A Cold Copper Moon (The Cooper Series)

In A Cold Copper Moon, Cooper, a private investigator desperate to find his son, now eight years missing, has dreams about his son's kidnapping--are they real or are they just part of his nightmares? In the meantime, a new client has hired Cooper to find her father, missing since Thanksgiving. Cynthia Hayward hires him because, Well, I hear you're good at finding missing people, she told him. And he is. Yeah, except for finding my own son, Cooper thinks. In trying to find Jack Hayward Cooper is caught in the treacherous world of drug runners and Chinese gangs who have set up business in the Florida Straits and the Gulf of Mexico. And Big Oil casts its shadow over the waters with its venture into horizontal drilling and fracking. With a quirky and dangerous cast of characters including Cooper's closest childhood friend, Richie Marino, a mob enforcer who uses a baseball bat to persuade; Huxter Crowe, a self-proclaimed third generation Miccosukee Native American; and Louise Delgado, a Miami homicide detective assigned to the Gang Unit, Cooper tracks the killers of his client's father from Boston's Chinatown to the Florida Straits where the Zhi Zhu Nu, the world's largest oil rig, run by a Chinese company, is drilling in the Caribbean just a few kilometers from Key West.

Richard Conrath began his career as a Roman Catholic priest. After he left the priesthood he became a teacher, first teaching English in a secondary school then, as a college professor, teaching philosophy. He eventually left teaching to work in administration, taking jobs as the president of several community colleges and then--adventurer that he is!--became the head of an overseas school in southern Turkey where he and his family lived on the local economy for three years. It was there, in the darkness of the Turkish nights, that he began to weave his tales of mystery and intrigue, reading them to his family each evening. There was only Turkish TV and until they learned the language, those early stories were all the entertainment they had. During this time, Conrath began writing Cooper's Moon and finally finished it ten years later. It bacame the first book in The Cooper Mystery Series. 

He has now begun to write a new series. The protagonist is a twenty-five-year-old homicide detective in Providence, Rhode Island. Trouble forces him to leave Providence and retreat to Florida where he becomes the youngest chief of police in the country in a small town near the Everglades. The story begins there and, of course, trouble follows.