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🧲 Books like this

Down by the River : Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family

Charles Bowden · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency

Ioan Grillo · 321 pages

"The world has watched stunned at the bloodshed in Mexico. Forty thousand murdered since 2006; police chiefs shot within hours of taking office; mass graves comparable to those of civil wars; car bombs shattering storefronts; headless corpses heaped in town squares. And it is all because a few Americans are getting high. Or is it? The United States throws Black Hawk helicopters, DEA assistance, an

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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Snowing in Bali

Kathryn Bonella · 400 pages

Investigative JournalismTrue CrimeOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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At the Devil's Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel

William C. Rempel · 357 pages

Traces the collaborative effort between two U.S. agents and a security chief for a notorious Colombian drug cartel to dismantle the organization and bring its leaders to justice, a life-risking venture marked by a race to protect the life of a key witness.

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

Mark Bowden · 384 pages

Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw is a book by Mark Bowden that details the efforts by the governments of the United States and Colombia, their respective military and intelligence forces, and Los Pepes to stop illegal activities committed by Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and his subordinates. It relates how Escobar was killed and his cartel dismantled. Bowden originally

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice

Kevin Cullen, Shelley Murphy · 503 pages

Chronicles the criminal career of the gangster who provided a protection racket against drug lords, ran illegal gambling, robbed banks, and served as an informant for the FBI until going into hiding for sixteen years. Raised in a South Boston housing project, James "Whitey" Bulger became the most wanted fugitive of his generation. In this story the authors follow his criminal career from teenage

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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Black Friday: The True Story Of The Bombay Bomb Blasts

S. Hussain Zaidi · 295 pages

Explores the events following the March 2, 1993, bombings that ripped through Mumbai, India, offering a cinematic study on just how such a tragedy can change a city. A policeman, determined to apprehend the culprits responsible for a continuing series of bombings, discovers a powerful businessman has been shifting funds in the Mumbai underworld in order to finance the bombings.

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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Black Mass

Dick Lehr, Gerard O'Neill · 400 pages

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34

Bryan Burrough · 624 pages

In Public Enemies, bestselling author Bryan Burrough strips away the thick layer of myths put out by J. Edgar Hoovers FBI to tell the full storyfor the first timeof the most spectacular crime wave in American history, the two-year battle between the young Hoover and the assortment of criminals who became national icons: John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty

True CrimeOrganized CrimeInvestigative JournalismNonfiction
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McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld

Misha Glenny · 387 pages

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the deregulation of international financial markets in 1989, governments and entrepreneurs alike became intoxicated by dreams of newly opened markets. But no one could have foreseen that the greatest success story to arise from these events would be the worldwide rise of organized crime. Today, it is estimated that illegal tra

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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The Daughters of Juárez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border

Teresa Rodriguez, Diana Montane, Lisa Pulitzer · 316 pages

For more than twelve years the Mexican border city of Juárez has been the center of an epidemic of horrific crimes against women and girls: kidnappings, rape, mutilation, and murder, with most of the victims conforming to a specific profile--young, slender, and poor. Speculation that the killer or killers are American citizens has led the U.S. government to send in criminal profilers from the FBI

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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ZeroZeroZero

Roberto Saviano · 455 pages

A truly harrowing and groundbreaking synthesis of intimate literary narrative and geopolitical analysis of one of the most powerful dark forces in our economy. Saviano tracks the shift in the cocaine trade's axis of power, from Colombia to Mexico, and relates how the Latin American cartels and gangs have forged alliances, first with the Italian crime syndicates, then with the Russians, Africans, a

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan

Jake Adelstein · 335 pages

From the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police press club: a unique, firsthand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up. At nineteen, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of peace and tranquility. What he got was a life of crime . . . crime reporting, that is, at the prestigious Yomiuri Shinbun. For twelve years of eighty-

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime - from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door

Brian Krebs · 256 pages

Explores "the criminal masterminds driving some of the biggest spam and hacker operations targeting Americans and their bank accounts. Tracing the rise, fall, and alarming resurrection of the digital mafia behind the two largest spam pharmacies--and countless viruses, phishing, and spyware attacks--he delivers the first definitive narrative of the global spam problem and its threat to consumers ev

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob

T.J. English · 416 pages

Published in the UK for the first time in 2008.

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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The Valachi Papers

Peter Maas · 304 pages

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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The Outfit

Gus Russo · 550 pages

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismOrganized CrimeNonfiction
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The Bluegrass Conspiracy

Sally Denton · 410 pages

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismNonfictionSubstance Abuse
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American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic

John Temple · 309 pages

The king of the pill mills was American Pain, a mega-clinic that served as a prototype for the rest. From a pristine former bank building, doctors distributed massive quantities of oxycodone to hundreds of customers a day, mostly traffickers and addicts who came by the vanload. Inked muscle-heads ran security, greeting the morning rush of pill poppers with cries of Welcome to the dope hole! Stripp

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismNonfictionSubstance Abuse
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Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

John Dickie · 483 pages

From the mafia's origins in the 1860s to its current tense relationship with the Berlusconi government, this is a vivid and gripping history of the Sicilian Mafia's inner sanctum.

True CrimeOrganized CrimeInvestigative JournalismNonfiction
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American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

Nick Bilton · 333 pages

In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye. It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismNonfictionSubstance Abuse
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