Cooper's Moon - Richard Conrath C

“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, Cooper’s Moon begins. While teaching philosophy at a small college in central Ohio, Cooper’s 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 Miami’s 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 girl’s 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 Miller’s murder haunts Cooper, bringing back memories of his own son’s disappearance. It’s 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. Cooper’s 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. Cooper’s search for Eddie brings him face-to-face with the reality of his own son’s disappearance some six years ago. Maxie would now be close to Eddie’s age. Cooper’s 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 don’t go. It’s Gangland. And even the cops don’t go there.            

           Cooper’s 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 Hunter’s Moon, Cooper’s Moon, as it stands vigil over the Big Swamp.