Love, Danger, Homecomings & Heart — Your June Reading Escape Starts Here

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Death Threat, September 2023
Trade Paperback / e-Book
Risk Factor, May 2021
Hardcover / e-Book
Missing Persons, October 2020
Paperback / e-Book (reprint)
Wild Card, May 2019
Hardcover / e-Book
Damned If You Do, September 2013
Hardcover / e-Book
Robert B. Parker's Killing The Blues, October 2012
Paperback / e-Book (reprint)
Robert B. Parker's Killing The Blues, September 2011
Hardcover / e-Book

WILD CARD
By: Michael Brandman

Buddy Steel #3
Poisoned Pen Press
May 2019
On Sale: May 14, 2019
Featuring: Buddy Steel
248 pages
ISBN: 1464211582
EAN: 9781464211584
Kindle: B07Q6CV2JD
Hardcover / e-Book
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Mystery | Mystery Police Procedural

When San Remo County Acting Sheriff Buddy Steel is deputized by the California Coastal Commission to investigate a reclusive Russian billionaire who has repeatedly violated state law by obstructing public access to his vast beachfront property, he makes a shocking discovery. And learns that the politicos, some with a history of corruption, some just chicken, will not back up enforcement.

This makes Buddy, a former LAPD cop dragged home by his Sheriff father's ALS diagnosis to "temporarily" head the department, dig in his heels and face down the Russian's imported goon squad. It can and will get uglier.

At the same time a string of random murders in the county's normally sleepy town of Freedom, a wealthy enclave up the coast from Los Angeles, places the Sheriff's Department on high alert as it seeks to apprehend a serial killer whose crimes are so perfectly executed they leave no forensic evidence.

Buddy enlists an old adversary in his war with the Russian. She's a legal shark from L.A., a savvy negotiator—and former lover. He needs to carry this fight to court. And he needs more backup—from the Sheriff's Department staff, not the Sheriff, who resists being sidelined. Nor Freedom's mayor, Buddy's stepmother.

Unconventional and meticulously obtuse in his methodology, wild card cynic Buddy Steel barrels his way through the myriad obstacles that defy him. He may not want the job but his quest for serving the law is relentless.

Wild Card is the third in the Buddy Steel series by Hollywood ace Michael Brandman who, among his other credits, has both written New York Times bestsellers in the Robert B. Parker Jesse Stone series and brought Jesse to the screen in nine films starring Tom Selleck.