Jobless and divorced, Pat Riordan takes a little-sought-after teaching job at the District's school for the hard-to-handle, Wolfcreek.

His sense of loss makes him a good fit for the boys of the school who call their banishment from the mainstream "bricked."

Doug Donovan, the school's principal, agrees with Riordan that gentle, but firm teaching strategies are the best way for their kids to learn. But ego-driven administrators, who want the school's location for more promising students, feel otherwise and start a campaign to discredit the Wolfcreek staff and curriculum.

As the school year unwinds, Riordan finds his way into the personal life of one of the students, Bobby, and gets thrust into the role of rescuer when Bobby's mother is abused by a live-in boyfriend.

Bricked follows Riordan, the students, and staff, in what might be the school's final year.

The Cues finds teacher Pat Riordan settling into a new post at the local university.
Having exonerated himself a year earlier as a suspect in a missing persons case, Riordan is asked by a
colleague’s widow to look into her husband’s death—and so, reluctantly, Riordan once again finds himself in the fold of a who-done-it case.
Teaming up with another colleague Phil Rister and former homicide detective Mike Finn,
who has returned to the Midwest to find answers to the three-decades-old murder of his cousin,
the trio follow leads connecting the old murder to the present-day death of Riordan’s colleague
and a series of unsolved cases of missing women. The connections they make, which they come
to call the cues, take them into the dark underbelly of the college town they thought they knew
and the powerful forces behind it.
  The Cues is my third novel in the Pat Riordan series, following Bricked and
The Slip Swing, 

Franklin's Bennies is the fourth book in the series. The protagonist, Peter Cleary, under an accusatory eye of prison officials and the Feds, helps an inmate even the score with drug pushers and a crooked lawyer.