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A Stab in the Dark

Lawrence Block · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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The Long Fall

Walter Mosley · 305 pages

A brand-new mystery series from one of the country's best-known, best-loved writers: a new character, a new city, a new era. A new Walter Mosley.His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: LEONID McGILL, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. It's a name that takes a little explaining, but he's used to it. "Daddy was a communist and great-great-Granddaddy was a slave master from Scotland. You know, the

Private InvestigatorNoirDetective FictionNew York City
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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 InvestigatorDetective FictionSerial Killer
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Innocent Monster

Reed Farrel Coleman · 291 pages

Seven years have passed since the brutal murder that tore Moe Prager's family apart, when his estranged daughter Sarah comes to him with a request he cannot refuse. Sashi Bluntstone, an eleven-year-old art prodigy and daughter of Sarah's dearest childhood friend, has been abducted. As Moe stumbles around the fringes of the New York art scene, he discovers that suspects abound beyond the usual pred

Private InvestigatorNoirDetective FictionNew York City
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The Blue Hammer

Ross Macdonald · 256 pages

NoirPrivate InvestigatorCold CaseDetective Fiction
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The Long Goodbye

Raymond Chandler · 324 pages

In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

Private InvestigatorNoirDetective FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Red Iron Nights

Glen Cook · 270 pages

Private InvestigatorNoirSerial KillerDetective Fiction
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The Big Kill

Mickey Spillane · 168 pages

A reformed ex-con is the victim of a vicious killer. Mike Hammer goes gunning for justice, but a beautiful woman keeps getting in his way.

Private InvestigatorNoirDetective FictionNew York City
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Motor City Blue

Loren D. Estleman · 219 pages

Marla Bernstein is a pretty, dark-haired teenager who happens to be the ward of Ben Morningstar­a semi-retired mobster. When Marla suddenly disappears, the gang boss is forced to call in private eye Amos Walker. Unfortunately, the only clue to Marla's whereabouts is a pornographic photograph that clearly proves that she's become part of a world that disgusts even her criminal guardian. The photo l

NoirPrivate InvestigatorDetective FictionMystery
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Back Story

Robert B. Parker · 304 pages

Cold CasePrivate InvestigatorDetective FictionFirst Person Narrator
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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 InvestigatorSerial KillerFirst Person Narrator
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The Chicago Way

Michael Harvey · 323 pages

Chicago private investigator Michael Kelly is hired by his former partner, John Gibbons, to help solve an eight-year-old rape and battery case, a case it turns out his old friend was once ordered to forget. When Gibbons turns up dead on Navy Pier, Kelly enlists a team of his savviest colleagues to connect the dots between the recent murder and the cold case it revived: Diane Lindsay, a television

Private InvestigatorCold CaseNoirMystery
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Death Angel

Linda Fairstein · 369 pages

Discovering the murdered body of a young woman in Ramble urban park, New York Assistant DA Alex Cooper and Detective Mike Chapman uncover disturbing links between the savage crime and a string of cold-case disappearances. In this novel the author, a former prosecutor for the City of New York, explores the rich, and little-known, history of New York City's Central Park. Here she takes readers into

Cold CaseDetective FictionNew York CitySerial Killer
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Private InvestigatorNoirDetective FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Cold CaseNoirDetective FictionSerial Killer
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Poodle Springs

Raymond Chandler, Robert B. Parker · 290 pages

NoirPrivate InvestigatorDetective FictionMystery
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Little Girl Lost

Richard Aleas · 224 pages

High-school sweethearts separate at graduation, and ten years later the man reads that the woman has been murdered on a strip-club roof.

NoirPrivate InvestigatorNew York CityFirst Person Narrator
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The Pale Criminal

Philip Kerr · 272 pages

Bernhard Gunther, a private investigator in Germany in 1938, is hired by a rich widow to discover who has been blackmailing her, and by the Berlin police to track down a serial killer, and runs into bizarre psychotherapy and medicinal practices and Nazi occultism.

NoirPrivate InvestigatorSerial KillerFirst Person Narrator
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True Crime

Max Allan Collins · 357 pages

NoirPrivate InvestigatorDetective FictionMystery
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Falling Angel

William Hjortsberg · 256 pages

A spellbinding novel of murder, mystery, and the occult, Falling Angel pits a tough New York private eye against the most fearsome adversary a detective ever faced. For Harry Angel, a routing missing persons case soon turns into a fiendish nightmare of voodoo and black magic, of dizzying peril and violent death--a world in which the shadow he chases seems to be the shadow he casts.--Cover

Private InvestigatorNoirNew York CityFirst Person Narrator
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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 InvestigatorNoirDetective FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Last Place You Look

Kristen Lepionka · 336 pages

"Nobody knows what happened to Sarah Cook. The beautiful blonde teenager disappeared fifteen years ago, the same night her parents were brutally murdered in their suburban Ohio home. Her boyfriend Brad Stockton--black and from the wrong side of the tracks--was convicted of the murders and is now on death row. Though he's maintained his innocence all along, the clock is running out. His execution i

Cold CasePrivate InvestigatorDetective FictionMystery
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Nightmare in Pink

John D. MacDonald · 224 pages

Travis McGee s permanent address is the Busted Flush, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale, and there isn t a hell of a lot that compels him to leave it. Except maybe a call from an old army buddy who needs a favor. If it wasn t for him, McGee might not be alive. For that kind of friend, Travis McGee will travel almost anywhere, even New York City. Especially when there s a damsel in distress.

NoirPrivate InvestigatorNew York CityFirst Person Narrator
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A is for Alibi

Sue Grafton · 244 pages

A IS FOR AVENGER. A tough-talking former cop, private investigator Kinsey Millhone has set up a modest detective agency in a quiet corner of Santa Teresa, California. She's a twice-divorced loner with few personal possessions and fewer personal attachments but with a soft spot for underdogs and lost causes. A IS FOR ACCUSED. That's why she draws desperate clients like Nikki Fife. Eight years ag

Private InvestigatorNoirDetective FictionCold Case
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Hardball

Sara Paretsky · 560 pages

Chicago politics—past, present, and future—take center stage in New York Times–bestselling author Sara Paretsky’s brilliant new V. I. Warshawski novel.Chicago’s unique brand of ball is sixteen-inch slow pitch, played in leagues all over the city for more than a century. But in politics, in business, and in law enforcement, the game is hardball.When V. I. Warshawski is asked to find a man who’s bee

Cold CasePrivate InvestigatorDetective FictionMystery
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