Detours: Life, Death and Divorce on the Road to Sturgis

Richard La Plante began his working life as a special education teacher in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he spent a great deal of time playing the guitar and working on songs to the amusement of his students. Following his dismissal, he formed the rock band Revenge and toured and recorded till egos clashed and noses were broken. His first book, Tegné, Soul Warrior, a fantasy-fiction novel, combined his longtime study of Japanese martial arts with his interest in metaphysics and love of adventure tales. He wrote a sequel to Tegné, entitled The Killing Blow, then switched from fantasy-fiction to hardcore thrillers with a popular series featuring the characters Josef Tanaka, a Japanese-American medical examiner and shotokan karate master, and Bill Fogarty, an Irish-American police Lieutenant. Mantis was the first novel in the series, followed by Leopard, Steroid Blues, and Mind Kill. A great deal of the money earned from his books ended up in the chrome and steel accessories that adorned his custom Harley-Davidson, a 1989 Springer, an obsession which became the inspiration for his motorcycle memoir, Hog Fever. Detours, written in 2002, continues the motorcycle theme and traces a solo cross-country journey ending in Sturgis, the famous motorcycle rally in the black hills of South Dakota. Richard and his second wife, Betina, an accomplished photographer and mother of his two sons, built their first home from the ground up on a bluff overlooking Gardiner’s Bay in East Hampton, New York. In 2004, the family moved to Ojai, a small town in the high desert of Southern California, where they built their dream home on a mountaintop, inspiring his latest memoir, Never Again. Richard’s other interests include anything paranormal, western boxing, and competitive swimming.