Brittle Karma

by Richard Helms

“EAMON GOLD IS THE REAL DEAL, a City-by-the-Bay ex-cop turned private dick with a taste for Glenlivet, Spenseresque wisecracks and tossing darts around his office… he's your basic meat-and-potatoes eye and his creator, Richard Helms, is simply one helluva storyteller, a master chef who knows when to stir the pot and when to let the ingredients just speak for themselves.“—Kevin Burton Smith, Thrilling Detective WebsiteRichard Helms' Derringer Award-winning and Shamus Award-nominated San Francisco private eye Eamon Gold returns in BRITTLE KARMA, a classic tale cast in the molds forged by Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Robert B. Parker. Eamon Gold turns away a potential client named Abner Carlisle, a recently paroled armored car robber, who is looking for a man named Eddie Rice. Rice was the wheelman for the robbery a quarter century earlier, and ran off with the take of almost twenty million dollars--and Carlisle's daughter. Gold believes Carlisle intends to murder Rice, and refuses the case. After Carlisle is murdered in his hotel room, Gold becomes intrigued when he discovers the insurance company will pay ten percent of whatever fraction of the robbery take he can recover. Gold is temporarily bucks-up, but has no paying client on the horizon, so he dives in on spec, trying to make a little quick bank on the coldest of cold cases. Along the way, he encounters crooked cops, an aging porn star, an ex-Army Ranger turned gangland muscle, the boozy estranged wife of a City Supervisor, dangerous mobsters, and a surprise player he never saw coming.

267 pages, Paperback

Published November 14, 2020

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

aka Eric Shane and Noah Roarke
Three-Time PWA Shamus Award Nominee. Author of the Pat Gallegher series set in New Orleans, and the Eamon Gold series set in San Francisco. Editor and publisher of The Back Alley, a webzine featuring hardboiled and noir fiction for a new century.
On May 2, 2008, he became the only author ever to win TWO Short Mystery Fiction Society Derringer Awards in the same year, for THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO GORDON BLACK, which was published under his own name in Kevin Burton Smith's Thrilling Detective Website, and for PAPER WALLS/GLASS HOUSES, which was published under his pseudonym Eric Shane in his own Back Alley Webzine. It's been a big year!

Series:
* Pat Gallegher
* Eamon Gold
* Judd Wheeler

Reviews

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: P.I. Eamon Gold turns down a possible client - he was looking for the driver in a 20-year-old robbery. But then he gets murdered.