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Paul Bishop

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Detective Paul Bishop is a thirty year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department.  He is the Officer-in-Charge of the Operations-West Bureau’s Sexual Assault Detail with responsibility for investigations in over twenty-five percent of the city, including Hollywood. Paul Bishop’s career includes over twenty years experience in the investigation of sexually-based crimes, including assault and rape. For the past eight years, his Sex Crimes Unit has had the highest number of arrests and crime clearance rate in the entire LAPD.  Paul Bishop is the author of Citadel Run; Sand Against the Tide; Pattern of Behavior: A Short Story Collection; Chapel of the Ravens; Kill Me Again; Twice Dead; Tequila Mockingbird; Chalk Whispers: A Fey Croaker LAPD Crime Novel; and, Sins of the Dead. He is also a contributor to Cop Tales 2000.

According to the book description of Twice Dead, “All of Los Angeles is thrust into chaos when a popular NBA athlete is charged with a series of murders, and the evidence against the defendant seems overwhelming, until the possibility of an evil twin emerges.”

Publisher’s Weekly said of Chapel of the Ravens, “Bishop (Sand Against the Tide ) scores a smashing goal chronicling the deadly games played out by the men and women connected to the Los Angeles Ravens soccer team. Bishop's passion for soccer and his belief in the value of sports keeps the reader rooting for the home team. Goalie Ian Chapel loses one eye and his career with Britain's World Cup soccer team when kicked during a game by West German player Kurt Wagstaff. Isolated by self-pity, Chapel nonetheless agrees to the request of his old SAS commander, Sir Adam Qwale, to investigate the murder of the Ravens' goalie. Despite his handicap, Chapel will assume the dead man's position on the team.. Returning to L.A., he finds Wagstaff now a member of the Ravens--a minor irritant compared with the big-league troubles served up by the sports complex owner, his two warring daughters, Irish terrorists, soccer hooligans and corrupt sports officials. Bishop's rendition of the play-by-play action is engrossing. In addition, a female goalkeeper for the Ravens is a fully realized character whose spirit and romantic appeal elevate this sports thriller beyond macho posing and the celebration of male bonding.”

Amazon.com said of Chalk Whispers: A Fey Croaker LAPD Crime Novel, “Fey Croaker, star of this and three previous mysteries in Paul Bishop's increasingly interesting series, has just been promoted to lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department. Fey and her team have been reassigned to the elite Robbery-Homicide Department and charged with solving the high-profile slaying of Bianca Flynn, a prominent woman lawyer as well as the daughter of a powerful judge and the sister of a police commissioner.

Flynn's obsession with the victims of parental sexual abuse was clearly the motive for her murder, and this resonates at a very personal level with Fey, whose father molested her throughout her childhood. When Ellis "Jack" Kavanaugh, her father's former partner, dies and leaves her a fortune in marked bills traced to a robbery over two decades old, she is forced to confront a part of her past she believed she had come to terms with long ago. Unraveling the connection between Kavanaugh's cryptic dying words and the murder of Flynn, who ran an underground railroad for sexually threatened children, takes the tough but vulnerable Fey on a tumultuous personal journey. Her sojourn rivets the reader's attention and illuminates Bishop's skill at characterization as well as pace and plotting. While Fey is the soul of this excellent crime novel, the secondary figures are almost as compelling, particularly Hammer and Nails, the married detectives on Fey's crew, and Brink Kavanaugh, a charismatic artist to whom Fey is almost fatally attracted. Chalk Whispers confirms Bishop's place in the pantheon of writers like Joseph Wambaugh and Michael Connelly, as well as an earlier generation of pros like Ross MacDonald, who uncovered the corruption beneath Los Angeles's glossy exterior.”

One reader of Chalk Whispers: A Fey Croaker LAPD Crime Novel said, “Paul Bishop has been writing cop novels for about a decade now. He started with a book that was a better premise than a novel, about a pair of patrolmen trying to win a bet by driving their patrol car from LA to Las Vegas and back in one shift without anyone noticing. It wasn't quite as good as it sounds. He's written several books since, trying different characters. One was a detective who was also a soccer player or something. The one he seems to have finally decided is a hit is Fey Croaker, who gets called Frog Lady (frogs croak) and who's been assigned to LAPD's West Side Division for three books. In this fourth entry, the author appparently decided to up the ante and promote her, and her "team", to Robbery Homicide Division downtown.

This was the first of several annoyances in this book. I don't know this, but I suspect that LAPD is like any other large organization: they don't transfer teams like this around their department's organizational structure. Now there are mitigating circumstances: Bishop mentions an outgoing chief of police, and a new one trying to shake things up. Still it was hard for me to buy that they would do this.

Next, no sooner do Fey and her cohorts get downtown than they are assigned a real hot potato: the torture-murder of a prominent black woman who's an attorney and child molestation crusader, and also the sister of a police commissioner, and the daughter of a judge. Soon, the case develops into a hunt for missing children who have entered an "underground railroad" where they are spirited away from abusive parents who have the law on their side. Just in case things weren't complex enough, the case also takes a historical turn, with a bloody armored car robbery and a shootout involving the police and the Black Panthers from almost thirty years ago proving to be connected with the case.

There are interesting, if a bit eccentric, characters throughout the book. The cops are fun, and well-defined. The dialog is well-written. The plot is a bit like something Michael Connelly or Jeffrey Deaver would concoct. Everything's logical and believable, but at the end you wonder if anything this complex ever occurs, and if it does, do the detectives on the case ever solve them?”

According to the book description of Cop Tales 2000, “Contributor Paul Bishop is the head of the Sex Crimes and Major Assaults Unit of the LAPD and author of 9 novels, including Tequila Mockingbird, Kill Me Again, Twice Dead and Chalk Whispers. Ed(ward) Dee spent 20 years on the NYPD walking the streets of the South Bronx before retiring as a lieutenant with a "suitcase full of stories" he had to write, including his four novels: 14 Peck Slip, Bronx Angel, Little Boy Blue and Nightbird. Jim DeFilippi served as a military policeman before picking up the pen to write Blood Sugar and Duck Alley. Dan Mahoney retired as a captain after a career in the NYPD. He supplements his work as a private eye by writing books, including Black and White, Hyde, Once In Never Out, Edge of the City and Detective First Grade. Editors Liz Martinez DeFranco, Marilyn Olsen and Keith Bettinger are successful police magazine writers and editors, and all three have books of their own scheduled for publication early in the new millennium.”

Publisher’s Weekly said of Sand Against the Tide, “Bishop, a 13-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, places series heroes ( Citadel Run ), retired cop Calico Jack Walker and his ex-partner and lover, Tina Tamiko, in an improbable fantasy that centers around a barge loaded with cocaine and confiscated weapons that the LAPD plans to dump in the ocean and the bad guys plan to hijack. A hotshot police captain, whose obvious crimes and corruption escape everyone's attention, rises through the ranks; a terrible ordeal in Vietnam has left him under the control of his Asian wife and her evil father, a Cambodian drug lord. Another Vietnam vet takes ill-gotten wealth from criminals and distributes it to the needy. Walker gets involved after his son is shot by boat hijackers and another of his ex-partners is framed for the murder of a nightclub owner. The ex-cop sets up a confrontation at sea with the Cambodian's motorboat armada (manned by Salvadoran terrorists), armed with flamethrowers and a vintage, battle-ready P-51. There's more, but mindless action and wisecracking heroes do not a thriller make.”


TEQUILA MOCKINGBIRD (Fey Croaker Novels (Paperback))
Paul Bishop  More Info

Chalk Whispers : A Fey Croaker LAPD Crime Novel (Fey Croaker Novels (Paperback))
Paul Bishop  More Info

Sand Against the Tide
Paul Bishop  More Info

Citadel Run
Paul Bishop  More Info

Kill Me Again
Paul Bishop  More Info

Twice Dead
Paul Bishop  More Info

Chapel of the Ravens
Paul Bishop  More Info

Pattern of Behavior: A Short Story Collection (Five Star Mystery Series)
Paul Bishop  More Info

Sins of the Dead
Paul Bishop  More Info

Cop Tales 2000
Ed Dee  More Info

According to the book description of Tequila Mockingbird, “When a highly decorated detective of the LAPD's ultra-secretive Anti-Terrorist Division is murdered by his wife, it appears to be an open-and-shut case of domestic violence. But Fey Croaker discovers circumstances are not what they seem--and becomes a moving target in a race to stop a south-of-the-border terrorist poised to strike the very heart of Los Angeles.”

One reader of Tequila Mockingbird said, “Being a Southern California-based mystery writer, I recently sat beside Paul Bishop during the first Men of Mystery Day in Orange County. During that hour or so, one person after another asked Mr. Bishop to sign TEQUILA MOCKINGBIRD, most praising the title. The book does have a great title, but it is also a fine mystery. The plot involves the murder of a member of LAPD's anti-terrorism unit, and Fey Croaker's search for the truth. The plot takes many unexpected twists and turns, and soon Fey is struggling to protect Los Angeles from an international terrorist attack. Paul Bishop is a pro, and TEQUILA MOCKINGBIRD is a top-notch book. There is much to savor in TEQUILA MOCKINGBIRD in addition to its clever title.”

Publisher’s Weekly said of Kill Me Again, “Empathy for female victims of child abuse and adult sexism informs this gripping, intense sixth novel by Bishop ( Chapel of the Ravens ), a 17-year veteran detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. At 43, homicide detective Fey Croaker has survived three dead-end marriages, a severely abusive upbringing and the relentless resentment of her male colleagues on the force. Now, because of a streak of unsolved murders, Fey feels extra pressure to solve the murder of a mysterious woman who had multiple IDs with different names, a million dollars in cash and only brand-new clothing and furniture in her equally brand-new condo at the time of her death. Fingerprints inexplicably reveal that the woman had already been murdered--18 years before in San Francisco. Despite this twist, the case appears to be open and shut--the woman's ex-husband, convicted of killing her the first time, was released on parole weeks before her second murder. But the victim turns out to be a killer herself, murdering the rich men she married under a variety of names. Throughout the story, what seems obvious is contradicted in labyrinthine ways, until Fey herself becomes one of the suspects in this complicated, compelling thriller.”

One reader of Kill Me Again said, “I've read all but one of Detective Bishop's books now and this may be the best of the Fey Croaker series. The plot is complex, with a twist a few pages from the end that I didn't see coming, although the hints were there. This mystery seems to have the best balance of Fey Croaker's personality (self-doubt, anguish, and determination), LAPD procedure, and the plot itself. The supporting cast is a little less colorful than in the other Fey Croaker books - Alphabet and Hammer and Nails are missing from this one, for example - but one detective's obnoxious behavior is a plot element that had to have more time than the other players. And in this book Croaker's horses actually take part in the story, not just serve as props. But the plot shines here - unfolding the identity of the murdered woman, tracking down her aliases, following the money, all leading to a surprising ending. As in some of the other books, a liberal defense lawyer mucks up the investigation, although Janice Ryder is colder and less obnoxious than similar characters elsewhere in the Fey Croaker series. And the investigation is subject to the whims of internal politics. All of this is well blended to produce a book which manages to keep the suspense going.”

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