About
The first time I visited the Big Island of Hawai'i in 1996, my initial thoughts drifted to "hmm, this would be a cool place to set mysteries featuring a female private eye."
Sadly, this notion sat on a back burner for many years, until I at last mustered the ambition to write and self-publish the first novel in my Noelani Lee mystery series in 2013. There have been a bunch since.
I suppose writing is in my blood. As a kid growing up in rural south-central Pennsylvania, I was a voracious reader and, inspired by the likes of A.C. Doyle, Joseph Wambaugh, Dame Agatha, Stephen King, and many others, I set pencil to paper to write numerous short stories and even a play. Where these artifacts of a bygone era are now, nobody knows.
Realizing I would one day need to make an honest living, and with visions of becoming the next Woodward and/or Bernstein lighting my path, I set my sights on becoming a journalist. Which I did in a roundabout way, first in the U.S. Navy and later reporting for community and daily newspapers in San Diego County.
But San Diego is an expensive place to live, so I crossed over to the other, somewhat more lucrative side and launched a career in public relations in Las Vegas and San Antonio.
Yet still I write, albeit at a pace best described as glacial. And when I'm not writing, I can often be found reading, watching far too many foreign crime dramas on TV, and shopping for unusual craft beers.
I'm a proud member of the Private Eye Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. My patient wife, Donna, and I live in a stucco-and-red-tile roofed suburban cookie-cutter as guests of a Bengal cat named Malia and a basset hound who sometimes answers to Lola.
Featured Work
A Happy Voyage Home (Noelani Lee Mysteries #9)
It’s early summer 1983 and Navy Petty Officer Third Class Nicholas Price has left his ship in Okinawa after receiving a letter from his wife that he was not supposed to read. But at some point during his trip across the vast Pacific to meet a divorce lawyer in San Diego, he vanishes—and is neither seen nor heard from again. That is, until hikers find his body on a muddy seaside trail on the Big Island of Hawai’i. In 1997.
Twenty years later, an anonymous stranger connects Hawaiian PI Noelani Lee with a woman seeking answers to her stepfather’s unsolved murder. Fresh off the biggest case of her career, Noelani takes the job—and soon finds herself going shadow-to-shadow with clandestine figures from the past as she takes an unwitting journey back in time to the Cold War.
Shrouded by cloaks and threatened by daggers, Noelani finds herself trying to outwit an array of old-school international spooks to uncover the truth—and the decades-old secrets—behind a heartbroken sailor’s lonely death on a muddy Big Island trail.
