Richard Helms Books in Order

Pat Gallegher, a washed-up former seminarian and forensic psychologist now playing jazz in a French Quarter bar, agrees to find a missing con man. When his client's husband turns up dead and Pat is framed, the search becomes a race to clear his name.

Twelve years after helping bring down an American president, Geoffrey Sterling has hidden from public life as a college student and campus reporter. His past refuses to stay buried, pulling him back toward political danger and the losses that broke him.

After Pat Gallegher witnesses a friend's execution, he gets pulled into a hunt for the killers while trying to protect a hungry ten-year-old runaway. Her stepfather is a Vietnamese gang boss, and the truth could start a mob war in New Orleans.

When Pat Gallegher's boss is arrested after his girlfriend is murdered, Pat starts digging into what becomes the Stripper Ripper case. The hunt for a killer turns personal when the danger closes in on Pat's own girlfriend, Merlie Comineau.

An early standalone suspense novel from Helms, this story turns on hidden motives, private fallout, and the damage one buried decision can do. It leans more toward straight thriller territory than the series books, but keeps the same interest in guilt and consequences.

Renovation work next to Holliday's uncovers a body sealed in concrete since the 1930s, dragging Pat Gallegher into a cold case with old gangland roots. What starts as a nuisance for the bar quickly becomes a deadly trip into New Orleans history.

Noted trial lawyer Taylor Chu is found brutally murdered, yet he also appears alive in PI Eamon Gold's office. Chasing the impossible setup pulls Gold into Chinatown power plays, corrupt cops, and a plot that could ignite gang war in San Francisco.

Eamon Gold takes what looks like a simple blackmail case for Napa winery heir Asa Corona, whose compromising photos could ruin him. Then a prime suspect is killed and Corona vanishes, sending Gold through San Francisco politics, crime, and buried secrets.

Prosperity, North Carolina is changing fast, and the town's tensions boil over when a teenage Mexican girl is found murdered beside Six Mile Creek. Police chief Judd Wheeler must solve the case before fear, class anger, and prejudice tear the community apart.

David Proctor comes home from a trip to find his agoraphobic wife gone and every trace of her existence erased. With Savannah PI Hollis Dayton, he uncovers false identities, fraud, murder, and a plot that may point to something far worse.

In sweltering July heat, Judd Wheeler investigates the savage killing of a future football star found in a rented house with bloodstained bills nearby. The case opens into a web of hatred and seemingly unrelated crimes hanging over Prosperity like a storm cloud.

Retired forensic psychologist Ben Long, brilliant and socially awkward, is lured back to work to assess a young man who confessed to murder. The deeper Ben and law clerk Paula Paige dig, the less certain the case looks, and the higher the stakes climb.

In 1958, Miami private eye Cormac Loame heads to Havana to retrieve a mobster's teenage daughter before revolution swallows the city. Gangsters, cops, and old love complicate the job, and every lead gets more dangerous as Cuba edges toward collapse.

Just back from recovering from a shooting, Judd Wheeler faces a missing banker and his Russian bride, the murder of the town's most hated man, and the return of a violent old friend turned blues star. The cases may be linked by one dangerous force.

When a boy commits a horrifying crime against a young child, the courtroom battle that follows exposes failures by the adults and professionals around him. Drawing on Helms's forensic background, this is a tense legal drama about guilt, responsibility, and what justice really looks like.

Back in New Orleans, Pat Gallegher juggles two missing-person cases: the disappearance of Cabby Jacks, who once saved his life, and the search for a little girl's absentee father. The cases slowly converge into a conspiracy with real bite.

Recently paroled robber Abner Carlisle asks Eamon Gold to find the wheelman who vanished with stolen money and Carlisle's daughter. After Carlisle is murdered, Gold chases a 25-year-old case where greed, old loyalties, and the missing millions still get people killed.

San Francisco PI Eamon Gold agrees to protect Brandon Hunt, a hateful professor notorious for racist and sexist public rants, after a brutal campus attack. When blackmail and darker motives surface, Gold finds himself guarding a man few people would mind seeing ruined.

A vanished letter, a bricked-up door, and rumors of a ghost test librarian Tamarind Ortega and stage magician Sanjay Rai. To solve the case, they must explain an impossible theft modeled on a classic locked-room story.

In 1950s Prosperity, three high school football heroes are bound to a death that will shadow them for decades. As the story moves through the civil rights era and beyond, old guilt, racism, and local power harden into a long reckoning.