Saving Primo

"Sandcastles in the Sun" is the first story in a continuing series of stories about Julius 'J.D.' Dickens, a detective and former police officer for 19 years. He gets a case he is very leery about taking but when his assistant, a 21-year old first year law student, whose father is a lieutenant on the police force assures his son that it is a "open-and-shut" case and will be paid with department money, Dickens, who has personal reasons for accepting any case paid for by any police department, takes it.
J.D. soon finds out that his premonitions were dead-on right when he meets the owner of the Love-Bug restaurant, the suspect in the 30-year old cold case that he had undertaken. The woman was more than strange and J.D., taking the identity of a food columnist from a large newspaper, is sure the case is not going to end pretty. The woman is the suspect in the murder of her husband, a multi-millionaire who had made his money in the car business. She had taken her inheritance and opened the Love Bug Restaurant, a shrine to the pesky insects that mated once every year and cause havoc on almost all human beings who come in contact with them.
It had been her own son who had pleaded with the police for years that his mother was the real killer but J.D., along with almost everybody else, felt he was just mad because his three inherited dealerships had all gone belly-up and he wanted to get the money his mother had made from her hugely successful chain of Love Bug restaurants. J.D. had been ready to close the case out when he met his suspect, a Dolly Parton lookalike and one who made an offer to J.D. that he just couldn't seem to turn down.
"The Spearhead Case" is a story woven around religious beliefs, superstitions and tales of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi-power elite and where they had derived their power from.
The Spearhead Case revives somewhat the first story: "Sandcastles in the Sun" when Private Detective Julius 'J.D.' Dickens takes a case that he is again somewhat skeptical of when a man walks into his office one day without an appointment or even a phone call. He knows who J.D. is and says he was referred to him by his best friend, a childhood buddy who also got him on the police force and was his partner for over a decade. The case is so quirky and troubling that J.D is just about to turn it down when the deciding factor shows up in the form of $20 K in cash as a retainer and salary to start him off if he will take the case, which--of course--he does.
The Spearhead case leads J.D. and his old boyhood pal, recently retired from the force, into a partnership again. The challenge is the swamps of the Everglades, with their huge alligators and crocodiles and twenty-foot Burmese pythons and a suspect who was born and raised in those swamps and is half Seminole Indian and half Gladesman and who calls himself Osceola Again in reference to the legendary Everglades Indian Osceola, who the entire U.S. government could never catch but who died when he came in when the Army lied and told him he would be free. It's a challenge that both men see as almost impossible and will need all their local police knowledge and connections to solve.
"A Heartbeat Away" is the third in the line and whereas the first two stories are set in Tampa and then the Everglades of Florida where both J.D. and I-Hop have lived and worked on the local police force, J.D. for twenty years and I-Hop for thirty and they take a case that matches up to "Sandcastles in the Sun" and "The Spearhead Case" in this page-turning suspense/thriller that will have you sitting on the edge of your seat from one second to the next.
The beginning of this 36,000 word story begins when a young lawyer who previously had worked for J.D., helping in the investigations, praises him to his current employer, a huge corporate law firm with offices in seven cities and four states. It turns out that the case is in Las Vegas but the law firm will pay J.D. and I-Hop a fifteen thousand retainer and a very generous salary to conduct an investigation for them. They take the case and fly out to Vegas where they soon find out that the law firm isn't exactly what the two private eyes thought it was and the case wasn't either. They search for the truth but along the way nearly lose their senses much less their lives in an attempt to get off the primary suspect who they believe is innocent even though it isn't to anyone's benefit that he be found anything but guilty, including the Dickins/Hopkins Detective Agency.

"Saving Primo" is the fourth story in this continuing series and it takes up where "A Heartbeat Away" left off when, 18 months after J.D. and I-Hop had semi-retired in sunny Florida with their wives, a phone call from Primo Canto, who they had gotten off on a murder charge in Las Vegas, turns J.D. and I-Hop's warm and comfy days in paradise into a nightmare decision of whether or not to help their old friend