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🧲 Books like this

The Elephant Tree

R.D. Ronald · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

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"--

Substance AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistCrimeDark
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Hell to Pay

George P. Pelecanos · 368 pages

Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, the team of private investigators who made their stunning debut in Right As Rain, are hired to find a 14-year-old white girl from the suburbs who's run away from home and is now working as a prostitute. The two ex-cops think they know D.C.'s dangers, but nothing in their experience has prepared them for Worldwide Wilson, the pimp whose territory they're intruding upo

Working-Class ProtagonistCrimeSubstance AbuseDark
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Section 8

K'wan

Working-Class ProtagonistCrimeSubstance AbuseViolent
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White Lines

Tracy Brown · 512 pages

Fleeing her home to escape the abuse of her mother's boyfriend, Jada seeks refuge with Born, the neighborhood kingpin, but her new life is threatened by crack addiction, prostitution, a struggle to rebuild her life, and a stormy romance with a street hustler.

Substance AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistCrimeDark
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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

Working-Class ProtagonistCrimeSubstance AbuseDark
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Clockers

Richard Price · 624 pages

Substance AbuseCrimeWorking-Class ProtagonistDark
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A Child of a Crackhead

Shameek Speight

Substance AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistCrimeDark
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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

Working-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseCrimeDark
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Prince of Thieves

Chuck Hogan · 400 pages

Claire Keesey finds herself attracted to two men--Doug MacRay, the leader of a crew of criminals and bank robbers, and FBI agent Adam Frawley--but her relationships are complicated by Frawley's plans to eliminate Boston's criminal element.

Working-Class ProtagonistCrimeViolentDark
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The Glorious Heresies

Lisa McInerney · 378 pages

One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions,

Substance AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistCrimeDark
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Substance AbuseCrimeDarkViolent
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Riding Dirty on I-95

Nikki Turner · 320 pages

Queen of hip hop fiction Nikki Turner follows her gritty, emotionally charged novel The Glamorous Life with this new tale from the hood featuring a beautiful down-on-her-luck sister who can out-hustle the best of them as she rises from the ghetto to glory. After Mercy's beloved dad is murdered in cold blood on her seventh birthday, her mother gives her up to foster care. But despite an unsavory up

Working-Class ProtagonistCrimeSubstance AbuseViolent
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The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

Charlie Huston · 319 pages

With a style that is razor sharp, an eye that never shies from the gritty details, and a taste for stories that simultaneously shock, disturb, and entertain, Charlie Huston is one of a kind. And The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death is the type of story--swift, twisted, hilarious, somehow hopeful--that only he could dream up.The fact is, whether it's a dog hit by a train or an old lady who

CrimeWorking-Class ProtagonistDarkViolent
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Easy Money

Jens Lapidus

Substance AbuseCrimeDarkViolent
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No Beast So Fierce

Edward Bunker · 301 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistCrimeSubstance AbuseViolent
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City on Fire

Don Winslow · 384 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistCrimeDarkViolent
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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

CrimeWorking-Class ProtagonistViolentDark
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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

CrimeSubstance AbuseViolentDark
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Whoreson

Donald Goines · 319 pages

Whoreson Jones, the novel's hero, is the son of a beautiful black prostitute and an unknown white john. By the age of sixteen, he is a full-fledged pimp, cold-blooded and ruthless.

Working-Class ProtagonistCrimeSubstance AbuseDark
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Long Bright River

Liz Moore · 473 pages

A female cop begins to fear for her addicted sister. A serial murder is targeting homeless female prostitutes. Can Mickey find her sister before the killer does ?

Substance AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistCrimeDark
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Banana Fish, Vol. 1

Akimi Yoshida · 196 pages

CrimeSubstance AbuseDarkViolent
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The Ice Harvest

Scott Phillips · 217 pages

On Christmas Eve [in Wichita], a mob lawyer is skipping town with the cash. But in this boozy, neo-noir world–James M. Cain meets George V. Higgins–the best-laid plans of bagmen turn brutal.” –The Dallas Morning News

CrimeSubstance AbuseDarkViolent
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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

Working-Class ProtagonistCrimeSubstance AbuseViolent
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The Son

Jo Nesbo · 401 pages

This novel is set amid Oslo's hierarchy of corruption, from which one very unusual young man is about to propel himself into a mission of brutal revenge. Sonny Lofthus, in his early thirties, has been in prison for the last dozen years: serving time for crimes he didn't commit. In exchange, he gets an uninterrupted supply of heroin, and the unexpected stream of fellow prisoners seeking out his unc

CrimeSubstance AbuseDarkViolent

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