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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.”
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