Larry Darter

Honolulu Blues Larry Darter

New Zealand ex-pat and Honolulu PI T. J. O'Sullivan, follows the trail of a con man to Hong Kong hoping to recover her client's half a million dollars' worth of stolen jewelry. But she never expected the case would catapult her into a deadly clash with an international crime syndicate that erupts in such danger and violence it threatens not only her life but the lives of everyone she loves.

Madison Edwards, a wealthy but lonely widow from Los Angeles, thought she'd found her soulmate on an online dating site. She fell so hard for the handsome, seemingly cultured Bernard Clemens, Ph. D. that she jumps at the chance when he invites her to Hawaii for a first face-to-face meeting. But when she awakens the morning after she and Clemens were intimate for the first time, Clemens was missing from her bed along with a quarter-million dollars worth of her jewelry taken from the hotel room safe. A Los Angeles private eye who had done work for Madison's late husband, Ben Malone, refers her to T. J. O'Sullivan for help.

While not hopeful of recovering her client's jewelry, O' Sullivan thinks finding and confronting Clemens, a self-proclaimed professor of comparative literature at a local university, will be easy enough...until she starts to learn more about the man. Bernard Clemens isn't even his real name, and he isn't a professor at all. Instead "Bernie Clements" is a career thief, an ex-con who preys on the lovelorn, divorced or widowed middle-aged wealthy women, by catfishing and fleecing them. Madison Edwards is just his latest victim.

Clements disappears to Hong Kong, leaving behind not only a string of jilted lovers but a very angry bunch of former criminal associates in a Chinese organized crime syndicate called the Triads, bent on revenge after Bernie conned them too.

Between trying to track down Clements in a foreign city, and trying to steer clear of the Chinese gangsters, O'Sullivan's case grows more complicated by the day. As T. J., her friend Jackie, and Tsang Chun-wah, a local Hong Kong private detective that T. J. hires to help with the case, search for Clements and try to recover the jewelry, things really start to spiral out of control when Jackie Fitzgerald is abducted by the gangsters. Honolulu Blues is the second novel in a female private investigator crime and suspense thriller series that features breathtaking action, chilling suspense, laugh-out-loud humor, and a hint of romance.