Rick Bennet Books in Order

Rick Bennet wrote fiction from inside the poker world rather than from its sidelines. Before publishing a novel, he ran after-hours home games and charity casinos in Southern Maryland, then spent years playing cards himself. Those rooms supplied the social map for his work: regulars, hustlers, friends, people carrying grudges, and people trying to keep ordinary life together.

His first novel, King of a Small World, arrived in 1995. It introduces Joey Pinocchio Moore, a young Maryland rounder whose success at poker does not spare him the complications of love, parenthood, work, and responsibility. Bennet has said Joey was imagined, not an autobiographical version of himself.

The book draws its energy from the everyday business of gambling: late sessions, uncertain money, shifting loyalties, and the people who make a living around the tables. Bennet's interest is not in treating poker hands as magic tricks. He is more concerned with what the game does to the people playing it.

For Bennet, the hand is never the whole story.

He followed his debut with The Lost Brother in 1996. The novel moves into Washington, D.C., where the murder of a prominent Black lawyer sets off parallel searches for the killer. A private investigator and the victim's brother approach the case from very different places, giving the story a tense mix of crime, race, power, and revenge.

About five years after King of a Small World was published, Bennet wrote The Baltimore Truth. Publishers showed interest, but he could not initially make a major structural change they wanted. Years later, he found a revision that worked for him. He eventually released the book in 2016, encouraged by his sister Melanie, who was seriously ill with cancer at the time. She later died.

The long wait changed the book's path, not its setting.

The Baltimore Truth brings Joey Moore back, but Bennet described it as only loosely sequel-like. Joey is the main returning figure, while much of the action moves toward Baltimore's criminal underworld. Poker remains part of the environment, but the story gives more space to the people, alliances, mistakes, and accusations around the game.

Bennet has connected the novel to a hard lesson from his own life: people can be dangerously certain they are right when they are not. That concern runs through his crime fiction, alongside a steady focus on the practical details of gambling culture and the pressure of trying to live a full life outside it.

In a 2017 interview, Bennet said he had left Maryland for North County San Diego, raised his children while playing cards, and later shifted part of his attention to sports betting. At that point, he was living in Las Vegas and playing low-stakes poker. He also said his sons were grown, offering a small, time-specific glimpse of the life behind the books.