Book picks similar to
One for Hell by Jada M. Davis


noir
crime
mystery-thriller-crime
mystery-crime

Bluebird, Bluebird


Attica Locke - 2017
    Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders--a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman--have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes--and save himself in the process--before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt. A rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas, Bluebird, Bluebird is an exhilarating, timely novel about the collision of race and justice in America.

The Man Who Came Uptown


George Pelecanos - 2018
    Anna keeps passing Michael books until one day he disappears, suddenly released after a private detective manipulated a witness in Michael's trial. Outside, Michael encounters a Washington, D.C., that has changed a lot during his time locked up. Once shady storefronts are now trendy beer gardens and flower shops. But what hasn't changed is the hard choice between the temptation of crime and doing what's right. Trying to balance his new job, his love of reading, and the debt he owes to the man who got him released, Michael struggles to figure out his place in this new world before he loses control.<Smart and fast-paced, The Man Who Came Uptown brings Washington, D.C. to life in a high-stakes story of tough choices.

Falling Glass


Adrian McKinty - 2011
    His beautiful new wife is pregnant, his upstart airline is undercutting the competition and moving from strength to strength, his diversification into the casino business in Macau has been successful, and his fabulous Art Deco house on an Irish cliff top has just been featured in Architectural Digest. But then, for some reason, his ex-wife Rachel doesn't keep her side of the custody agreement and vanishes off the face of the earth with Richard's two daughters. Richard hires Killian, a formidable ex-enforcer for the IRA, to track her down before Rachel, a recovering drug addict, harms herself or the girls. As Killian follows Rachel's trail, he begins to see that there is a lot more to this case than first meets the eye and that a thirty-year-old secret is going to put all of them in terrible danger.McKinty is at his continent-hopping, well-paced, evocative best in this thriller, moving between his native Ireland and distant cities within a skin-of-his-teeth timeframe.

Bad Boy Boogie


Thomas Pluck - 2017
    With an iron-fisted police chief on his tail and a ruthless mob captain at his throat, he'll need his wits, his fists, and his father's trusty Vietnam war hatchet to hack his way through a toxic jungle of New Jersey corruption that makes the gator-filled swamps of home feel like the shallow end of the kiddie pool.

Strangers on a Train


Patricia Highsmith - 1950
    Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno are passengers on the same train. Haines is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno a mysterious smooth-talker with a sadistic proposal: he’ll murder Haines’s wife if Haines will murder Bruno’s father. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy finds himself trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, ordinary people are capable of extraordinary crimes. The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith’s prolific career, proving her a master at depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday life.

The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter


Malcolm Mackay - 2013
    The telephone rings; a casual conversation, but behind this a job offer. The clues are there if you know to look for them. He is an expert. A loner. Freelance. Another job is another job, but what if this organization wants more?A meeting at a club. An offer. A target: Lewis Winter, a necessary sacrifice that will be only the first step in an all-out war between crime syndicates the likes of which hasn't been seen for decades. It's easy to kill a man. It's hard to kill a man well. People who do it well know this. People who do it badly find out the hard way. The hard way has consequences.

The Killing Pool


Kevin Sampson - 2013
    The slaying carries all the hallmarks of a gangland hit -- a message from the underworld to snitches, cops and rival gangs. One mile away, a Liverpool-Somali girl, Misha, staggers into a run-down bar, dazed and confused. The bar's owner, a career criminal called Shakespeare who dresses like an Edwardian dandy, cannot get a word out of her. Shakespeare, a chivalrous old Trinidadian who has called Liverpool his home since the 70s, is smitten. DCI McCartney is all too well aware that the clock is ticking. The butchered body was one Kalan Rozaki, youngest brother of a notorious Liverpool-Kurdish crime family -- except Kalan is no criminal. For almost a year his brothers have been under full-time Drug Squad surveillance as McCartney slowly closed the net on the Rozakis' intercontinental heroin trafficking organisation. McCartney's key witness and chief informant on the case is someone with intimate insider knowledge of the Rozaki clan's operation... their newly deceased baby brother, Kalan. McCartney's investigation into Kalan's murder peels back layer after layer of a decades-long dynasty of drug smuggling. Each revelation plunges Mac further back into the dark heart of an unsolved drug crime that weighs heavy on his soul. He wants to catch the Rozakis -- badly -- but he wants the shadowy men behind their drug empire even more. The closer McCartney gets to Kalan's killer, the closer he comes to facing down a lifetime's torment -- and facing up to the possibility, finally, of closure. There is one solid gold witness to the killing, Kalan's girlfriend, Misha -- but Misha has vanished. Meanwhile a shipload of unadulterated heroin is sailing ever closer to the Port of Liverpool and Mac's key informant is dead. As dawn breaks on his day of destiny, Mac's priorities have become fatally intertwined: find Kalan's killer, rescue Misha and swoop on the Rozakis -- hopefully elbows-deep in heroin. Then, and only then, can he unmask the demon who has haunted his adult life.

Coyote Songs


Gabino Iglesias - 2018
    A woman offers colonizer blood to the Mother of Chaos. A boy joins corpse destroyers to seek vengeance for the death of his father.These stories intertwine with those of a vengeful spirit and a hungry creature to paint a timely, compelling, pulpy portrait of revenge, family, and hope.

Outsourced


Dave Zeltserman - 2010
    Desperate, and seeing their middle-class lives crumbling apart, they come up with a brilliant plan to use their computing skills to rob a bank. But not even a systems analyst can foresee every eventuality, so the group falls afoul of the Russian Mafia...Movie rights have been sold for Outsourced, and the film will be produced by the team behind the hugely successful Resident Evil films.

Shella


Andrew Vachss - 1993
    For Shella is nothing less than a tour of evil's spawning ground, conducted by one of its natural predators.He is called "Ghost" because he is so nondescript as to be invisible and because he slays with such reflexive ease that he might be one of the dead. Once he traveled with a woman who was called "Shella" -- because those who had treated her as a horrendously ill-used child had tried to make her come out of her shell. Now Shella has vanished in a wilderness of strip clubs and peep shows, and Ghost is looking for her, guided by a killer's instinct and the recognition that can only exist between two people who have been damaged past the point of no return. The result is Andrew Vachss's most compelling work to date, the thriller reimagined as a bleak romance of the damned.

Lethal Injection


Jim Nisbet - 1987
    In a bleak Texas prison Royce, an alcoholic doctor administers Bobby Mencken's last "high," convinced that the convicted killer was innocent. When Royce's marriage crumbles he takes off for Dallas to search for the real killer.Of Nisbet, Germany's Die Welt wrote, "Neither Norman Mailer nor Truman Capote has in their writing been able to produce such an intensity as Nisbet has achieved."With sharp humor and a poet's ear for language, Nisbet's world may be bleak, but it is frighteningly real. Overlook is proud to bring him to a new generation of readers.

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps


Otto Penzler - 2007
    Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.Including:• Three stories by Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dashiell Hammett.• Complete novels from Carroll John Daly, the man who invented the hard-boiled detective, and Fredrick Nebel, one of the masters of the form.• A never before published Dashiell Hammett story.• Every other major pulp writer of the time, including Paul Cain, Steve Fisher, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and many, many more of whom you’ve probably never heard.• Three deadly sections–The Crimefighters, The Villains, and Dames–with three unstoppable introductions by Harlan Coben, Harlan Ellison, and Laura LippmanFeaturing:• Plenty of reasons for murder, all of them good.• A kid so smart–he’ll die of it.• A soft-hearted loan shark’s legman learning–the hard way–never to buy a strange blonde a hamburger.• The uncanny “Moon Man” and his mad-money victims.

Fatale


Jean-Patrick Manchette - 1977
    Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different interests against each other the better, as always, to make a killing. But then something snaps: the master manipulator falls prey to a pure and wayward passion.Aimée has become the avenging angel of her own nihilism, exacting the destruction of a whole society of destroyers. An unholy original, Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the modern detective novel into a weapon of gleeful satire and anarchic fun. In Fatale he mixes equal measures of farce, mayhem, and madness to prepare a rare literary cocktail that packs a devastating punch.

The Glass Key


Dashiell Hammett - 1931
    Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett's tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.

Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled


David CranmerAmy Grech - 2011
    This collection includes thirteen lean and mean stories from the fingertips of Garnett Elliott, Glenn Gray, John Hornor Jacobs, Patricia Abbott, Thomas Pluck, Brad Green, Ron Earl Phillips, Kent Gowran, Amy Grech, Benoit Lelievre, Kieran Shea, David Cranmer, and Wayne D. Dundee and a boiled down look at hardboiled fiction in an introduction by Ron Scheer. Edited by David Cranmer and Scott D. Parker.