Book picks similar to
Road to Perdition by Max Allan Collins
fiction
thriller
crime
drama
The Flanders Panel
Arturo Pérez-Reverte - 1990
Translation: Who killed the knight? Breaking the silence of five centuries, Julia's hunt for a Renaissance murderer leads her into a modern-day game of sin, betrayal, and death.
Green River Killer: A True Detective Story
Jeff Jensen - 2011
After twenty years, when the killer was finally captured with the help of DNA technology, Jensen and fellow detectives spent 188 days interviewing Gary Ridgway in an effort to learn his most closely held secrets--an epic confrontation with evil that proved as disturbing and surreal as can be imagined. Written by Jensen's own son, acclaimed entertainment journalist Jeff Jensen, Green River Killer: A True Detective Story is bound to become a well-recognized member of the crime-genre graphic novel family, including titles like Darwyn Cooke’s The Hunter and Alan Moore’s From Hell.
Whiteout
Greg Rucka - 1998
Cold, desolate, nothing but ice and snow for miles and miles. Carrie Stetko is a U.S. Marshal, and she's made The Ice her home. In its vastness, she has found a place where she can forget her troubled past and feel at peace... Until someone commits a murder in her jurisdiction and that peace is shattered. The murderer is one of five men scattered across the continent, and he has more reason to hide than just the slaying. Several ice samples were taken from the area around the body, and the depth of the drilling signifies something particular was removed. Enter Lily Sharpe, who wants to know what was so important another man's life had to be taken for it. But are either of the women prepared for the secrets and betrayals at the core of the situation?
Tokyo Year Zero
David Peace - 2007
More murders will soon be uncovered: women killed in the same way, and, it becomes clear, by the same hand.Narrated by the irreverent, despairing yet determined Detective Minami of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, Tokyo Year Zero tells a fictionalized story of the real-life hunt for “the Japanese Bluebeard”—a decorated Imperial soldier who raped and murdered at least ten women amid the bleak turmoil of post-war Japan (“one huge sea of displaced persons . . . one minute here and one minute gone”). And it is the story of Detective Minami: chasing down, and haunted by, memories of atrocities that he can no longer explain or forgive.
The Power of the Dog
Don Winslow - 2005
This novel of the drug trade takes you deep inside a world riddled with corruption, betrayal, and bloody revenge. Art Montana is an obsessive DEA agent. The Barrera brothers are heirs to a drug empire. Nora Hayden is a jaded teenager who becomes a high-class hooker. Father Parada is a powerful and incorruptible Catholic priest. Callan is an Irish kid from Hell’s Kitchen who grows up to be a merciless hitman. And they are all trapped in the world of the Mexican drug Federaci. From the streets of New York City to Mexico City and Tijuana to the jungles of Central America, this is the war on drugs like you’ve never seen it.
V for Vendetta
Steve Moore - 1989
Imagine a Britain stripped of democracy, a world of the not-too-distant future, in which freedom was not lost but surrendered willingly to a totalitarian regime that rose to power by exploiting the people's worst fears and most damning weaknesses. This is the setting for the parable of Evey, a young woman saved from death by a masked man calling himself V. Beguiling and dangerous, V ignites the fuse of revolution when he urges his fellow citizens to shed the blanket of tyranny and oppression they have permitted themselves to be cloaked in. While those in power take steps to neutralize the threat, police pursue the mystery of V, unaware of the terrible truth that awaits them. But it is Evey who, with V as her enigmatic guide, sets out on the painful path of deception and self-discovery, deconstruction and re-creation, vindication and vengeance.
The Double Eagle
James Twining - 2005
. .Only a handful still exist, each one worth millions . . .Now they have vanished from an impenetrable fortress . . .and the killings have begun.Somehow, impossibly, someone has invaded Fort Knox and stolen five of the world's last remaining Double Eagles -- the $20 gold coin ordered destroyed by President Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Now, one has resurfaced during an autopsy in France -- in the stomach of a murdered priest.Disgraced FBI agent Jennifer Browne needs to recover the priceless coins to resuscitate her stalled career -- and her investigation is pointing her toward Tom Kirk, a brilliant international art thief who wants to get out of the game. But Kirk's only chance for freedom -- and survival -- is to find the missing coins, joining Browne, an unlikely ally, on a breakneck race across the globe and into the lethal heart of a shocking conspiracy of greed and power . . . and death.
The Tailor of Panama
John le Carré - 1996
And seldom has the hidden eye of British Intelligence selected such an unlikely champion as Harry Pendel—a charmer, a dreamer, an evader, a fabulist and presiding genius of the house of Pendel & Braithwaite Co. Limitada, Tailors to Royalty, formerly of London and presently of Panama City.Yet there is a logic to the spies' choice. Everybody who is anybody in Central America passes through Pendel's doors. He dresses politicos and crooks and conmen. His fitting room hears more confidences than a priest's confessional. And when Harry Pendel doesn't hear things as such—well, he hears them anyway, by other means.For what is a tailor for, if not to disduise reality with appearance? What is truth if not the plaything of the artist? And what are spies and politicians and journalists if not themselves selectors and manipulators of the truth for their own ends?In a thrilling, hilarious novel, le Carré has provided us with a satire about the fate of truth in modern times. Once again, he has effortlessly expanded the borders of the spy story to bring us a magnificent entertainment straight out of the pages of tomorrow's history.JOHN LE CARRÉ was born in 1931. After attending the universities of Bern and Oxford, he taught at Eton and spent five years in the British Foreign Service. His third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was solidified by the acclaim for his trilogy, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. His mostly autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy, wa followed by The Russia House, The Night Manager and Our Game. The Tailor of Panama is his sixteenth novel.John le Carré lives in Cornwall, England.
The Last Call
George Wier - 2011
She has taken a North Texas quarter horse racer and liquor baron named Archie Carpin--the last of a dynasty of criminals from the 1920's--for a ride and cleaned him out of a neat two million bucks. And thus begins the adventure of Bill’s life.Ensues a chase north across Texas to recover the money and shake the pursuit of a couple of rednecks with a penchant for rifles and rigged explosives. Yet, through all this action the compelling tale of yet another mystery—an 80-year old missing person’s case—begins to unravel.
The Dante Club
Matthew Pearl - 2003
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields—are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante's remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor.The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret.Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and an outcast police officer named Nicholas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, must place their careers on the line to end the terror. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer to home than they ever could have imagined.The Dante Club is a magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dante's continued grip on our imagination, and a captivating thriller that will surprise readers from beginning to end.
The Long Drop
Denise Mina - 2017
Peter Manuel has been found guilty of a string of murders and is waiting to die by hanging. But every good crime story has a beginning. Manuel's starts with the murder of William Watt's family. Looking no further that Watt himself, the police are convinced he's guilty. Desperate to clear his name, Watt turns to Manuel, a career criminal who claims to have information that will finger the real killer. As Watt seeks justice with the cagey Manuel's help, everyone the pair meets has blood on their hands as they sell their version of the truth. The Long Drop is an explosive novel about guilt, innocence and the power of a good story to hide the difference.
Absent in the Spring
Mary Westmacott - 1944
This sudden solitude compels Joan to assess her life for the first time ever and face up to many of the truths about herself. Looking back over the years, Joan painfully re-examines her attitudes, relationships and actions and becomes increasingly uneasy about the person who is revealed to her.
Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter
Darwyn Cooke - 2009
Betrayed by the woman he loved and double-crossed by his partner in crime, Parker makes his way cross-country with only one thought burning in his mind - to coldly exact his revenge and reclaim what was taken from him! Richard (Donald Westlake) Stark's groundbreaking Parker books are adapted for the first time as a series of graphic novels by Darwyn Cooke. The initial graphic novel brings to life the first Parker book, The Hunter, which introduces readers to the dangerous anti-hero's cold and calculated world of criminals, thugs, and grifters.
Harriet
Elizabeth Jenkins - 1934
Elizabeth Jenkins's artistry, however, transforms the bare facts of this case from the annals of Victorian England's Old Bailey into an absolutely spine-chilling exploration of the depths of human depravity.
Norwegian by Night
Derek B. Miller - 2012
An ex-Marine, he talks often to the ghosts of his past - the friends he lost in the Pacific and the son who followed him into the US Army, and to his death in Vietnam.When Sheldon witnesses the murder of a woman in his apartment complex, he rescues her six-year-old son and decides to run. Pursued by both the Balkan gang responsible for the murder, and the Norwegian police, he has to rely on training from over half a century before to try and keep the boy safe. Against a strange and foreign landscape, this unlikely couple, who can't speak the same language, start to form a bond that may just save them both.An extraordinary debut, featuring a memorable hero, Norwegian by Night is the last adventure of a man still trying to come to terms with the tragedies of his life. Compelling and sophisticated, it is both a chase through the woods thriller and an emotionally haunting novel about ageing and regret.