Debut Novel Released in New Rick Bishop Series

Brand new private eye series kicks off with release of The Girl on the Beach, A Rick Bishop Novel

Rick Bishop is a character I developed while stuck at home during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.

Like Malone, Bishop is a private investigator but the characters couldn’t be more different. Bishop is an ex-Honolulu PD detective who resigned from the force after a tragic incident that he still feels responsible for. Adrift and uncertain, he decided to get his private investigator license and opened an office on Hotel Street.

Rick specializes in divorce cases, mostly because it’s easy work and no one ever gets hurt, usually. Divorce cases are the only cases he will take, usually. Bishop is so stubborn about this, in the debut novel, The Girl on the Beach, it causes a rift between him and his ex-Navy pal and best friend, Joe Rose, the owner of a Honolulu bar called the Likelike, when Joe comes to Rick for help finding a missing beautiful and mysterious woman Joe met on a midnight, romantic beach stroll on Waikiki.

Rick is a man struggling to find himself after his traumatic experience as a police detective. He became a private detective only because it seemed the only thing he was suited for after leaving the cops. So, Rick drinks a little too much, is a bit too lazy, and puts only enough effort into his work to earn enough from divorce cases to keep his head above water.

Book Summary

Rick Bishop, a former cop and lazy Honolulu private investigator who specializes in divorce investigations, reluctantly agrees to help his love-struck best friend, Joe Rose, track down a mysterious girl named Elle Palmer. Rose met the woman briefly on a moonlight stroll on a Waikiki beach. After the fleeting romantic encounter, Palmer vanished the same evening without a trace. Rose believes he is in love with the woman and that she is in grave danger.

Bishop begins his investigation apathetically, but when he meets the wealthy and powerful Hawaii pineapple magnate Derek Ballard, Rick grows more interested in the case. When he spots a photo of the woman Rose wants him to find in Ballard’s office, Ballard explains the woman in the photo is his former fiancé, Elle Palmer, who committed suicide nearly forty years ago. As he continues to dig, Bishop discovers the girl on the beach was actually Kate Weaver, the niece of the long-deceased Elle Palmer. Rick also learns Weaver bears an uncanny resemblance to her dead aunt and appears in various places around Honolulu, claiming to be Elle Palmer while wearing the same ivory-colored formal dress her aunt was wearing the night friends and relatives last saw her alive at a party in 1982.

The plot thickens once Rick uncovers the motivation behind Kate’s bizarre impersonations of her dead aunt’s ghost. Weaver believes her aunt didn’t commit suicide but that Derek Ballard murdered her in a jealous rage. Kate has traveled to Honolulu from California to expose Ballard as her aunt’s killer. She pretends to appear as Elle Palmer’s ghost as a ruse aimed at garnering enough publicity to encourage the Honolulu authorities to reopen the decades-old investigation into her aunt’s death. Bishop decides to help Weaver get justice for her aunt after realizing she truly is in grave danger. Unfortunately, Derek Ballard intends to keep his dark secrets buried by shutting her up by any means necessary. Rick also becomes a target when Ballard tires of his interference and hires a Chinatown thug to eliminate him in a staged auto accident. Bishop and Weaver must find out where all the bodies are buried and fast before Ballard buries them.

Publication Details

The Girl on the Beach is available now in print on Amazon and will be available within a few days at the other major booksellers. The eBook version releases on November 9, 2021, and will be available wherever digital books are sold. However, if you’re an eBook reader and don’t want to wait to  get a copy of this book, I have made it available for immediate download from Smashwords. The book is in ePub format and can be downloaded on any reading device including phone reading apps like Kindle and Nook. If you’re interested in being among the first to read The Girl on the Beach, simply click the link below to grab a copy on Smashwords.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/presale/1108044

I hope readers will enjoy the new Rick Bishop series. I’ve already started the second book, Dead End, which is scheduled for a Spring 2022 release. I hope you will give the series a try.

For Malone fans, the next book in the series, Strange Bedfellows, is in editing and will be out soon. Also, I hope to release the fourth T. J. O’Sullivan novel, Frisky Business, this December.

Dead End (A Rick Bishop Novel, 2)

A local attorney hires Rick Bishop to find her missing friend and then insists on tagging along to help with the case. But, unfortunately, the missing friend, who has a troubled past, also has a former father-in-law looking for her who wants to find her just as badly.

Coming Spring 2022

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.