Recommendations based on "The Devil May Care"

Why would a man serving a long prison sentence escape the day before he's due to be released? Audie Palmer has spent ten years in a Texas prison after pleading guilty to a robbery in which four people died and seven million dollars went missing. During that time he has suffered repeated beatings, stabbings and threats by inmates and guards, all desperate to answer the same question: where's the money? On the day before Audie is due to be released, he suddenly vanishes. Now everybody is searching for him -- the police, FBI, gangsters and other powerful figures -- but Audie isn't running to save his own life. Instead, he's trying to save someone else's. Michael Robotham has created the ultimate underdog hero, an honorable criminal shrouded in mystery and ready to lead readers on a remarkable chase.

Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+!“In his masterly reworking of this powerful myth, Hillerman creates a kachina for contemporary times. . . . No wonder Hillerman’s stories never grow old. Like myths, they keep evolving with the telling.”— New York Times Book ReviewFrom the enduring "national and literary cultural sensation" (Los Angeles Times) Tony Hillerman, a crackling tale of myth, mystery, and murder featuring the legendary Leaphorn and Chee.Though he may be retired, Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn hasn’t lost his curiosity or his edge. He’s eager to help Sergeant Jim Chee and his fiancée Bernie Manuelito with their latest case—clearing an innocent kid accused of robbing a trading post.Billy Tuve claims he received the precious diamond from a strange old man in the canyon. Could it be one of the gems that went missing in an epic plane crash decades earlier? Now that it may have resurfaced, it’s attracted dangerous strangers to the Navajo lands.Proving Billy’s innocence won’t be easy. Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito must find the remains of a passenger who died in the crash—one of 172 lost souls whose remains were scattered across the magnificent tiered cliffs of the Grand Canyon.But nature may prove their deadliest adversary. To find the proof they need, the detectives must battle a thunderous monsoon and a killer as they plunge deeper into the dark realm of the Hopi Lord of Death—the guardian of the underworld known as Skeleton Man.

“In this series about gambling, the main character is a big winner.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times“Bask in Swain’s Las Vegas without having to set foot in the place and risk being skinned alive.”–The Washington Post Book WorldA blind poker player named Skip DeMarco is scamming the world’s largest poker tournament in Las Vegas, and cheating-expert Tony Valentine and his son, Gerry, have been hired to find out how. DeMarco is tied to some dangerously desperate characters who will go to extremes–even cold-blooded murder–to ensure that the obnoxious DeMarco wins big.While Gerry flies to Atlantic City to suss out DeMarco’s secret, Valentine stays in Vegas and teams up with an aging grifter named Rufus Steele, who has his own score to settle with DeMarco. On opposite sides of a deadly game, father and son work their way through a colorful landscape of conmen and hitmen. Together, they will have to prove there’s more to any game of chance than meets the eye.Featuring insider tips for catching poker cheats, as well as a glossary of card hustler terms!

New York Times bestselling author William Lashner returns with a brilliantly twisty tale that probes the dark side of the law -- and manUnlike the rest of you, I cheerfully admit to my own utter selfishness. I am self-made, self-absorbed, self-serving, self-referential, even self-deprecating, in a charming sort of way. In short, I am all the selfs except selfless. Yet every so often, I run across a force of nature that shakes my sublime self-centeredness to its very roots. Something that tears through the landscape like a tornado, leaving nothing but ruin and reexamination in its wake. Something like Bob.--Victor CarlA beautiful young woman is dead, her husband convicted of the murder. In seeking a new trial for the husband, defense attorney Victor Carl must confront not only a determined prosecutor and a police detective who might have set up his client, but also a strange little busybody named Bob.Bob has the aspiration, one could even say compulsion, to help those around him. And it usually works out well for all concerned, except when it ends in blood. But Victor doesn’t know that . . . yet.Thanks to Bob, Victor is suddenly dressing better, dating a stunning woman, and both his economic prospects and his teeth are gleaming. It’s all good, until Victor finds a troubling connection between Bob and the murdered wife. Is Bob a kind of saint or is this obsessive Good Samaritan, in reality, a murderer?Filled with the keen wit, deep poignancy, twisting suspense, and dark realism that has entranced readers, impressed reviewers, and made William Lashner’s previous novels bestsellers, Falls the Shadow is a riveting novel sure to leave readers eager for more.

The fourth novel in the DI Sean Corrigan series - authentic and terrifying crime fiction with a psychological edge, by an ex-Met detective. Perfect for fans of Mark Billingham, Peter James and Stuart MacBride. Guilty or not guilty? A lone vigilante is abducting wealthy Londoners and putting their fate in the hands of the public. Within hours of disappearing, the victims appear on the internet, bound to a chair in a white room. Revenge or mercy? Their crimes of greed and incompetence are broadcast to the watching thousands who make up the jury. Once the verdict is cast, the man who calls himself 'The Jackdaw' will be judge and executioner. Live or die? DI Sean Corrigan and his Special Investigations Unit are under pressure to solve this case fast. But as The Jackdaw's popularity grows, Corrigan realizes he's hunting a dangerously clever and elusive adversary - one who won't stop until his mission is complete.

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF DAVE BRANDSTETTER Death claims investigator Dave Brandstetter navigates the opposing realms of evangelical Christianity and the porn business while tracking a lost girl in late 1970s Los Angeles. Lon Tooker certainly fits the profile: big, strong, a Marine Corps veteran, and recently the target of evangelical crusader Gerald Dawson's wrath. Tooker's adult toys and pornography store on the local skid row has recently become the target of Dawson's church men's group and their destructive masked raids on "un-Christian" businesses. When Dawson is strangled to death by someone of Tooker's size and ability, the police see a smut-peddler with a motive. Case closed. But death claims investigator Dave Brandstetter doesn't like it. By all accounts Tooker is a softy incapable of such a crime. Actual evidence is nonexistent and assumptions many. And Dave particularly doesn't care for assumptions based on someone's sex life. But Dave is also navigating new personal territory. His father's death has left him bereaved and for the first time in a long time without a job. Dave quit the insurance company his father built and has struck out on his own as a private investigator. Add in his breakup with his recent partner and he's a man unencumbered. It's the late 1970s and Dave may be aging a bit but he's still handsome, wealthy, and recently in possession of a new convertible Triumph. Looks like it's not all hard work.

The versatile mystery novelist Bill Crider has created a pantheon of marvelous characters, but none is more real, warm, and thoroughly delightful than Sheriff Dan Rhodes of Claflin County, Texas.In his sixth adventure, Rhodes is confronted with what seems at first to be a suicide: the body of a man newly arrived in the county is found hanged in the dilapidated building he has taken over for his business. Simon Graham was a rare-book dealer. If it seems unlikely to find such an arcane entrepreneur in this extremely rural and sparsely populated part of Texas, it becomes less strange when it turns out that Graham was more con man than bibliophile.The presumed suicide begins to look more and more like murder when several newcomers swoop down on the scene and try to beat out one another to find a reputedly valuable rare book that Graham was rumored to have among his collection of hardly worthwhile items.Although Rhodes's two attenuated and eccentric jailhouse employees have gone overboard for the magic of the department's new computer, the steady, if put-upon, Rhodes and his clear-eyed observations of human nature have invariably been more useful to the solution of a crime - and that is still true in the case of the hanged book dealer.

Her tattoo wasn't just a mark for life; it marked her for death, too. In New York's East Village a young girl is brutally raped, tortured, and murdered. Detective Callum Doyle has seen the victim's remains. He has visited the distraught family. Now he wants justice. Doyle is convinced he knows who the killer is. The problem is he can't prove it. And the more he pushes his prime suspect, the more he learns that the man is capable of pushing back in ways more devious and twisted than Doyle could ever have imagined. Add to that the appearance of an old adversary who has a mission for Doyle and won't take no for an answer, and soon Doyle finds himself at risk of losing everything he holds dear. Including his life.

Bernhardt sticks to his tried-and-true formula in his 13th novel to feature Tulsa defense attorney Ben Kincaid. An odious criminal defendant is foisted on Kincaid's practice: Johnny Christensen, a hate-filled frat boy accused of beating a gay man to death outside a singles bar in a Chicago suburb. Despite Kincaid's reluctance to take the case (at first, he flat-out refuses, for reasons he keeps hidden), he and partner Christina McCall put up the best criminal defense they can, allowing Bernhardt to explore issues of justice and contemporary mores while keeping the tension high. The well-paced plot weaves the hate crime of the title together with an Oklahoma kidnapping, Kincaid's romantic past, another grisly unsolved murder and a detective gone bad. In between, Bernhardt introduces readers to a straight male prostitute named Charlie the Chicken, a poetry-reciting homicide cop, a Christian social organization that opposes homosexuality above all else and a gay activist group that dabbles in courtroom executions and terrorism. Bernhardt places a premium on the plot twists, and his characters sometimes act in unlikely ways in service to the surprise. It should also be noted that the primary villain proves as eager to provide exposition of the scheme once nabbed as the typical Scooby Doo bad guy. That said, Bernhardt offers another good read, full of courtroom fireworks, double-crosses and even a bit of romance.

In David Housewright's The Taking of Libbie, SD, a grifter cons an entire town using Mac McKenzie’s name, leaving the real McKenzie facing an angry town with nothing left to lose. Rushmore McKenzie is a retired cop, an unexpected millionaire, and an occasional unlicensed private investigator. So, it isn’t the biggest surprise in the world when he’s attacked and kidnapped from his home—McKenzie has more than a few enemies out there with a grudge against him. But it is a surprise when it turns out his kidnapping is a case of mistaken identity. McKenzie was taken to the small plains town of Libbie, South Dakota which just lost pretty much everything it had to a con man using McKenzie’s name. Using a scam involving a new shopping mall, the grifter apparently stole all the money electronically from the bank then disappeared, leaving behind a devastated town full of people with many reasons to hate him. To that list of enemies, he’s just added McKenzie who is now determined to help the devastated townspeople, as well as catch and punish the weasel besmirching his reputation.