Books about Tough Guys!
Discover the best books about tough guys with our curated list of hard-boiled fiction. From Michael Connelly's The Black Echo to Lee Child's Killing Floor, explore gritty heroes and crime thrillers that define masculine grit.
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Killing Floor
by Lee Child
A former military policeman, Jack Reacher is passing through Margrave, Georgia, on his way to nowhere in particular when four policemen arrive to arrest him for a murder he did not commit, in critically acclaimed suspense novel. Reprint. NYT.
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The Black Echo
by Michael Connelly
A Vietnam veteran-turned-police detective, Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch discovers the body of a former comrade-in-arms during an investigation and, with the help of an attractive FBI agent, hunts for the murderers along a trail leading back to Saigon. Reprint.
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The Monkey's Raincoat
by Robert Crais
First published 1987. Elvis Cole mystery. Elvis is on the case when a client's estranged husband kidnaps their son.
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The Wrong Case
by James Crumley
An extraordinary detective story from one of the great American crime fiction authors. Milo once had a thriving divorce-case business in the small town of in the Pacific Northwest, but because of liberal new divorce laws he has taken to drinking and staring out the window. He's up to his third drink of the morning when an attractive young woman walks into his office and asks him to find her brother. He takes on what seems a routine missing-person case in hopes of getting to know her better, but finds himself involved in what is most definitely the wrong case. Everyone is a victim, one way or another, of a crime that took place long before the novel begins.
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The Last Good Kiss
by James Crumley
C.W. Sughrue, a Montana private eye, is hired to track down a failing author and winds up searching for Betty Sue Flowers, a woman missing for ten years in Haight-Ashbury.
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Under Cover of Daylight
by James W. Hall
Years after his real parents are killed by a drunken driver and Thorn executes his own justice in the form of murder, his foster-mother is found brutally killed on her charter fishing boat, and Thorn, now in his late 30s, edges in among the suspects.
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Devil in a Blue Dress
by Walter Mosley
Devil in a Blue Dress, a defining novel in Walter Mosley’s bestselling Easy Rawlins mystery series, was adapted into a TriStar Pictures film starring Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins and Don Cheadle as Mouse. Set in the late 1940s, in the African-American community of Watts, Los Angeles, Devil in a Blue Dress follows Easy Rawlins, a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Monet, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.
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Flood
by Andrew Vachss
Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her—so she can kill him with her bare hands. In this cauterizing thriller, Andrew Vachss's renegade investigator teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements. Fearfully knowing, crackling with narrative tension, and written in prose as forceful as a hollow-point slug, Flood is Burke at his deadliest—and Vachss at the peak of his form.
