44 books like Donnie Brasco

I learned so much from reading this book by the bureau's pioneering profiler.

Books by profilers and local police who solve major murders often focus on the author's career. No one cares. Douglas's books focus on the crimes and the perpetrators.

He has interviewed Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz, Lynette Fromme, John Wayne Gacy, Edmund Kemper, Sirhan Sirhan, Richard Speck, Sara Jane Moore, and Charles Manson. He explains what makes them tick.

The Valachi Papers, a 1968 book written by Peter Maas, is the life story of Joe Valachi, a former member of the Genovese crime family, who testified in 1963 before a Senate committee, revealing until-then confidential information about the American mafia. The book was made into a film in 1972, starring Charles Bronson as Valachi.

Maas describes in vivid detail Joe Valachi’s initiation into and rise within a mafia family, frequently relying on Valachi’s own gutsy descriptions. Although it is a biography the book has the verve and pace of a thrilling work of fiction. In many ways better than even a well-written novel, The Valachi Papers is an edge-of-your-seat reading experience.

This book leans a bit more toward the literary fiction category than do most books I read these days, but it’s among my top five because of two elements it develops, and poignantly so: 1) the constant threat of death for not only the narrator but also others he knows, and 2) a love story.

And the love story, much as it got to me emotionally, never once struck me as sappy. Instead, it was very realistic. Very human. Very no-b.s. As a result, altogether, this novel offers terrific storytelling.

Hubert Selby Jr. delivers another dark indictment of life along the outer shores of South Brooklyn, in the form of both this 1978 novel and the grim 2000 film Darren Aronofsky film adaptation (co-written with Selby, with a cameo as prison guard).

The characters of this disturbing drama are as marginalized as the bleak 1970s backdrop they infect. Selby’s prose holds us by the back of the neck as his characters descend down awful spirals of addiction: Sara Goldfarb with her diet pills, and her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion, and his best friend Tyrone, all heroin addicts. Electroconvulsive therapy, reluctant prostitution, and amputation abound, harrowing hallmarks you’d expect from Selby.

For this trip to Coney Island, think more Warriors, less Woody Allen, and buckle up. It’s going to be a spectacularly gruesome ride.

Locations of interest: Coney Island Clam Bar; Brighton Beach Boardwalk; Surf Avenue Second-hand Shops; 3152 Brighton… show more.

The Godfather portrays the classic conflict between loyalty to a family and the desire to escape it for a better life.

Michael is a former marine who wants to stay out of the crime business and have a normal relationship with his girlfriend. But family loyalty trumps principle when his father is attacked, his brother killed, and his wife in Italy murdered. It wonderfully shows his slow fall to unfeeling coldness as the price for avenging his family and protecting their empire.

The book has great and colorful characters, especially Don Corleone. He is fascinating because he offsets his violence with principle and a love for his family.

David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon gives the viewer a window into a piece of Native American culture in 1920s Oklahoma as well as the inner workings of the brand-new FBI under its narcissistic and despotic head J. Edgar Hoover.

For me, the heart of the story is the Osage people and their struggle to prosper in the face of racism, corruption, and murder. That’s not to say that Grann doesn’t do a brilliant job with the FBI investigation into the killings. 

Much as I enjoyed the film based on this novella by Stephen King (which I now understand is a standalone book—I read it as part of a story collection long ago), I enjoyed the novella more.

Why? Because of its extraordinarily likeable narrative voice, which has caused people worldwide to find themselves rooting for its narrator. How can you not want to know what’ll happen next to someone so candid and down-to-earth—who has experienced homicide and love so intensely? Especially when he wants intimacy yet also feels threatened by it.

In fact, just after I finished reading the Shawshank novella, I vowed to write a novel about someone in NYC who exuded those same attributes: candor, humility, and understated yet solid wisdom about murder and affairs of the heart. And after several years of writing with this goal, I finally tapped into the voice of Matt Connell, the narrator of… show more.

Displaying the decaying carcass of post-war South Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr. mines a grim industrial wasteland, as bleak as his beleaguered characters imploding across six short stories, each prefaced by a Biblical passage.

A gang mauls a group of soldiers on leave. A transgender woman, abused by a homophobic brother, rejected by a drug dealer, overdoses. Facing a shotgun wedding, a young man abandons his pregnant girlfriend. A sex worker is gang raped to death. A corrupt, closeted union steward is severely beaten after sexually assaulting a boy.

This 1950s South Brooklyn, when the Brooklyn Army Terminal complex and waterfront docks were infested by racketeers and thugs, comes to brutal life because of Selby’s crude prose. That grammar-be-damned style vividly captures Brooklyn life on the docks, factories, and warehouses, as well as its diners, dive bars, and union locals.

This book is the biography of Henry Hill, who, at the age of eleven, began working as an assistant for a boss of the Lucchese crime family in Manhattan. The book was turned into the movie Goodfellas, with Ray Liotta playing the role of Hill.

Fast-paced and filled with brutally violent incidents, Wise Guy portrays Henry Hill’s involvement in the life of the crime organization. In 1980, twenty-five years after he began working with the Lucchese family, Hill was arrested for heroin trafficking. Knowing he would be convicted at trial and would receive a lengthy sentence, and understanding that members of the family would likely have him murdered in prison, Hill testified under oath to federal prosecutors in return for admission into the Witness Protection Program.

Richard Condon shows the mob as a family of degenerates, violent felons who are still human beings who also fall in love. The focus on the novel is how a hit man, looking to embellish his career, dates a big mob guy’s daughter, only to fall in love with another killer who is a woman. She has been hired to kill him but she also is in love with him. Published in 1982 , the novel captures the entanglements of a soap opera with real bite. The movie with Jack Nicholson is also top rate.