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The Pledge

Friedrich Durrenmatt, Clara Winston · 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

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Cop Hater

Ed McBain

Sparse ProseDetective FictionSerial KillerCrime
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The House of Silk

Anthony Horowitz · 312 pages

For the first time in its one-hundred-and-twenty-five-year history, the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate has authorized a new Sherlock Holmes novel. Once again, THE GAME’S AFOOT… London, 1890. 221B Baker St. A fine art dealer named Edmund Carstairs visits Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson to beg for their help. He is being menaced by a strange man in a flat cap – a wanted criminal who seems to have fo

Frame StoryKids in DangerDetective FictionCrime
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Watchmen

Alan Moore · 416 pages

"This book examines each of the series' twelve issues in unprecedented detail, moving page by page and panel by panel to reveal the hidden foundations of this milestone in modern storytelling. Edited with notes by Leslie S. Klinger, this new edition draws upon critical and scholastic commentary, in-depth interviews with Dave Gibbons, and previously unseen original source material. Klinger provides

Frame StoryBleakCrimeDetective Fiction
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Gorky Park

Martin Cruz Smith · 384 pages

A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI and New York police as he pursues a rich, ruthless, and well-connected American fu

Detective FictionBleakCrimeSerial Killer
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The Laughing Policeman

Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo · 240 pages

Sparse ProseDetective FictionCrimeSerial Killer
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Cold Granite

Stuart MacBride · 458 pages

The debut thriller from a bright new Scottish talent set to rival Ian Rankin.It's DS Logan McRae's first day back on the job after a year off on the sick, and it couldn't get much worse. Four-year-old David Reid's body is discovered in a ditch, strangled, mutilated and a long time dead. There's a killer stalking the Granite City and the local media are baying for blood.If that wasn't enough, Logan

Kids in DangerDetective FictionSerial KillerCrime
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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

Detective FictionBleakSerial KillerCrime
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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.

Sparse ProseBleakSerial KillerCrime
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On Beulah Height

Reginald Hill · 440 pages

Kids in DangerDetective FictionCrimeMystery
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The Dark Winter

David Mark

Detective FictionBleakSerial KillerCrime
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Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 186 pages

Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

Frame StorySparse ProseBleakLiterary Fiction
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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.

BleakDetective FictionSerial KillerCrime
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Smaller and Smaller Circles

F.H. Batacan · 360 pages

"In northeast Manila's Quezon City is a district called Payatas--a 50-acre dump that is home to thousands of people who live off of what they can scavenge there. It is one of the poorest neighborhoods in a city whose law enforcement is already stretched thin, devoid of forensic resources and rife with corruption. So when the eviscerated bodies of teenage boys begin to appear in the dump heaps, the

Kids in DangerDetective FictionCrimeSerial Killer
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Knots and Crosses

Ian Rankin · 248 pages

Edinburgh policeman, John Rebus, must solve murders involving seeming crank letters. He is not the only officer workering the case, but the only one who has all the pieces to resolve it.

BleakDetective FictionSerial KillerCrime
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The Stranger

Albert Camus · 124 pages

The Stranger is a 1942 novella by French author Albert Camus. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of Camus' philosophy, absurdism coupled with existentialism, though Camus personally rejected the latter label. The title character is Meursault, an indifferent French settler in Algeria described as "a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa, a man of the Mediterranean, an homme

BleakSparse ProseNovellaCrime
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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

Sparse ProseDetective FictionBleakCrime
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To Live

Yu Hua · 250 pages

An award-winning, internationally acclaimed Chinese bestseller, originally banned in China but recently named one of the last decade's ten most influential books there," "To Live tells the epic story of one man's transformation from the spoiled son of a rich landlord to an honorable and kindhearted peasant. After squandering his family's fortune in gambling dens and brothels, the young, deeply pen

Frame StoryBleakSparse ProseLiterary Fiction
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Night Train

Martin Amis · 175 pages

Detective Mike Hoolihan has seen it all. A fifteen-year veteran of the force, she's gone from walking a beat, to robbery, to homicide. But one case - this case - has gotten under her skin. When Jennifer Rockwell, darling of the community and daughter of a respected career cop - now top brass - takes her own life, no one is prepared to believe it. Especially her father, Colonel Tom. Homicide Det

BleakSparse ProseCrimeDetective Fiction
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Roadside Picnic

Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky · 160 pages

[Comment by Hari Kunru in The Guardian][1]: > Soviet-era Russian science fiction deserves a wider audience in English. The Strugatsky brothers collaborated on numerous novels and stories, the best known of which is this, partly because it was filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, in 1977. The novel takes place 10 years after a mysterious alien visitation, which seems to have no rational explan

Sparse ProseBleakNovellaLiterary Fiction
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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

BleakSparse ProseSerial KillerCrime
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The Child Taker

Conrad Jones

Kids in DangerDetective FictionSerial KillerCrime
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The Adventures of Sam Spade and Other Stories

Dashiell Hammett · 189 pages

Sparse ProseDetective FictionCrimeMystery
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The Snowman

Jo Nesbo · 550 pages

"In Oslo, after the first snow of the season has fallen, a woman disappears, and a sinister snowman is left in her wake. As irascible detective Harry Hole realizes that this is only one of multiple disappearances, he begins to think a serial killer may be at work--and may be drawing in Hole personally and intentionally"--

BleakDetective FictionCrimeMystery
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A Man's Head

Georges Simenon · 170 pages

Maigret sets out to prove the innocence of a man condemned to death for a brutal murder. As his audacious plan to uncover the truth unfolds, he encounters rich American expatriates, some truly dangerous characters and their hidden motives.

Sparse ProseDetective FictionCrimeMystery

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