Showing results by author "Phil Bookman" in All Categories

It’s the food that nourishes tech startups. O-P-M. Other People’s Money. To many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, it’s known irreverently as opium, because once you get on it, it’s hard to kick the habit. Silicon Valley software entrepreneur Mike Gold is an expert at using this opium to fund his startups. Mike is between ventures and getting antsy when he's offered an intriguing proposition: start up a new company funded by billionaire tech icon Barry Samson. But when Samson is found murdered, and Gold’s friends start disappearing, the FBI targets him as a suspect. To protect his ...

Joe Brink is a newly-minted PI who can barely make ends meet. He lives with his parents and struggles to pay for his threadbare office over a frozen yogurt shop and a bakery by getting the goods on disability insurance frauds and errant spouses. On a stakeout of a client’s cheating wife, Joe stumbles across and rescues two small children, Sofia and Diego Ramirez, and apprehends their kidnapper. Joe’s 15 minutes of fame leads to little new business but earns him the unhelpful moniker Accidental Hero. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Rex Baker is rich, famous, and detested by most who ...

This is the third novel in the Mike Gold Mystery Series. When Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike Gold’s plans for an IPO falter, his old college buddy Stew King calls out of the blue with a great offer to buy Mike’s company. They meet for a quiet weekend at Mike’s Napa Valley winery to negotiate the sale. But this is hardly an ordinary business deal. Mike soon discovers that the White House is behind it, the Chinese want to scuttle it, and the ecology of a million square miles of ocean may be at stake. Then the body of a beautiful, seductive woman is found in the vineyard and Mike is ...

This is the sequel to the first Mike Gold mystery, "Opium." When Hollywood science celebrity Abe Wiezman invites Silicon Valley software entrepreneur Mike Gold to become CEO of his eight-year-old biotech company, Mike is intrigued. Abe’s messianic belief that the company can save the world from pollution and maybe even from global warming is intoxicating. As he dives into the challenges of learning new technology and taking the company public, Mike discovers some of the downsides of running an organization built around a charismatic personality. But these management problems fade into the...

Renowned author Norman Bloom wakes up on his 80th birthday and decides to take a stroll down memory lane to review his life. He’s just getting warmed up when he receives a phone call that will rock his world. “You see, sir, my name is David Bloom Adler. I was named after your father. How that came to be is what I would like to meet with you and talk about.” And with that, what was intended as a mere exercise in self-indulgence evolves into something far more meaningful. Norman’s exploration of his past uncovers long-kept secrets and hidden truths that transform his understanding of ...

When she was two years old, Sally Roquette’s mother walked out on her and her father, never to return. But she never missed her mom. Sally was her father’s princess, a prop in his well-honed con game featuring a down-on-his-luck single father and his adorable but homeless daughter. Her mother had just gotten in the way between them. Eight years later, as Sally once more played her part in his oft-repeated scam, Emmanuel Roquette left the little girl alone in a park, also never to return. Ten-year-old Sally, devastated at the loss of her beloved father and certain that she was somehow to...

Hurricane Maria devastates Puerto Rico. Wildfire destroys wide swaths of Northern California Wine Country. Against this tragic backdrop, two deadly predators independently close in for the kill. One, a psychopathic woman Mike Gold thought was his friend. The other, a rogue foreign agent still pursuing the supposedly defunct Gold Jihad. And billionaire tech CEO Mike Gold is their prey.

TALES FROM THE PANDEMIC Life Is Never Easy Months after a wildfire destroys Boomer Montana’s barn in the Santa Cruz Mountains, PI Joe Brink discovers a charred corpse in the rubble. Now Joe must save his aging friend Boomer from prosecution for negligent homicide, while finessing a thorny conflict of interest. Retirement Plan After his second heart attack, it’s time for Alejandro Zapatero to retire. But there is no off-ramp for a drug cartel kingpin. If not murdered outright, the constant anxiety of living with extreme personal security protection, unable to trust anyone, protectors ...

Victor Ostrovsky wants a new toy. He also wants to be a billionaire. He’s getting close. His new factory in China has reached full production and he’s got a second one planned. Added to his global manufacturing empire, they should catapult Ostrovsky into that elite club to which he has long aspired. To celebrate, Ostrovsky decides to buy himself a superyacht. He asks Silicon Valley finance guru and fabled yachtsman Nick Marchetti for advice. Ostrovsky and Marchetti get together for coffee at a San Francisco marina, a meeting by chance observed by one of drug kingpin Rick Varga’s ...

THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD Silicon Valley billionaire Mike Gold has an audacious idea: Provide everyone on Earth cheap, clean energy by beaming solar power from the Moon. He wants to fund the development and startup costs for this endeavor through donated funds, including a billion dollars of his own money. On the other side of the world, the secretive ruling council of the Saudi Royal Family, the Sab’a, decrees that Mike Gold is the most dangerous man in the world. They instruct the man they call Scorpion to declare all-out but covert war on Mike Gold. He must annihilate Mike ...

Married couples are dying A home invasion robbery results in a double murder in Palo Alto, California. A hiking vacation in Tahoe ends with the deaths of a husband and wife due to what seems to be accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. Yet a third couple dies in an apparent motorcycle accident in Big Sur. All within a month. They’re all wealthy clients of the man known as the boutique business consultant of Silicon Valley, Ernie Alvarez. Are the alleged accidents murders? Are the couples dying because of their connection to Alvarez? Can PI Joe Brink solve the case without destroying ...

In 1945, an infant was discovered in a basket on the front porch of the Katz farmhouse in Camino County, in the remote northeast corner of California. Sarah and Morris Katz adopted the foundling and named him Joshua. Now an old man, Josh Katz hires private investigator Joe Brink to find out who his birth parents were. Joe heads to Manning Cross, county seat of Camino County. In stark contrast to the suburban sprawl, diversity and liberal culture of Silicon Valley, he finds himself in a rural, lily-white, conservative region. Manning Cross is a dying town in a dying county, running out of ...

Mike Gold’s company, Global Lunar Electrical Energy, has established the first permanent settlement on the Moon, and its lunar solar farms are beaming power to Earth. Soon, billions will be getting cheap, clean electricity supplied by GLEE. What had been Mike’s audacious dream five years ago has become a reality. Then the body of a long-dead man in a spacesuit is discovered on the Moon, and it appears that no one knows who he is or how he got there. A terrorist attack destroys the first GLEE power station on Earth. A spaceship returning GLEE staff from their pioneering two-year stint on...

DEADLY PLOTS OF GREED AND DUPLICITY June 1944: Allied forces in England are poised to launch Operation Overlord, the massive invasion of Nazi occupied France. In Normandy, French Resistance operatives Doris Cohen, alias Colette Blanchette, codename Sparrow, and Pierre Dufort, codename Hawk, implement an audacious plan to weaken Nazi forces on D-Day. March 2016: Henri Legrand, leader of French industrial giant Dufort Engineering, confronts tech CEO Mike Gold in his Silicon Valley office with an outlandish claim. He says that billionaire Pierre Dufort, now 95 years old, is Mike’s real ...

When sales superstar Bobby Bradshaw fails to close four big deals in the last week of the quarter, he is outraged. One deal he could understand. But four? No way. That just doesn’t happen to the Rainmaker. Bobby is convinced the deals were sabotaged, each in a different way. But who would do such a thing? And why? To get some answers, Bobby hires private detective Joe Brink. The last thing Jessica Kraft, Bobby’s CEO at software giant Forward Data Systems, needs is a sales shortfall. She’s just taken over for venerable Eli Applewhite, whose death allowed Kraft to finally move into the ...

In 2025, what had been Mike Gold’s audacious dream has become a reality. Global Lunar Electrical Energy is supplying 80% of the world’s population with electricity, beamed to Earth from solar farms on the Moon. As his young grandson says, GLEE CEO Mike Gold is now Boss of the Moon, with ultimate responsibility for protecting the security of the GLEE Zone and the Earth’s power supply. But Mike is distracted from this mission when two scientists die under suspicious circumstance at Santa’s Village, the scientific enclave at the Moon’s north pole. Back on Earth, the wife and daughter...

INTERNET PIONEER MURDERED! Barely a week before Internet pioneer Hunter York, founder of Yippee, died in an auto accident, he gave his old friend Mike Gold an envelope. “Just something I’d like you to open when I die,” he said with a big grin. But when Mike opens the envelope, he finds an enigmatic letter from Hunter, stating that he had uncovered serious wrongdoing of some sort and was concerned about how long he had to live. The letter also asks Mike to help Hunter’s estranged 21-year-old son and only heir, Jason, cope with his inherited wealth and controlling interest in Yippee. ...

A DEADLY WEB OF VILLAINY AND DECEIT March 19, 2003: The invasion of Baghdad is imminent. Saddam Hussein withdraws over a billion dollars in cash from the Iraqi Central Bank. Within days, the U.S. Army recovers most of the loot. But not all of it. January, 2004: A U.S. Army intelligence investigator is assigned to probe reports of appalling abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Army guards at Abu Ghraib prison. This leads to numerous courts-martial convictions and other disciplinary actions, along with worldwide condemnation of both the atrocities and the complicity of top U.S. government officials. A...

When the love of her life walked out, saying their marriage had become stale, Stephanie Cunningham was heartbroken. Six months later, after a do-it-yourself divorce, Stephanie read about a hot startup that had secured a windfall of venture capital. The article was accompanied by a picture of the founders toasting their success. One of them was her ex. Stephanie may have been naïve, but she was no fool. The bastard had been working on this startup all the while he told her he was out fruitlessly looking for work. Now free of her, he was suddenly wealthy. Then came the ultimate blow. The ...

Pizza, technology, murder and scandal! Zack Zander, billionaire CEO and founder of MySlice, is on top of the world. Silicon Valley's hottest tech company, MySlice is an ingenious marriage of a pizza chain with social media. But then Zack and three senior executives are savagely murdered onboard his yacht. Lounging in a villa in Maui, Mike Gold is asked to take over as MySlice CEO. He relishes the challenges of rebuilding the executive team, calming dismayed employees and soothing the financial markets. But the murders don't stop, and as the body count climbs, Mike wonders who he can trust ...