Books published by Author Larry Darter

A Malone Novel. In this latest thriller featuring the intrepid Los Angeles PI, Malone gets reacquainted with some old friends and meets new enemies in a troubling case that threatens to shake the City of Angels to its core.

A search for the estranged husband of a rich young thing from Boston seeking reconciliation leads L. A. private detective Ben Malone south of the border to the exotic locales of the Mexican Riviera and into an entanglement with a trio of ruthless grifters who will stop at nothing including murder to protect their confidence scheme."It was one of those clear, sunny afternoons we get in Los Angeles in the early spring after a rain. There was still snow on the peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains, but the Hollywood Hills were green, and the jacaranda trees were blooming in Beverly Hills." So begins Foul Play, the sixth novel in the private investigator series of crime and suspense thrillers featuring Los Angeles private eye Ben Malone. Business is a little slow, and Malone is feeling restless until L. A. attorney Liz Harper calls with a job: a young, beautiful, and desperate woman wants Malone to find her estranged husband. Malone sets out on his search, almost immediately discovering the man's whereabouts. But that only propels him into a series of bewildering events and a web of fraud, deceit, and murder.

Heart pounding thriller and suspense detective tale that stretches from Honolulu to Hong Kong. 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.

Someone was definitely feeling stabby when they plunged a steak knife into the chest of one of Tinseltown's brightest stars...Not once, but four times-leaving the starlet's beautiful face frozen in the last moment of a violent death, lips slightly parted, after her last breath escaped...But who murdered Holly Sutherland?LAPD murder cops are sure Sutherland's estranged husband, bad-boy actor Zack Sinclair, stabbed her to death-so sure, they arrested and charged him-saying Sinclair had the means, opportunity, and definitely a motive. As Sutherland's lone heir, he's in line to inherit her multi-million dollar estate, and he's desperate for money. Sinclair hasn't made a picture in years. He's broke and owes his bookie a quarter-million dollar gambling debt. The situation looks bleak for Zack Sinclair, whose appetites for booze, gambling, and extramarital sex are as out-sized as his ego.But his attorney, Liz Harper, a top LA criminal defense lawyer, says not so fast. Convinced her client didn't do it, she hires Malone to find out who did. Malone, a former LAPD homicide detective turned private investigator, is skeptical. He isn't interested in helping another famous, and guilty Hollywood celebrity beat a murder rap. But he can't say no to Liz Harper, so he reluctantly takes the case.Malone searches for the truth, but soon ends up with more questions than answers in what turns into the most baffling of murder mysteries. With each step, each new clue uncovered, he unravels more startling facts that lead him to one conclusion: Zack Sinclair might be innocent, the victim of an elaborate frame job. As he probes deeper into the sinister underbelly beneath Hollywood's facade of glitz and glamour looking for the truth, Malone touches a nerve, putting himself in the crosshairs of the boss of a dangerous organized crime syndicate determined to shut down his investigation. He faces his greatest challenge, and the clock is running out for Zack Sinclair.Cold Comfort is a gripping and gritty crime thriller with a twist, perfect for fans of Robert B. Parker's Spencer and Chandler's Philip Marlowe. It's the third exhilarating installment in the fast-paced Malone private investigator crime thriller series, which you may read and enjoy in any order.

A tale of deceit, betrayal, dark choices, and murder that reviewers describe as "gripping," "full of suspense and thrills," and "hard to put down."Inspired by a shocking true story, Come What May, the debut book in the Malone detective mystery series, is a high-stakes thrill ride through the gritty underbelly of the City of Angels and a look at the darker side of human nature.Ben Malone is a veteran Los Angeles Police detective with a bright future ahead of him. Or so he thought until he is caught up in a run of bad luck and his life starts falling apart. The worst of it, his unfortunate entanglement in a spate of fatal on-duty shootings at a time when activists are protesting the use of deadly force by police and rioting all over the country. On edge and questioning his judgment, Malone's LAPD superiors speculate that he may be too quick to use deadly force.Relieved from street duty, Malone is sequestered in Robbery-Homicide Division's Cold Case Homicide Section to keep him under wraps while he undergoes department-mandated psychiatric evaluation. His work-related problems compounded by a vindictive ex-wife intent on bleeding him dry financially sends Malone into a spiral of depression that soon has him drinking too much in the attempt to cope.Initially resentful over his reassignment to the cold case section, Malone's attitude starts to change when he and new partner, Detective Jaime Reyes, come across the files of a cold as ice, 23-year-old unsolved murder case. The more they study the case, the more certain they become that the theory pursued by the original investigators was completely wrong. Since the decades-old murder does not fit the unit's criteria for reopening a cold case for active investigation, Malone and Reyes embark on an "off-the-books" investigation. Predictably, that creates some problems, especially for Malone.It quickly becomes clear that there are powerful forces at work both inside and outside the LAPD determined to keep the truth behind the murder buried along with the corpse. The more resistance he encounters, the more unwavering Malone becomes in his unwillingness to let sleeping dogs lie, even when things start to get increasingly personal. His persistence in digging up bones from the past begins to threaten his very career with the LAPD. Even when the investigation sends him hurtling into more trouble than he ever dreamed possible, Malone is unrelenting. He is determined to solve the mystery and to uncover the truth behind the brutal 23-year-old unsolved murder, come what may.