Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Godfather
The Family
Sofia Colicchio and Antonia Russo grow up together in 1930s Brooklyn as daughters of the Family, the crime organisation their fathers serve, until one of the fathers disappears.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Harlem Shuffle
A furniture dealer in 1960s Harlem runs a criminal sideline, and the heist novel becomes a portrait of a neighbourhood navigating the edge of the Civil Rights era.
Age of Vice
In the early hours in New Delhi a Mercedes ploughs into a group of people sleeping by the road, and the story goes back to Ajay, a servant from a poor village who rose to work for Sunny Wadia, the heir to a criminal empire.
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 Black Dahlia
In 1947 Los Angeles, two police detectives and former boxers are drawn into the case of Elizabeth Short, a young woman found murdered and mutilated in a vacant lot, and the obsession it breeds pulls them into the city's dark heart.
Jade City
On the island of Kekon, two clans of jade-wielding warriors control the city of Janloon and its trade in magical jade, and when a new drug lets anyone use jade, a gang war begins.
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.
Gone, Baby, Gone
A private detective searches for a missing four-year-old girl in a Boston neighbourhood where everyone knows what happened but no one will talk.