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Booklists

Lists of books, many of which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist , Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus and Library Journal (LJ). Additional titles of interest may be included on the lists. Titles are generally listed alphabetically by author.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overbooked specializes in providing timely information about fiction (all genres) and readable nonfiction. Overbooked has been online since 1994. Overbooked is a work in progress . . .

Overbooked is the winner of the 2008 Louis Shores - Greenwood Publishing Award: to recognize excellence in book reviewing and other media for libraries. The award recipient is selected for significant achievement related to a reviewing process that helps librarians make selection decisions.

Booklists and Suggested Reading

Mobbed Up Booklist

 

Page Modified: August 19, 2008

Fiction about gangsters and organized crime - Mafia, Russian Mob, etc.

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A list of books, many of which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist (BL), Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus, and Library Journal (LJ). Additional titles of interest may be included on this list. Titles are alphabetically by author.

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

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• Long Firm
  Author: Arnott, Jake
  Publisher: Soho List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 15947169x Date: 1999
  Kirkus PW
  Club owner Harry Starks is a feared gangster in 1960s London. Five narrators tell the story of Harry's fall, and surprising resurrection, in this vividly imagined portrait of the sleazy London mobs ("firms") at the end of an era.
  
  
• Everbody Dies : Matt Scudder
  Author: Block, Lawrence
  Publisher: William Morrow List Price: $ 25 ISBN: 068814182x Date: 1998
  PW Kirkus
  PW's Best 98 Books selection
  In his 14th adventure, Matthew Scudder, signs up to help his closest and most unlikely friend, the larger-than-life Hell's Kitchen hoodlum Mick Ballou - and soon finds himself living in a world where the past is a mine field, the present is a war zone, and the future's an open question.
  
• The Good Guys
  Author: Bonanno, Bill
  Publisher: Warner $ 24.95 ISBN: 0446529656 Date: 2005
  Kirkus
  The authors' extraordinary lives and experiences infuse this novel with chilling true-to-life details and a real insider's perspective. Bonanno is a former high-ranking member of a crime family, and Pistone is a former undercover FBI agent.
  Updated 10.25.04
• Gone Bamboo
  Author: Bourdain, Anthony
  Publisher: Villard List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0679448802 Date: 1997
  PW
  This wry, blistering thriller by the author of Bone in the Throat pits a CIA -trained assassin and his equally hard-nosed wife against two governments and a cross-dressing Mafioso. Sexy, raucous, and funny, Gone Bamboo is destined to burnish Bourdain's reputation and bring him the readership he so richly deserves.
  
• King Con
  Author: Cannell, Stephen J.
  Publisher: Morrow List Price: $24 ISBN: 0688147763 Date: 1997
  PW
  Accomplished grifter Beano Bates's lucky streak vanishes after a card game in which he scams 80 grand from a Mafia don who retaliates by having him nearly beaten to death. The savage beating leads to murder. Now Beano wants more than a big score, he wants revenge. Aided by a cunning female prosecutor and an army of crafty cousins, the king of the cons puts together the ultimate swindle--a game of strategy, skill and deception, and the target is America's most feared mob kingpin and his psychopathic brother.
  Suggested Reading: Grift Sense
  
• City of Ice
  Author: Farrow, John
  Publisher: Random Price: $ 25.95 ISBN: 0375501401 Date: 1999
  Booklist
  Reminiscent of Smilla's Sense of Snow, this gripping debut thriller, set in the bone-chilling midwinter Montreal, features an unorthodox detective pitted against the Russian mafia, CIA infiltrators, motorcycle gangs, and a corrupt police force.
  
• 30 Seconds
  Author: Giancana, Sam
  Publisher: Warner List Price: $ 24.50 ISBN: 044651716x Date: 1998
  Kirkus
  The nephew of mobster Sam Giancana and coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Double Cross and his wife deliver a compelling tale of one innocent man's fight against the international drug trade, the CIA, and the Mafia.
  
• A Man with an Axe
  Author: Jackson, Jon A.
  Publisher: Atlantic Monthly List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0871137089 Date: 1998
  BL
  Detroit Detective Sergeant "Fang" Mulheisen is about to begin an investigation into the mystery surrounding a headless corpse when a young kid arrives with an E-mail cartoon message addressed to Mulheisen. Soon the detective is being led on a scavenger hunt that takes him into modern jazz history, the Detroit police archives, and the notebook diaries of Grootka, his now-dead mentor.
  
• La Donna Detroit
  Author: Jackson, Jon A.
  Publisher: Atlantic $ 24 ISBN: 0871138107 Date: 2000
  PW
  In this compelling and unpredictable page-turner, Detective Sergeant "Fang" Mulheisen's latest investigation thrusts him into the nerve center of the Detroit mob. "Jon Jackson makes the hard-boiled form look as if he thought it up himself last week".--Newsday.
  Updated 5/4/00
• The Dog Who Bit a Policeman
  Author: Kaminsky, Stuart M.
  Publisher: Mysterious List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 089296667x Date: 1998
  PW Booklist
  PW's Best 98 Books selection
  Moscow Police Inspector Porifry Rostnikov returns in another book in the Edgar Award-winning series - this time putting himself in league with members of the Russian Mafia, who feel the murders of two of their own are related to new gang wars.
  
• Mobtown
  Author: Kelly, Jack
  Publisher: Hyperion $ 23.95 ISBN: 0786866152 Date: 2002
  Kirkus
  In the deceptively quiet neighborhoods of 1950s Rochester, New York, Ike Van Savage's latest case starts out simply enough: a threatening husband and a beleaguered wife. But before he knows it, he's pulled into a serpentine mystery that involves the town's most notorious gangster, a dead heiress, and one too many "accidents."
  Updated 11/21/01
• Fourth Down
  Author: Klein, Dave
  Publisher: Forge List Price: $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312863705 Date: 1999
  Booklist
  When a star quarterback, who is bring forced by the mob to throw games, dies in the middle of a game, a former teammate starts digging deep into the suspected murder.
  
• The Narrowback
  Author: Ledwidge, Michael S.
  Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Price: $ 24 ISBN: 087113716x Date: 1999
  PW
  A riveting and suspensful debut, The Narrowback is a tale of a soulful Irish-American gangster who dares to betray the IRA. Stylish, lucid, and compelling, "The Narrowback is as auspicious a debut as I've seen in years" (James Patterson).
  
• The Big Law
  Author: Logan, Chuck
  Publisher: Harpercollins List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 006019133 Date: 1998
  PW
  In his most electrifying thriller to date, an emerging master of the thriller pits one man's smoldering sense of justice against the FBI's witness protection program when he tracks down a killer shielded by the unwitting Feds.
  
• Family Honor
  Author: Parker, Robert B.
  Publisher: Putnam List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0399145664 Date: 1999
  Kirkus PW
  After rescuing a wealth family's missing teenage daughter from prostitution, private investigator Sunny Randall becomes the girl's unlikely bodyguard, fending off some serious mobsters and getting involved in a murder case and criminal conspiracy.
  
• Omerta
  Author: Puzo, Mario
  Publisher: Random $ 25.95 ISBN: 0375502548 Date: 2000
  Kirkus PW Library Journal
  First came The Godfather, then The Last Don. Now prepare for the final chapter in Puzo's Mafia trilogy about power and morality in America. Omerta, from the Italian word for "code of silence", is a powerful epitaph for the Mafia at the century's end and a final triumph for a great American storyteller.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 5/11/00
• Flower Net
  Author: See, Lisa
  Publisher: HarperCollins List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0060175273 Date: 1997
  PW
  NYTBR Notable
  A Chinese cop and an American DA travel the breadth of modern China - revealing to the reader the country's venerable culture, its teeming economy, its omnipotent mafia, its institutionalized cruelty - as they attempt to uncover the conspiracy behind a series of high-profile murders.
  
• Killing Ground
  Author: Seymour, Gerald
  Publisher: HarperCollins List Price: $19.95 ISBN: 0061011959 Date: 1997
  Booklist Kirkus
  In this tense, gripping thriller from the bestselling author of Heart of Danger and the Fighting Man, an innocent young woman is recruited to go undercover in pursuit of a vicious mafia leader in hiding.
  
• Virgin Heat
  Author: Shames, Laurence
  Publisher: Hyperion List Price: $21.95 ISBN:2786862033 Date: 1997
  Booklist Kirkus
  Shames's thriller is his wildest to date, rich in excitement, tension, laughs, and loopy characters. Fed up with the life set up for him by the Federal Witness Protection Program, Sal Martucci is tending bar in Key West when he is spotted in a home video by his ex-sweetheart, Angie Amaro - the daughter of the man who wantes Sal dead.
  
• Charlie Opera
  Author: Stella, Charlie
  Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 25 ISBN: 0786712139 Date: 2003
  PW Booklist
  A gritty underworld thriller that takes mob bosses, hit men, and gangland wannabes to Las Vegas, where the name of their game is Charlie Opera.
  Updated 11.25.03
• Act of Revenge
  Author: Tanenbaum, Robert K
  Publisher: Harpercollins Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0060192186 Date: 1999
  PW
  "The most interesting pair of characters in the suspense genre" ("Chicago Tribune") comes to HarperCollins for the first time. When their daughter witnesses a tong murder in Chinatown, Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi find themselves entangled in a 20-year-old--but still very poisonous--Mafia conspiracy.
  
• Codes of Betrayal
  Author: Uhnak, Dorothy
  Publisher: St. Martin's List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312155824 Date: 1997
  BL
  For the first time in a decade, Dorothy Uhnak gives readers a new police novel of double jeopardy and triple cross that will seize fans of Puzo as well as Wambaugh. Codes of Betrayal is a story of intense drama and fiendish complication, in which one man is tested by his own drive for justice.
  
• Capo
  Author: Watson, Peter
  Publisher: Richard Cohen Books List Price: $17.95 (pbk) ISBN: 1860660118 Date: 1997
  PW
  When Silvio Randazzo completes his dangerous rite of passage, he goes from peasant boy to Mafia soldier. He also begins an extraordinary turn-of-the-century odyssey, one that leads him from his first vendetta killing in the hills of the old country to his rise as the most powerful gangster in America's most decadent city.
  
• The Godfather Returns
  Author: Winegardner, Mark
  Publisher: Random $ 26.95 ISBN: 1400061016 Date: 2004
  PW Booklist
  Winegardner--whose proposal for this novel was chosen in an international competition--brings new artistry and vision to Mario Puzo's mythic characters.
  Updated 12.6.04
• California Fire and Life
  Author: Winslow, Don
  Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0679454314 Date: 1999
  PW
  From the author of The Death and Life of Bobby Z comes an unstoppable new novel about a Southern California Gold Coast conflagration of greed, deceit, and murder, and the one man trying to fight it.
  Suggested Reading: On Fire
• Whacking Jimmy
  Author: Wolf, William L.
  Publisher: Villard List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0375501738 Date: 1998
  Kirkus
  The Freshman meets Carl Hiaasen in this hip and hilarious crime novel of an unwilling mafia heir's introduction to the ways of his family.
  

 

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