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🧲 Books like this

Hell to Pay

George P. Pelecanos · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Darkness, Take My Hand

Dennis Lehane · 480 pages

The master of the new noir, Dennis Lehane magnificently evokes the dignity and savagery of working-class Boston in this terrifying tale of darkness and redemption. Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro's latest client is a prominent Boston psychiatrist running scared from a vengeful Irish mob. The private investigators know something about cold-blooded retribution. Born and bred on the mean streets of

NoirPrivate InvestigatorCrimeBig City
❤️

Devil in a Blue Dress

Walter Mosley · 219 pages

In a Los Angeles bar, "Easy" Rawlins, a black war veteran just fired from his job, wonders how he'll pay his mortgage. DeWitt Albright, a quietly vicious white man, walks in and offers Easy good money if he'll find Daphne Monet.

Private InvestigatorNoirCrimeBig City
❤️

Pulp

Charles Bukowski · 192 pages

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on M

Private InvestigatorNoirWorking-Class ProtagonistBig City
❤️

Everybody Dies

Lawrence Block · 338 pages

Matt Scudder is finally leading a comfortable life. Then all hell breaks loose. "A taut noir story ... one of Lawrence Block's best" (Cleveland Plain Dealer).Matt Scudder is finally leading a comfortable life. The crime rate's down and the stock market's up. Gentrification's prettying-up the old neighborhood. The New York streets don't look so mean anymore.Then all hell breaks loose.Scudder qui

NoirPrivate InvestigatorRevenge PlotCrime
❤️

Altered Carbon

Richard K. Morgan · 480 pages

Mankind is strung out across interstellar space, and human consciousness is digitally freighted between the stars and downloaded into bodies, but some things never change, so when Takeshi is downloaded into the body of a ex-thug and presented with a catch-22 offer he shouldn't be surprised.

Private InvestigatorNoirBig CityCrime
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King of Ashes

S.A. Cosby · 352 pages

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the family business—together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortali

NoirRevenge PlotWorking-Class ProtagonistCrime
❤️

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler · 220 pages

Philip Marlowe, a private eye who operates in Los Angeles's seamy underside during the 1930s, takes on his first case, which involves a paralyzed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail, and murder

Private InvestigatorNoirCrimeDark
❤️

Complete Novels: Red Harvest / The Dain Curse / The Maltese Falcon / The Glass Key / The Thin Man

Dashiell Hammett · 967 pages

"In a few years of extraordinary creative energy, Dashiell Hammett invented the modern American crime novel."--BOOK JACKET. "The five novels that Hammett published between 1929 and 1934, collected here in one volume, have become part of modern American culture, creating archetypal characters and establishing the ground rules for a whole tradition of hardboiled writing."--BOOK JACKET. "Each novel

Private InvestigatorBig CityNoirCrime
❤️

Darker Than Amber

John D. MacDonald · 207 pages

Helping damsels in distress is nothing new for Travis McGee--it's basically how he spends his life. But this one was different right from the start. Tossed off a bridge with cement wired to her feet, dragged to safety by Travis and Meyer, she was a hot Eurasian beauty with a cold heart...ready to snare them in a murder racket to end all murders....

Private InvestigatorRevenge PlotNoirCrime
❤️

Every Dead Thing

John Connolly · 480 pages

John Connolly superbly taps into the tortured mind and gritty world of former NYPD detective Charlie "Bird" Parker, tormented by the brutal, unsolved murders of his wife and young daughter. Driven by visions of the dead, Parker tracks a serial killer from New York City to the American South, and finds his buried instincts -- for love, survival, and, ultimately, for killing -- awakening as he confr

NoirPrivate InvestigatorCrimeRevenge Plot
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The Killing Of The Tinkers

Ken Bruen · 254 pages

Back in Galway and back to his old drinking habits, Jack Taylor agrees to assist a gypsy in an investigation into the deaths of a number of members of the gypsy clan, deaths that the Guards, the Irish police, are reluctant to investigate.

NoirPrivate InvestigatorCrimeRacism
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Razorblade Tears

S. A. Cosby · 247 pages

*INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* One of Barack Obama's Recommended Reads for Summer • New York Times Notable Book • NPR’s Best Books of 2021 • Washington Post’s Best Thriller and Mystery Books of the Year • TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 • New York Public Library’s Best Books of the Year • Goodreads Choice Award Nominee • Book of the Month’s Book of the Year Finalist “Provocative,

NoirCrimeRevenge PlotWorking-Class Protagonist
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The Hard Way

Lee Child · 512 pages

In Lee Child's astonishing new thriller, ex--military cop Reacher sees more than most people would...and because of that, he's thrust into an explosive situation that's about to blow up in his face. For the only way to find the truth--and save two innocent lives--is to do it the way Jack Reacher does it best: the hard way.... Jack Reacher was alone, the way he liked it, soaking up the hot, electri

Private InvestigatorBig CityRevenge PlotCrime
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Big City, Bad Blood

Sean Chercover · 294 pages

A disillusioned newspaper reporter turned private detective, Ray Dudgeon isn't trying to save the world. He just wants to do an honest job, and do it well. But when doing an honest job threatens society's most powerful and corrupt, Ray's odds for survival make for a sucker's bet. . . .While working on a movie in Chicago, Hollywood locations manager Bob Loniski saw something he shouldn't have. Now

Private InvestigatorNoirBig CityCrime
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Batman: Year One

Frank Miller · 144 pages

"A man doesn't live forever-- a legend does. From the moment he declared war on crime, the Batman knew his story would eventually come to an end. But for each soul he has touched, either as an ally or an enemy, a lover or a friend, an inspiration or an obsession, the life of the Dark Knight-- and its tragic conclusion-- is viewed differently. Now those closest to the Caped Crusader gather for his

NoirBig CityCrimeRevenge Plot
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Blacksad

Juan Diaz Canales, Juanjo Guarnido · 54 pages

Private InvestigatorNoirCrimeRacism
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Batman: The Long Halloween

Jeph Loeb · 369 pages

Unaware of being watched, Batman pursues villains including Killer Croc and Poison Ivy, and discovers that Poison Ivy's latest plan will require that he ally himself with Catwoman in order to defeat his old friend Superman.

NoirCrimeBig CityRevenge Plot
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The Redeemer

Jo Nesbo · 573 pages

"One night in Oslo, Christmas shoppers gather to listen to a Salvation Army street concert. An explosion cuts through the music, and a man in uniform falls to the ground. Harry Hole and his team have little to work with: no immediate suspect, no weapon and no motive. But when the assassin discovers he has shot the wrong man, Harry Hole's troubles have only just begun. After some exceptionally shre

CrimeRevenge PlotBig CityViolent
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Crime Partners

Donald Goines · 191 pages

Goines’ powerful first novel lays bare the bloody, brutal world of crime in the black ghetto, where, as Goines put it, “kindness was the sweetest con of all.” Here is the gutsy and often shocking world of Billy and Jackie, prison buddies on the streets and hot on the trigger.

NoirCrimeBig CityWorking-Class Protagonist
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Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

Sara Gran · 288 pages

When Paul Casablancas, Claire DeWitt's musician ex-boyfriend, is found dead in his Mission District home, the police are convinced it's a simple robbery. But Claire knows nothing is ever simple. With the help of her new assistant, Claude, Claire follows the clues, finding hints to Paul's fate in her other cases -- especially that of a missing girl in the gritty 1980s East Village and a modern-day

NoirPrivate InvestigatorBig CityCrime
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52 Pick Up

Elmore Leonard · 191 pages

NoirBig CityCrimeRevenge Plot
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Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters

Mike Grell · 160 pages

Revenge PlotNoirBig CityCrime
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City on Fire

Don Winslow · 384 pages

Revenge PlotWorking-Class ProtagonistCrimeBig City
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Blind Man with a Pistol

Chester Himes · 240 pages

"New York is sweltering in the summer heat, and Harlem is close to the boiling point. To Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, at times it seems as if the whole world has gone mad. Trying, as always, to keep some kind of peace, their legendary nickel-plated Colts very much in evidence, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger find themselves pursuing two completely different cases through a maze of knifings

NoirBig CityCrimeRacism

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