Blood Moon Rising (The Cooper Series)

This is the second book in The Cooper Series. It’s been eight years since Cooper’s son, seven-year-old Maxie, disappeared from the front lawn of his home in rural Ohio. After leaving his teaching position at Concord College, Cooper joined Miami PD as a homicide detective. That took him into the dark underbelly of Miami where the brilliant colors of the night sky hide the violence in the streets below. Blood Moon Rising begins as Cooper, now a PI, receives an early morning call from a friend of his, a faculty member at a College in southern Ohio. And his friend tells Cooper that he has become a prime suspect in a case involving a young student in his class who has gone missing. And he’s been sleeping with her. He begs Cooper to help him, offers him exorbitant amounts of money—anything. Cooper agrees to help him. And this case leads him into the terrifying world of human trafficking: a world where kids housed in orphanages are sold on the world market; where college students unwittingly sign up for dangerous pharmaceutical experiments; and where the Russian mob plays a shadow game of catch me if you can. And Cooper risks his life. But he has friends who help: Richie, a mob enforcer; Huxter Crow, a Seminole cowboy and alligator hunter; Louise Delgado, a Miami detective specializing in gang activity; and Leo Federovich, a Russian KGB agent and the grandfather of one of the missing students. And through it all, Cooper, a brooding, dark, intellectual, with a side not everyone can see, will stop at nothing, even murder, to find his son. And the Blood Moon keeps constant vigil as Cooper searches the streets of Miami, and the Everglades, and the Florida Straits, where kidnappers prey, to find the missing children and his son, Maxie.

Blood Moon Rising, finalist winner of the Royal Palm Literary Award, is Richard Conrath's second novel in a trilogy featuring Cooper, a private detective, who searches for his young kidnapped son while trying to track down other missing people.                                                                                                                                       
 
           Conrath is a former Catholic priest who left to teach philosophy in a small college while freelancing for papers like the Cleveland Plain dealer and Sunday Magazine. He left teaching in 1984 and began a series of three-year stints in administration as a college vice-president, president, and then as headmaster of an American school in Turkey. It was there, during the darkness of the Turkish winters, that he began to write his first mystery.