AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

No Beast So Fierce

Edward Bunker · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

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

NoirWorking-Class ProtagonistAnti-HeroBleak
❤️

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-HeroCrimeBleak
❤️

Where All Light Tends to Go

David Joy · 289 pages

"Set in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely is torn between appeasing his meth-dealing kingpin father and leaving the mountains forever with the girl he loves"--

NoirBleakWorking-Class ProtagonistCrime
❤️

The Black Dahlia

James Ellroy · 364 pages

The Black Dahlia is a roman noir on an epic scale: a classic period piece that provides a startling conclusion to America's most infamous unsolved murder mystery--the murder of the beautiful young woman known as The Black Dahlia.

Anti-HeroBleakNoirCrime
❤️

Flood

Andrew Vachss · 341 pages

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeWorking-Class Protagonist
❤️

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

NoirCrimeBleakWorking-Class Protagonist
❤️

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.

Anti-HeroNoirHeistCrime
❤️

Breakout

Richard Stark · 309 pages

Parker's back in jail, but not just any old jail; it's the correctional center, where people without bail wait before and during their trial. So Parker's first order of business is to build a network among these cons and break on through to the other side.

Anti-HeroNoirCrimeHeist
❤️

Galveston

Nic Pizzolatto · 272 pages

After being diagnosed with lung cancer, Roy Cady kills the men hired by his loan shark boss to kill him, and flees to Galveston, Texas with a prostitute and her young sister, where they face more problems.

NoirCrimeAnti-HeroBleak
❤️

The Getaway

Jim Thompson · 179 pages

Doc McCoy knows everything there is to know about pulling off the perfect bank job. But there are some things he has forgotten--such as a partner who is not only treacherous but insane and a wife who is still an amateur. Worst of all, McCoy has forgotten that when the crime is big and bloody enough, there is no such thing as a clean getaway.

Anti-HeroHeistNoirCrime
❤️

Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit

Darwyn Cooke, Richard Stark · 152 pages

Using a Nebraska plastic surgeon to create a new face, Parker, a master thief, plots revenge on the Outfit, an organization that is trying to kill him, as he sets up robberies in Outfit territory and waits for a confrontation with the head boss.

Anti-HeroNoirCrimeHeist
❤️

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

NoirCrimeAnti-HeroWorking-Class Protagonist
❤️

Dark Places

Gillian Flynn · 349 pages

Libby Day tinha apenas sete anos quando testemunhou o brutal assassinato da mãe e das duas irmãs na fazenda da família. O acusado do crime foi seu irmão mais velho, que acabou condenado à prisão perpétua. Desde aquele dia, Libby passou a viver sem rumo. Uma vida paralisada no tempo, sem amigos, família ou trabalho. Mas, vinte e quatro anos depois, quando é procurada por um grupo de pessoas conv

BleakCrimeWorking-Class ProtagonistAnti-Hero
❤️

Flashfire

Richard Stark, Terry Teachout · 303 pages

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeHeist
❤️

No Dominion

Charlie Huston · 272 pages

Joe Pitt's life sucks. He hasn't had a case or a job in God knows how long and his stashes are running on empty. What stashes? The only ones that count to a guy like Joe: blood and money. The money he uses to buy blood; the blood he drinks. Hey, buddy, it's that or your neck--you want to choose? The only way to lay his hands on both is to take a gig with the local Vampyre Clan. See, something new

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFirst Person Narrator
❤️

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-HeroNoirHeistCrime
❤️

Black Wings Has My Angel

Elliott Chaze · 208 pages

"Gold Medal books weren't books that won literary awards, or any kind of awards at all. But during the 1950s Gold Medal put out some of the best writers America had to offer, writers like Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, and David Goodis, who not only peered into the bleakest reaches of the psyche, but did it with blood-tinged glee. And while many of the Gold Medal pulps have since become acknowledged

HeistAnti-HeroNoirCrime
❤️

Richard Stark's Parker: Slayground

Darwyn Cooke · 96 pages

Parker is put to the test against crooked cops and sleazy gangsters after a heist goes south. He finds himself trapped in an amusement park closed for the winter and embroiled in a deadly game of cat and mouse...a game that slowly starts to favor the mouse.

NoirAnti-HeroHeistCrime
❤️

The Death of Sweet Mister

Daniel Woodrell · 208 pages

"Shuggie Akins is a lonely fat boy of thirteen. His mother, Glenda, teases him with her sexual provocations. His father, Red, is a brutal man with a short fuse who mocks and despises his son. Into this mix comes Jimmy Vin Pearce with his shiny green T-bird and his smart city clothes. It isn't long before he and Glenda begin a torrid affair. What follows is violent, shocking, and totally unpredicta

NoirBleakWorking-Class ProtagonistCrime
❤️

Criminal: The Deluxe Edition, Vol. 1

Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips · 432 pages

NoirHeistCrimeAnti-Hero
🙂

Pretty Boy Floyd

Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana · 446 pages

The time is 1925. The place, St. Louis, Missouri. Charley Floyd, a good-looking, sweet-smiling country boy from Oklahoma working as a baker's helper at the Kroger Bakery, has just taken the big step that will make him, very shortly, a legend in his own lifetime: he has just robbed his first armored car. Charley is an irresistible invention, as American as Huck Finn, a young man so charming that i

Anti-HeroHeistWorking-Class ProtagonistCrime
🙂

Layer Cake

J.J. Connolly, John M. Connolly

NoirAnti-HeroCrimeFirst Person Narrator
🙂

She Who Waits

Daniel Polansky · 407 pages

Low Town: the worst ghetto in the worst city in the Thirteen Lands. Good only for depravity and death. And Warden, long ago a respected agent in the formidable Black House, is now the most depraved Low Town denizen of them all. As a younger man, Warden carried out more than his fair share of terrible deeds, and never as many as when he worked for the Black House. But Warden's growing older, and th

Anti-HeroNoirCrimeFirst Person Narrator
🙂

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess · 188 pages

A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian satirical black comedy novel by English writer Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. It is set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence. The teenage protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him. The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Na

Anti-HeroBleakCrimeFirst Person Narrator

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.