Books in the Dick Hardesty Mystery series

All Tom Brady wanted was to be a good cop; to keep a low profile and prove to a notoriously homophobic police department undergoing its own internal upheavals that gays deserved the right to be among them. But when he and old friend Dick Hardesty go out for a quiet evening, an incident leads to Tom shooting two thugs attacking patrons of a gay bar. Dick finds himself trying to protect Tom from being outed, while heading off a violent antipolice rebellion by the gay community.

Arrogant and homophobic Tony T. Tunderew, author of a muckraking bestseller, hires Dick Hardesty to look into blackmail threats he’s been receiving. When Tunderew and a male hustler die in a mysterious car crash, Dick’s investigation reveals Tunderew was working on a new book exposing an evangelical husband-and-wife team and their religious-based community for troubled teens. Is Tunderew’s death “divine intervention,” or something far more sinister?

Dick and his lover, Jonathan, finally manage to take a vacation, and it is, to some extent, a sentimental journey for Dick-it is to New York City, the site of former adventures, and where his former lover is now settled in with a new lover, Max, who happens to be involved in a theater company. Dick and Jonathan fly in for opening night, but also arrive soon after one of the original cast is murdered-gunned down with a shot in the back, and ending up face down in a vacant lot. It seems Dick can't even have a vacation without playing his usual role of sleuth, and there's a different kind of role playing happening as well...