Book picks similar to
Thieves' Market by A.I. Bezzerides
crime-noir
crime
crime-fiction
novels
Nineteen Seventy Four
David Peace - 1999
Crime correspondent for the Evening Post. He didn't know it was going to be a season in hell. A dead little girl with a swan's wings stitched to her back. A gypsy camp in a ring of fire. Corruption everywhere you look.In Nineteen Seventy Four, David Peace brings passion and stylistic bravado to this terrifyingly intense journey into a secret history of sexual obsession, greed and sadism.
The Church of Dead Girls
Stephen Dobyns - 1997
The two disciplines collide in The Church of Dead Girls, a lyrical novel that inspired Stephen King to comment, "If ever there was a tale for a moonless night, a high wind and a creaking floor, this is it ... I don't expect to read a more frightening novel this year." Aurelius is a drowsy bedroom community in upstate New York that is rocked by a vicious, seemingly random killing. A woman is found murdered in her bed, her left hand missing. Just when the grisly details begin to fade, a young girl vanishes. The only clue: a bag with the girl's washed and folded clothes and a mannequin's left hand. Soon two more girls disappear, and when clues remain elusive, conjecture and rumour take over. The town awakens to a nightmare of suspicion and vigilantism. As the killer spirals in to kill again, the town spins out of control, and The Church of Dead Girls heads to a jolting conclusion. It'll give you goosebumps even if you read it at the beach.
Fadeout
Joseph Hansen - 1970
When entertainer Fox Olson's car plunges off a bridge in a storm, a death claim is filed, but where is Olson's body? As Brandstetter questions family, fans, and detractors, he grows certain Olson is still alive and that Dave must find him before the would-be killer does. Suspenseful and wry, shrewd and deeply felt, Fadeout remains as fresh today as when it startled readers more than thirty years ago.
L.A. Rex
Will Beall - 2006
As far as everyone in the squad room knows, Ben Halloran is completely fresh to the streets of the 77th Division, a soft kid from the West Side who's decided to become a cop and just happened to draw the hardest neighborhood in L.A. But demons from Ben's complicated past catch up with him-and his tough, oddly principled Daryl Gates-era partner, Miguel Marquez-all too quickly. From the moment Ben and Marquez hit the streets together, they're pulled into a web of ultraviolent corruption and retribution involving hardcore Crip gangbangers and tagalong gangsta-rap gloryhounds, L.A.'s Mexican Mafia, sleazy celebrity defense attorneys, and dirty cops with distinctly self-serving definitions of law enforcement. Ben is forced to choose among father figures and apparent destinies-trying to obey (and discover) his own moral principles as well as his desperate animal instinct simply to stay alive. Author Will Beall is a Los Angeles police officer who has spent almost all of his career on the streets of South Central, much of it in antigang units. The book bristles with the energy and authenticity of his experience. But the true revelation of L.A. Rex is that Will Beall can write - his raw and brilliant, fearless prose simultaneously evokes Richard Price and James Ellroy. The result is an explosive thriller that takes us deep into a city that's further from Hollywood than we can imagine-a city that no other writer has managed to capture with this kind of hard-earned insight and intensity. L.A. Rex is already on its way to the silver screen, and Beall is now at work on his next novel. Articulate cop and hard-nosed writer, Will Beall is perfectly poised to become the next great noir laureate of Los Angeles.
Kiss Me, Judas
Will Christopher Baer - 1998
Red dress, black hair, body like a knife. He takes her back to his room and wakes the next morning in a bathtub full of blood and ice, missing a kidney.Dragging himself from a hospital bed, Phineas discovers he wants to be with Jude like a hunger -- and he wants to find her and kill her. Falling for her is the start of a twisted love story that takes him from the snowy streets of Denver to the high plains of Texas where the boundaries between torturer and victim, killer and accomplice, become nightmarishly distorted.