75 Books Like Black Mass

This work came out in the Roaring Twenties, but the gangsters of that decade had nothing on the 19th-century outfits like the Dead Rabbits and the Gas House Gang.

When the dive bars have names like the Tub of Blood and they’re kept in business by the likes of Razor Riley, One-Lung Curran, and Stumpy Malarkey, you can’t go wrong. But to me the most compelling part was Asbury’s account of New York’s horrendous Civil War draft riots.

The Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania were born in opposition to that same draft, after a Protestant Republican allied with the coal industry used conscription to try to rid the coal fields of Irish Catholic Democrats and mine labor activists before a crucial election. 

This is a gritty, riveting look at the Irish Mob on New York’s West Side in the 1980s.

The author grabs you by the arm and propels you at breakneck speed through the blood-stained streets and barrooms of Hell’s Kitchen. Along the way, he introduces the reader to a crew of crazy characters that you definitely wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

The parts about the Irish mob’s connections to the Mafia were especially enlightening. It’s a very atmospheric look at a part of the city where I worked as a newspaperman in the decade the book came out (and downed pints in some of those bars.)

This forgotten masterpiece of a memoir by a prosecutor who took on corruption on the docks of New York came out in 1956, two years after that Marlon Brando classic, On the Waterfront.

William Keating, a hard-nosed, relentless, and incorruptible crime-fighter, gives an inside look at the reign of terror imposed on honest, hard-working longshoremen by the gangsters who ran their union.

Keating was by no means anti-labor – at the start of Chapter 2, he mentions that his father was an official in the United Mine Workers, and that his great-grandfather was a prominent Molly Maguire in the hard-coal fields of Pennsylvania. That earned points with me – I come from a long line of Irish American coal miners in that area. 

In 1993, a gang of thieves got away with $7 million in a heist at a Brink’s depot in Rochester, N.Y – and the bulk of it has never been recovered.

The cast of characters includes a former I.R.A. man who’d done prison time in Northern Ireland, an activist priest, an ex-cop who became a suspect, and a charismatic prizefighter whose dismembered body was found in Lake Ontario.

I liked this because at the center of it all is the lingering question of whether the missing money ended up with the Irish Republican Army. 

The author plays a clever trick on us to get us to identify with the villain in this book. It’s effective and horrifying, and results, in large part, in our seeing the world through a monster’s self-serving eyes. It’s not a pretty picture, but there’s no escape for his unfortunate victims, or for us. He reminds me of Bridget in the movie The Last Seduction, in the way some predators seem like a completely different species from us, their prey, while we assume they’re human, just like us. This is noir, only with an homme fatale (and a bit of publishing industry satire thrown in).

This book takes place in Boston during the broiling hot summer of ‘74. The protagonist of Lehane’s sublime novel is Mary Pat Fennessy, a hard-bitten mother from the Southie projects who took a look at this list of tough guys, chuckled, punched the #5 guy in the throat, and took over his spot.

Mary Pat’s teen daughter is missing, the Irish mob may know more about it than they’re letting on, and all the while, the desegregation of the public schools has turned the city into a violent racial hotbox. In Small Mercies, Mary Pat navigates searing issues of loyalty and justice. Race and grief, and as intense pressures converge on both her and the city, she responds the only way she knows how—by coming out swinging. 

Detectives Sarah Kelling and her much-loved husband Max Bittersohn live in her inherited house on Beacon Hill, Boston. These are detective novels of the cozy and charming sort, and because of the relationship between Sarah and Max are adventure romances as well.

Sarah has a large extended family and they enter into all the books as friends. This makes each one a friend and fun to read. MacCleod knows Boston and her descriptions of the habits and haunts of classic Beacon Brahmins/Yankees are as charming and rich as her plots. I recommend this and her other books for the fun of reading and the great plots.

Here’s another PI series set in Boston, and while Carlotta Carlyle is nowhere near as well-known as Spenser, Linda Barnes is every bit as readable as Robert Parker. In her first outing (an Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel), ex-cabbie and ex-cop Carlyle takes on a missing person case that has her tangling with IRA gunrunners. A Trouble of Fools is my pick because it brings the ‘80s Boston I remember to life, and because of the light, humorous voice Barnes lends the proceedings.

This is a complex young adult contemporary novel that spotlights Mini as she singlehandedly organizes the wedding-of-the-year for her older sister and her fiancé. Amidst the primary plot of Mini pulling together the wedding and falling in love with the handsome Vir Mirchandani, there is a unifying theme of family. Nandini Bajpai does an incredible job of unpacking the elements of an Indian family, specifically in how they support each other after the loss of a loved one. It was heartwarming to see Mini come into her own by the end of her story, and I highly recommend this book to anyone with a penchant for Indian weddings, Indian culture, and young love. 

Early Autumn made me cry from two directions. As a tween, reading about Spenser’s rescue of Paul, a shut-down, emotionally neglected boy that Spenser first assesses as “an unlovely little bastard”, I cried in sympathy and relief for Paul.

Over a summer, Spenser taught him skills, built up his strength and gave him the confidence to find his own dreams, before leaving him at the doorway to the life he now knew he wanted. As an adult, I cried with joy for Spenser, who connected with a stranger, taught what he had to teach, and changed a life.

Really helping someone in a lasting way is rarely so easy as it was in this book, but it’s a worthwhile dream and this Cinderella story gets me every time.