Books like Innocent bystander by Craig Rice

Hard‑boiled detective Sam Spade races to recover a priceless, gem‑encrusted statuette while double‑crosses and danger creep from every corner.

A pioneering English detective story in which a priceless diamond, once stolen from a Hindu idol and presented to a young woman on her eighteenth birthday, disappears again, sparking intrigue and danger.

Walter Hartright, a drawing master, becomes entangled with Laura Fairlie, Sir Percival Glyde, and the scheming Count Fosco as questions of identity and madness intertwine in 19th‑century England.

Saul Bellow’s novel follows a middle‑aged Jewish man navigating the challenges of contemporary life, examining themes of failure, redemption, and the search for meaning in an urban American setting.

Nick and Nora Charles navigate a New York murder mystery with wit and charm, turning a hard‑boiled investigation into a sophisticated comedy of manners.

**John J Malone / Jake & Helene Justus #8** (1945) Wrongly convicted Anna Marie St. Clair has escaped the electric chair only because the hired gun fronting for the real murderer of Big Joe Childers made an eleventh-hour confession on his own death bed. Now she's playing dead and laying for the lowlife creeps who conspired to get her tried and fried. For help, she turns to John Malone, the one defense lawyer in Chicago who might have gotten her off in spite of everything, if she hadn't put her trust in Big Joe's pals instead. A smitten Malone readily agrees to join in Anna Marie's fun, but the whole haunting affair soon becomes a good deal more complicated. Turns out that Malone's pal, Jake Justus, was an unwilling side party to the Childers murder frame. Helene Justus hasn't been let in on her husband's guilty secret; nevertheless, as usual, she suspects enough to scare up a few complications herself.