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The First Quarry

Max Allan Collins · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Maybe

John Locke · 252 pages

AssassinsAnti-HeroCrimeFast-Paced
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A Man Named Doll

Jonathan Ames · 224 pages

NoirCrimeAnti-HeroFast-Paced
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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.

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFast-Paced
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Every Last Drop

Charlie Huston · 252 pages

"[Charlie Huston's] action scenes are unparalleled in crime fiction and his dialogue is so hip and dead-on that Elmore Leonard should be getting nervous."--Publishers Weekly (starred review), on Half the Blood of BrooklynIt's like this: a series of bullet-riddled bad breaks has seen rogue Vampyre and terminal tough guy Joe Pitt go from PI for hire to Clan-connected enforcer to dead man walking in

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFast-Paced
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Beautiful, Naked & Dead

Josh Stallings · 277 pages

Beautiful, Naked and Dead is a hard-boiled crime novel. Moses McGuire a suicidal strip club bouncer is out to avenge the death of one of his girls. From his East L.A. home, through the legal brothels of Nevada and finally to a battle with the mob in the mountains above Palo Alto, it is a sex soaked, rage driven, road trip from hell.

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFast-Paced
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Daddy Cool

Donald Goines · 223 pages

Larry Jackson, better known as Daddy Cool, is a ruthlessly efficient black hit man, equally effective with a gun or a knife in nailing his prey. The only thing that can melt his icy heart is his love for his teenage daughter Janet. But when the smooth talking youngblood pimp Ronald lures her into his stable, Daddy Cool must go into action with a fearsome vengeance.

AssassinsNoirAnti-HeroCrime
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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.

NoirCrimeAnti-HeroFast-Paced
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Layer Cake

J.J. Connolly, John M. Connolly

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFast-Paced
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The Mourner

Richard Stark, John Banville · 160 pages

The fourth Parker novel has the main character coming up against the KGB while on the trail of a small statue stolen from a fifteenth-century French tomb.

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFast-Paced
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The Outfit

Richard Stark · 157 pages

You probably haven't ever noticed them. But they've noticed you. They notice everything. That's their job. Sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making note of the tellers' work habits, the positions of the security guards. Lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds. Surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the racetrack. They'r

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFast-Paced
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The Redbreast

Jo Nesbo · 519 pages

NoirAnti-HeroAssassinsCrime
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Flashfire

Richard Stark, Terry Teachout · 303 pages

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFast-Paced
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Mask Market

Andrew Vachss · 241 pages

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeViolent
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The Hard Goodbye

Frank Miller · 199 pages

This volume was published as an original graphic novel in October 1997 (vol. 5). This volume collects Sin City stories originally published from 1994 to 1998 in The babe wore red and other stories; San Diego comic-con comics #4; Silent night; A decade of Dark Horse #1; Lost, lonely, & lethal; Sex & violence; and Just another Saturday night (vol. 6). This volume collects issues one through ni

NoirCrimeAnti-HeroViolent
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No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy · 320 pages

In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of his famed *Border Trilogy.* The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in th

NoirAssassinsCrimeFast-Paced
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The Name of The Game Is Death

Dan J. Marlowe · 137 pages

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFast-Paced
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Hitman, Vol. 2: 10,000 Bullets

Garth Ennis · 143 pages

AssassinsAnti-HeroCrimeFast-Paced
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Cross

Ken Bruen · 288 pages

A boy has been crucified in Galway city. People are shocked; the broadsheets debate what this says about the state of the nation; the Irish Church is scandalised. No further action is taken. When the sister of the murdered boy is burned alive, PI Jack Taylor decides to take matters into his own hands. Taylor’s investigations lead him to some old city haunts where he encounters ghosts – living and

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFirst 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

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFirst Person Narrator
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The Sour Lemon Score

Richard Stark, Donald E. Westlake · 160 pages

After a four-way split following a job, George Uhl begins to pick off his fellow hoisters, one by one. His first mistake? He doesn't begin things by putting a bullet into Parker.

Anti-HeroNoirCrimeFast-Paced
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A Hell of a Woman

Jim Thompson · 288 pages

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFirst Person Narrator
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Driven

James Sallis · 147 pages

Driver thinks he has settled into a normal life, but after his fiance e is killed he must confront his criminal past.

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeViolent
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Wild Justice

Kelley Armstrong · 381 pages

Protect the innocent. If there is any one principle that drives hitwoman Nadia Stafford it's this. When she was 13 she failed to protect her older cousin Amy from being raped and murdered. As Wild Justice opens, she fails again, disastrously, when she botches a hit on a man who's been beating his wife. Before she's had a chance to fix things, the wife is murdered and Nadia plunges into despair. To

AssassinsAnti-HeroCrimeFast-Paced
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Otherwise Alone

Shay Savage · 88 pages

Lieutenant Evan Arden sits in a shack in the middle of nowhere, waiting for orders that will send him back home - if he ever gets them. Other than his loyal Great Pyrenees, there's no one around to break up the monotony. The tedium is excruciating, but it is suddenly interrupted when a young woman stumbles up his path. He has two choices - pick her off from a distance with his trusty sniper-rif

AssassinsAnti-HeroCrimeFirst Person Narrator
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