Books like Brighton Rock
Pinkie, a teenage gangster in 1930s Brighton, kills a man and marries Rose, a young waitress, to keep her from testifying, while a cheerful woman named Ida sets out to see justice done.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Brighton Rock
Red Harvest
A detective arrives in a mining town controlled by warring gangs and plays them against each other, leaving a trail of bodies that adds up to something like justice.
The Given Day
An Irish cop torn between his family and his union and a Black man on the run from Tulsa meet in Boston in 1919, as anarchist bombs go off and the police head towards a strike.
Layer Cake
A polite London cocaine wholesaler wants one more job before he retires, and the London of ecstasy importers, dirty cops, and old East End families has not read his retirement memo.
The Third Man
A writer of cheap westerns arrives in postwar Vienna to find his old friend Harry Lime dead, and a British police officer shows him what Lime was really selling.
The Winter of Frankie Machine
A retired San Diego hitman with a bait shop and a mortgage discovers that someone in the mob he left is trying to have him killed, and has to walk backwards through his career to figure out who.
Farewell, My Lovely
A detective searches for a missing ex-con in 1940s L.A. and finds a world of fake identities, wealthy psychopaths, and the city's rotten underside.
The Power and the Glory
A whiskey priest on the run from anti-clerical authorities in 1930s Mexico becomes an unlikely saint, too flawed and human to be a martyr but too stubborn to stop.
The Broken Shore
Joe Cashin, a Melbourne homicide detective recovering from injuries, takes a posting back in his home town on the south-west coast of Victoria, and a rich old man is bashed in his home.
Sanctuary
A young woman in Depression-era Mississippi is violated by a bootlegger, and the justice system that responds reveals more about the corruption of power than the crime itself.
Silent Joe
Joe Trona, scarred as a baby when his father threw acid in his face, works as a deputy in Orange County and as bodyguard to the county supervisor who adopted him, until the man is shot dead in front of him.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
A small-time criminal in 1970s Boston tries to sell a truckload of stolen guns, and every conversation he has reveals how the underworld really works.
Galveston
A New Orleans enforcer told he has lung cancer drives a runaway teenage girl to Galveston, and the Gulf Coast holds them for the few days before the men who want him dead arrive.