Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Layer Cake
Savages
Two Laguna Beach marijuana entrepreneurs share a girlfriend and a business until a Mexican cartel takes her to force a merger, and the two boys calmly start a war.
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.
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.
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.
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.
City of God
Three decades of the rise and war of the gangs of one Rio de Janeiro housing project, told from inside by a man who grew up in it and stripped fiction out of it.
Clockers
A young Jersey City crack lieutenant and a tired homicide detective circle each other after a drug-corner murder nobody is straight about, in Price's taped-from-the-kerb prose.
The Godfather
An ageing Sicilian-American crime boss in postwar New York hands his empire, piece by bloody piece, to the son he most wanted to keep out of it.
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.
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.
Something in the Water
Erin, a documentary maker, and Mark, a banker who has just lost his job, are diving on their honeymoon in Bora Bora when they find a bag floating in the sea, full of cash and diamonds.
Slow Horses
Slough House is where MI5 sends the agents whose careers it has ended, to push paper under the slovenly Jackson Lamb, and River Cartwright, exiled there after a botched exercise, sees a chance at redemption when a young man is kidnapped and threatened with a beheading on the internet.