Cooper's Moon: 1 (Cooper Mystery)

It was August when our seven-year-old son went missing. On a Tuesday morning in Muskingum Ohio trees still green under the punishing late summer sun. And so Coopers Moon begins. While teaching philosophy at a small college in central Ohio Coopers seven-year-old son Maxie is kidnapped an event that would eventually destroy his marriage his career and his mental well-being taking him from a rural mid-western town into southeast Florida and into the vicious world of child prostitution gangs and church treachery. The novel begins with a random shooting in the streets of south Miami where a young boy is killed. Cooper now a homicide detective with the Miami Police Department is called to the scene with his partner Detective Anthony DeFelice. Caught in a shootout with gangbangers Cooper is wounded and is taken to the hospital. He will remember one of the bangers in a later gunfight in Miamis Gangland. Two weeks later now recovered from his gunshot wounds Cooper is called out to investigate the death of a twelve-year-old boy Ethan Miller whose body was found in a cemetery in south Miami. Soon after the murder a teenage girls body is found in a cemetery in Oceanside a small city to the south of Miami. This leads Cooper to believe there might be a connection. Ethan Millers murder haunts Cooper bringing back memories of his own sons disappearance. Its been seven years since Maxie vanished from his own yard. So Cooper depressed over his failure to find his son quits the force to focus on Maxie. But he needs money so he becomes a private investigator and specializes in finding missing people. His first client is the mother of Ethan the murdered twelve-year-old boy. Coopers leads take him to a priest who works with kids from the streets of Miami. At the same time Cooper hears from DeFelice that a twelve-year-old boy Eddie Dougherty from Coral Gables is missing. Coopers search for Eddie brings him face-to-face with the reality of his own sons disappearance some six years ago. Maxie would now be close to Eddies age. Coopers search for Eddie becomes an intensely personal one as he probes the dark side of Miami where he worked as a homicide detective: a section of Miami known as the Hole where even the garbage men dont go. Its Gangland. And even the cops dont go there. Coopers Moon ends in a chase through the Everglades after go-fast boots and the men who drive them and their human cargo. And in the madness of the chase Cooper hopes for release from the seven-year-old search for his son as well for salvation for twelve-year-old Eddie and for Ethan Miller and his grieving mother Hannah. And all of it happens under the Hunters Moon Coopers Moon as it stands vigil over the Big Swamp.