Richard Conrath

A Cold Copper Moon Richard Conrath

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.

In A Cold Copper Moon, Cooper finally unravels the disappearance of his son, Maxie, who would now be 15 years old. His dreams (nightmares) guide him in his search. Struggling to solve the mystery of a disappeared father, Jack Hayward, and caught in a fight with the Tong in the middle of the Caribbean, Cooper gets a call from his wife, Jillie. She tells him he has to come home. To his horror, the call is about his son.