A Dick Hardesty Mystery Series

Following the death of the parents of Jonathan’s four-year-old nephew Joshua, Dick and his partner find themselves in a new role: parents. As if fatherhood didn’t bring enough of a set of challenges, the mother of one of Joshua’s new friends is murdered, sending Dick on a trail to find out who killed her and why. With a list of suspects ranging from a lesbian ex-partner to the boy’s race-car-driver father, Dick is soon embroiled in a case so complicated that child-rearing begins to look easier than solving the case.

P.I. Dick Hardesty listens with polite interest to his partner Jonathan's stories of his days working for 90-year-old multimillionaire Clarence Bement, helping the old man tend his garden. But when Bement is found dead, an apparent suicide, Jonathan is adamant that the old man would never have killed himself, a theory also held by Bement's grandson, Mel Fowler. When Mel hires him to investigate, Dick learns Bement's lawyer also died mysteriously, barely a week before Bement. Dick finds himself immersed in a world of greed and familial dysfunction, searching for a missing new will, and Jonathan becomes the target for someone who believes the old man entrusted Jonathan with a secret he is not aware he has.

At the gala opening of a new library filled with homosexual writings collected by the late Charles Burrows, known for both his taste in writing, as well as his eccentricity, Dick Hardesty and his partner Jonathan are enjoying a rare night out since four-year-old Joshua joined their household. The evening takes an abrupt turn when cataloger Taylor Cates is found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs in the library. The library foundation enlists Hardesty’s help in determining the truth of what happened—accident, or something more—which leads Dick to opponents of the creation of the library, and into the world of a long-dead, secretly gay writer, whose remaining family is determined to conceal his sexual orientation.

Grant Jefferson joins the Gay Men's Chorus as a protégé of its biggest supporter, and begins causing more dischord than harmony. Determined he's going to Broadway, Grant sees the chorus as the means to his end, and doesn't care much how many of the other members he uses as his stepping stones—or how hard they get stepped on. So, when a car bomb ends Grant's plans to be a star on The Great White Way, there is no shortage of possible suspects; and when the chorus' board of directors hires Dick Hardesty to see what he can find out about the murder, he ends up in a case as complicated as a madrigal.

When Dick Hardesty is hired to look into threats against former priest Dan Stabile, possibly from someone whose confession Dan heard while still in the priesthood, it’s just another case. Then, on a stormy Sunday, on a rain-slick road, Dan is killed, Dick’s partner Jonathan is severely injured, and suddenly, it’s personal. Was the accident really an accident...or murder? Dick learns Dan’s secret could involve a child murderer, and now it seems the man is stalking their son Joshua and tormenting Jonathan. The objectivity so vital to Dick’s role as a private investigator goes out the window as he pursues one lead after another, and it begins to look like Dan wasn’t the target after all.

Dick Hardesty is hired to investigate the mysterious death of a client’s lover. The police assume the death is drug related. In the course of his investigation Dick learns of eight similar deaths, all seemingly unrelated. The victims had nothing in common other than being gay, and all dying the same way. The police, to whom the deaths of “perverts” means very little, conclude that a serial killer is randomly killing gays, but Dick disagrees and believes that what tied the men together will lead to their killer.

Gay investigative reporter Victor Koseva is working on an exposé about doping within a boxing syndicate, when he mysteriously disappears. Hired by the journalist’s sister-in-law, P.I. Dick Hardesty takes on the case, following a cast of unsavory suspects ranging from construction unions to bitter ex-boyfriends to a middleweight boxer determined to win a championship. When Koseva’s body is found, not only does Hardesty have to determine whether the death is from foul play or an accident, but he also has to make sure he’s not the next victim.

When the obnoxious owner of a gay bathhouse begins receiving threatening messages accusing him of not admitting people inside that he doesn't deem "hot" enough, he enlists the services of private detective Dick Hardesty to find the person behind the notes. When the owner is murdered following a heated argument with Dick, Hardesty becomes a suspect. Following a succession of other seemingly unrelated deaths — all involving individuals noted for their cruelty to other gays — Hardesty begins to suspect the actions are of someone who is looking to “take out the garbage” of the gay community. Can he solve the case and clear his name before the body count rises even further?

Dick Hardesty, working for a public relations firm, is assigned the task of helping elect a rabidly homophobic police chief governor. Dick’s being gay himself, coupled with rumors that the chief had one of his identical twin sons murdered for being gay doesn’t make Dick’s job easier. He soon finds himself caught up in a whirlwind of politics, drag clubs, a do-good reverend’s homeless shelter, and an arsonist torching the city’s gay bars.

Hired to find a missing man—an alcoholic—Dick Hardesty discovers that an unusual number of alcoholic gay men have vanished within a relatively short period and never heard from again. Clues lead him to a support group for gay couples, where one partner is alcoholic and the other is not. Dick and his partner Jonathan infiltrate the group by claiming Jonathan is an alcoholic. When two more men from the group appear to suffer the same fate as the previous victims, Dick is determined to find out why…and who is responsible.

When private investigator Dick Hardesty is hired by businessman Stuart Anderson to conduct routine background checks on potential store managers, he becomes reacquainted with a former trick, Phil Stark, who has undergone an amazing transformation from bar hustler to professional escort. When Anderson is murdered, Hardesty is hired by the escort services owners, Arnold and Iris Glick, to keep Phil and the agency away from police scrutiny. Two subsequent murders make this impossible, and Hardesty embarks on a mission to find the identity of the killer.

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.

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…

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?