Sam Sawyer is a fishing guide and part-time sleuth living in the Florida Keys. Sam’s life takes an unexpected turn when he discovers a pair of shoes lying next to a huge crocodile on a sandy bank deep in the everglades, and somebody’s feet are in the shoes. Sam discovers they belonged to a woman called Mable who lived reclusively on an isolated key in Florida Bay. But how did her shoes and feet end up back in the glades, and who was responsible?

In Campfire Stories: Close Calls, Steven Rinella invites seasoned hunters, anglers, adventurers, and outdoor professionals to share their tales of perilous adventures in the natural world, from run-ins with black bears and grizzlies to bad falls and severe hypothermia.

Virgil Flowers kicked around for a while before joining the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. First it was the army and the military police, then the police in St. Paul, and finally Lucas Davenport brought him into the BCA, promising him, "We'll only give you the hard stuff." He's been doing the hard stuff for three years now, but never anything like this.

In 1919, Delano, Georgia, appoints its first chief of police. Honest and hardworking, the new chief is puzzled when young men start to disappear. But his investigation is ended by the fatal blast from a shotgun. Delano's second chief-of-police is no hero, yet he is also disturbed by what he sees in the missing-persons bulletins. In 1969, when Delano's third chief takes over, the unsolved disappearances still haunt the police files.

A twelve-year-old girl and her younger brother are on the run in the Idaho woods, pursued by four men they have just watched commit murder—four men who know exactly who William and Annie are. And where their mother lives. Retired policemen from Los Angeles, the killers easily persuade the local sheriff to let them lead the search for the missing children. Now there's nowhere left for William and Annie to hide…and no one they can trust. Until they meet Jess Rawlins.

When Maggie Blackthorne returns to her hometown after nearly 20 years to serve as an Oregon State Police Sergeant, she expects to deal with the usual suspects - drunk drivers, oxy slingers, and the occasional rural scofflaw. But after she stumbles upon the bullet-ridden bodies of twin brothers, she realizes she’s stepped into something much more sinister. With little homicide experience, Maggie and her partner, Trooper Hollis Jones, find themselves thrust into the murder investigation.

Jonas Piedmont Beaumont has had a hard life and learned at a young age how hard life can be. Two marriages, a treacherous battle with the bottle, assorted midlife and moral dilemmas, and a few decades as a homicide detective haven't convinced him otherwise. When Beau and his new partner Sue Danielson are assigned the murder of an elderly woman torched to death in her bed, Beau finds himself distracted by Sue's difficulties at home.

Accolades for Brad Smith’s celebrated crime novels include a nomination for the coveted Dashiell Hammett Prize. In Smith’s novel Red Means Run, prominent attorney Mickey Dupree is found dead at Burr Oak Golf and Country Club. On record as hating Mickey, small-time rancher Virgil Cain quickly becomes the prime suspect. Virgil knows the fix is in—so he sets out to find the real killer.

Horning, escaping professional troubles in Texas, accepts the vacant job in Port Stirling, Oregon, looking for a fresh start in what he thought would be a peaceful coastal town where the far west meets the mighty Pacific Ocean. Nothing much ever happens here…or does it?

Bo Tully is the sheriff of Blight County, Idaho, where law enforcement is usually pretty mundane: tracking down truants running away from school, picking up country boys who've had a few too many beers. But Tully gets a little more than the country norm when an ex-con calls with the startling news that there's a corpse draped across one of his fences.

Reservation "bad boy" Thomas Begay is found dead drunk under the La Plata Bridge, which is not unusual for him. What is unusual, however, is that beautiful BIA investigator Patsy Greyhorse is found lying beside him, not drunk or even a Navajo but very dead nonetheless. Charlie Yazzie, fresh from law school, risks his career and even his life to help his old friend. The answer seems to lie with the Yeenaaldiooshii...should one choose to believe in such things.

Alan Gregory is a clinical psychologist with a thriving practice in Boulder, Colorado. His life begins to unravel when one of his female patients is found in an apparent suicide and the local paper begins printing accusations from an unnamed source of sexual impropriety between the woman and Dr. Gregory. He launches a psychological and personal quest for the truth that rapidly intensifies when more of his patients die untimely deaths, and Gregory suspects not only that the deaths are related but that another one of his patients may be somehow involved. Lacking facts but roused by suspicion and troubled by seemingly random acts of terror around him, Gregory starts to fear for the safety of the people he loves. The question of the inviolability of confidential disclosures made to Gregory by his patients - privileged information - becomes crucial as the psychologist pursues an unsettling romance with Lauren Crowder, a lovely deputy district attorney investigating one of the deaths. Bound to silence, Gregory follows the psychological tracks of someone he fears may be a cunning and disturbed killer, while turning to his enigmatic but supportive partner, Diane Estevez, for counsel, and to his tart-tongued female urologist neighbor for support. The sinister, surprising drama unfolds against Boulder's Rocky Mountain backdrop, in the arresting natural beauty of Aspen, and in the midst of a baroque Halloween costume party in downtown Boulder. Finally, in a lonely mountain lodge enshrouded in menace, the story comes to its breathtaking climax.

Once a land of Pueblo dwellers, the town of San Geronimo Peak, New Mexico, is prime ski country. PI Howard Moon Deer and ex-cop Jack Wilder are headed there to meet their first client - a former US senator and the ski slope's owner. Instead, they find his body - and a murder case to solve.

On the edge of the Navajo Nation, rookie paralegal Naomi Manymules pauses on a lakeside clifftop to enjoy a moonlit moment. She hears someone swimming in the darkness far below her, and a boat drifts out of the shadows. When she glimpses something that might be a naked butt shining in the moonlight, she decides to head for home. What she saw was the bare behind of a murdered local sleaze. His passing upsets exactly no one, but his wife can offer only a coyote for an alibi.

For Sheriff Joanna Brady and her 12-year-old daughter Jenny, an innocent Girl Scout campout turns into a lethal game when Jenny and her tentmate, Dora Matthews, discover a murdered Phoenix woman.

Homicide is always an abomination, but there is something exceptionally disturbing about the victim discovered in a high, lonely place: a corpse with a mouth full of sand, abandoned at a crime scene seemingly devoid of tracks or useful clues. Though it goes against his better judgment, Navajo tribal police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn cannot help but suspect the hand of a supernatural killer.

Accolades for Brad Smith’s celebrated crime novels include a nomination for the coveted Dashiell Hammett Prize. In Smith’s novel Red Means Run, prominent attorney Mickey Dupree is found dead at Burr Oak Golf and Country Club. On record as hating Mickey, small-time rancher Virgil Cain quickly becomes the prime suspect. Virgil knows the fix is in—so he sets out to find the real killer.

Bo Tully is the sheriff of Blight County, Idaho, where law enforcement is usually pretty mundane: tracking down truants running away from school, picking up country boys who've had a few too many beers. But Tully gets a little more than the country norm when an ex-con calls with the startling news that there's a corpse draped across one of his fences.

Samantha Sweet breaks into houses for a living - all perfectly legal as a caretaker for the USDA. But her real dream is to open her own pastry shop, 'Sweet's Sweets.' Life is a little crazy for Sam right now. At one of her break-in properties, a dying woman insists that she take a small wooden box. Sam doesn't realize that the old woman was known locally as a 'bruja,' a witch, until she begins to feel some strange effects from the box.

Alan Gregory is a clinical psychologist with a thriving practice in Boulder, Colorado. His life begins to unravel when one of his female patients is found in an apparent suicide and the local paper begins printing accusations from an unnamed source of sexual impropriety between the woman and Dr. Gregory. He launches a psychological and personal quest for the truth that rapidly intensifies when more of his patients die untimely deaths, and Gregory suspects not only that the deaths are related but that another one of his patients may be somehow involved. Lacking facts but roused by suspicion and troubled by seemingly random acts of terror around him, Gregory starts to fear for the safety of the people he loves. The question of the inviolability of confidential disclosures made to Gregory by his patients - privileged information - becomes crucial as the psychologist pursues an unsettling romance with Lauren Crowder, a lovely deputy district attorney investigating one of the deaths. Bound to silence, Gregory follows the psychological tracks of someone he fears may be a cunning and disturbed killer, while turning to his enigmatic but supportive partner, Diane Estevez, for counsel, and to his tart-tongued female urologist neighbor for support. The sinister, surprising drama unfolds against Boulder's Rocky Mountain backdrop, in the arresting natural beauty of Aspen, and in the midst of a baroque Halloween costume party in downtown Boulder. Finally, in a lonely mountain lodge enshrouded in menace, the story comes to its breathtaking climax.

Meg Langslow's summer is not going swimmingly. In her small Virginia hometown, she's the maid of honor at the nuptials of three loved ones - each of whom has dumped the planning in her hands. One bride is set on including a Native American herbal purification ceremony while another wants live peacocks on the lawn. But when an offensive newcomer, who hints at skeletons in the guests' closets, is found dead under suspicious circumstances, level-headed Meg's to-do list extends from flower arrangements and bridal registries to catching a killer - before the next event is her own funeral.

Life on the ranchlands of Montana comes with more than its share of trouble. The unique people who live and work on this untamed stretch of today's American West expect it---and some of them even enjoy it. One of them is Mike Wire, a former homicide detective who once worked the decadent hills and valleys of Hollywood.

When two lowlifes rob a gas station, murder the attendant, and then incinerate bystanders who are filling up their minivan, the Manceford County, North Carolina, police quickly arrest the killers at a nearby motel.

Someone is knocking at the door to Grace Adams' house, and he won't stop. Grace thinks she knows who it is, but when she goes to her second floor window for a look she sees a woman she doesn't recognize. The woman isn't alone for long before a man emerges from the dark of the surrounding woods, stabs her, and leaves her for dead. Trying to help, Grace goes to the woman and is shocked to find that it's her mother Leanne - a woman who abandoned her 11 years before.

Rodeo Grace Garnet lives alone, save for his old dog, in a remote corner of Arizona known to locals as the Hole. He doesn't get many visitors, but a body found near his home has drawn police attention to his front door. The victim is not one of the many illegal immigrants who risk their lives to cross the border just south of the Hole, but is instead a member of one of the local Indian tribes.

Detective Peter Decker of the LAPD is stunned when he gets the report. Someone has shattered the sanctuary of a remote yeshiva community in the California hills with an unimaginable crime. One of the women was brutally raped as she returned from the mikvah, the bathhouse where the cleansing ritual is performed.

At age fifty, Margaret Spencer's empty nest and empty marriage prompt her to answer an ad for part-time office work at the office of private investigator Nat Southby. Suddenly, she is deep in the most unlikely of adventures for a woman in 1950s Vancouver, helping him with a case of missing young women involved in a shady business ring. Maggie finds unexpected freedom as a developing detective and along the way she uncovers evil in the quaintly urban setting.

Ex-cop Frank Harper doesn't want to get involved. Harper is visiting the small Ohio town of Cooper's Mill, trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter and a grandson he's never met. But he finds the town gripped in fear - two young girls have gone missing, taken in broad daylight from a busy street. And the police are coming up blank. But once Harper is drawn reluctantly into the investigation, he'll stop at nothing to find the girls. And he doesn't care who gets in the way.

He's a self-described beach bum who won his houseboat in a card game. He's also a knight errant who's wary of credit cards, retirement benefits, political parties, mortgages, and television. He only works when his cash runs out, and his rule is simple: he'll help you find whatever was taken from you, as long as he can keep half.

Lucie Montgomery's semi-estranged brother, Eli, calls her in France to tell her that their father, Leland, has been killed in a hunting accident on the family's 500-acre Virginia vineyard. But the vineyard is now shabby and run-down and her siblings want to sell it. Then Lucie's godfather tells her Leland's death was no accident. With her greedy brother, hell-raising sister, and a seemingly cut-rate vintner hired by Leland just before he died, all the suspects are disturbingly close to home.