Recommendations based on "Born to Kill The Rise and Fall of America's Bloodiest Asian Gang"

The award-winning novel that inspired the legendary Rambo film series starring Sylvester Stallone.First came the man: a young wanderer in a fatigue coat and long hair. Then came the legend, as John Rambo sprang from the pages of First Blood to take his place in the American cultural landscape. This remarkable novel pits a young Vietnam veteran against a small-town cop who doesn't know whom he's dealing with -- or how far Rambo will take him into a life-and-death struggle through the woods, hills, and caves of rural Kentucky.Millions saw the Rambo movies, but those who haven't read the book that started it all are in for a surprise -- a critically acclaimed story of character, action, and compassion.

Love. Violence. Destiny. These powerful themes ricochet through Lorenzo Carcaterra's new novel like bullets from a machine gun. In Gangster, he surpasses even his bestselling Sleepers to create a brutal and brilliant American saga of murder, forgiveness, and redemption.Born in the midst of tragedy and violence and raised in the shadow of a shocking secret, young Angelo Vestieri chooses to flee both his past and his father to seek a second family--the criminals who preside over early 20th century New York. In his bloody rise from soldier to mob boss, he encounters ever more barbaric betrayals--in friendship, in his brutal business, in love-- yet simultaneously comes to understand the meaning of loyalty, the virtue of relationships, and gains a perspective on the lonely, if powerful, life he has chosen.As the years pass, as enemies are made and defeated, as wars are fought and won, the old don meets an abandoned boy who needs a parent as much as protection. By taking Gabe under his wing and teaching him everything he knows, Angelo Vestieri will learn, in the winter of his life, which is greater: his love for the boy he cherishes, or his need to be a gangster and to live by the savage rules he helped create.A sweeping panoramic with riveting characters, a unique understanding of the underworld philosophy, and a relentless pace, Gangster travels through the time of godfathers and goodfellas to our own world of suburban Sopranos. But this is more than just an authentic chronicle of crime. Setting a new standard for this acclaimed author, Gangster is a compassionate portrait of one man's fight against his fate--and an unforgettable epic of a family, a city, a century.

Four women-four friends-share a determination to stop a killer who has been stalking newlyweds in San Francisco. Each one holds a piece of the puzzle: Lindsay Boxer is a homicide inspector in the San Francisco Police Department, Claire Washburn is a medical examiner, Jill Bernhardt is an assistant D.A., and Cindy Thomas just started working the crime desk of the San Francisco Chronicle.But the usual procedures aren't bringing them any closer to stopping the killings. So these women form a Women's Murder Club to collaborate outside the box and pursue the case by sidestepping their bosses and giving one another a hand.The four women develop intense bonds as they pursue a killer whose crimes have stunned an entire city. Working together, they track down the most terrifying and unexpected killer they have ever encountered-before a shocking conclusion in which everything they knew turns out to be devastatingly wrong.

Solomon Creed, the enigmatic hero introduced in The Searcher, must stop a killer tied to a conspiracy stretching back over generations to the dying days of World War II. Solomon Creed has no recollection of who he is, or where he comes from. The only solid clue to his identity is a label stitched in his jacket that reads: "This suit was made to treasure for Mr. Solomon Creed." The jacket fits perfectly, and so does the name, but there is a second name on the label, the name of the tailor who made the suit and an address in southern France. Solomon heads to France in search of this man, hoping to discover more about who he is. But instead of answers he finds a bloody corpse, the Star of David carved into his chest and the words "Finishing what was begun" daubed in blood on the wall. When the police discover Solomon at the crime scene they suspect he is the murderer and lock him up. Solomon must escape to clear his name and solve the mystery of why the last remaining survivors of a notorious Nazi death camp are being hunted down and murdered. Only by saving these survivors from evil can Solomon hope to piece together the truth about a decades-old conspiracy as well as discover the key to his own identity.

Would you be wary if someone gave you the assignment of delivering five million dollars to a Philippine terrorist—never mind from whom or why? Booth Stallings, a terrorism expert just fired from his job at a bashful organization that never admitted its mount in the Washington merry-go-round, is wary. So wary that he cuts in con man "Otherguy" Overby, who in turn involves Artie Wu, pretender to the throne of China, and his partner, Quincy Durant. Obviously, good patriots don't want to hand over all that money to bad guys. Better they keep it for themselves. Which inevitably raises the question: Who among them will end up with the money?

When Andy Moore learns that his war-hero father may be the perpetrator of a massacre, he begins a search for the truth. But bad things start happening at school--putting every student at risk. And if Andy doesn't figure it out soon, it might just be too late--for everybody.

Bernhardt sticks to his tried-and-true formula in his 13th novel to feature Tulsa defense attorney Ben Kincaid. An odious criminal defendant is foisted on Kincaid's practice: Johnny Christensen, a hate-filled frat boy accused of beating a gay man to death outside a singles bar in a Chicago suburb. Despite Kincaid's reluctance to take the case (at first, he flat-out refuses, for reasons he keeps hidden), he and partner Christina McCall put up the best criminal defense they can, allowing Bernhardt to explore issues of justice and contemporary mores while keeping the tension high. The well-paced plot weaves the hate crime of the title together with an Oklahoma kidnapping, Kincaid's romantic past, another grisly unsolved murder and a detective gone bad. In between, Bernhardt introduces readers to a straight male prostitute named Charlie the Chicken, a poetry-reciting homicide cop, a Christian social organization that opposes homosexuality above all else and a gay activist group that dabbles in courtroom executions and terrorism. Bernhardt places a premium on the plot twists, and his characters sometimes act in unlikely ways in service to the surprise. It should also be noted that the primary villain proves as eager to provide exposition of the scheme once nabbed as the typical Scooby Doo bad guy. That said, Bernhardt offers another good read, full of courtroom fireworks, double-crosses and even a bit of romance.

Even among the Mob, the Westies were feared. Out of a partnership between two sadistic thugs - James Coonan and Mickey Featherstone - the gang dominated the decaying slice of New York City's West Side known as Hell's Kitchen in the 1970s and '80s. Excelling in extortion, numbers running, loansharking and drug-peddling, they became the most notorious gang in the history of organized crime. The then prosecutor Rudolf Giuliani called them 'the most savage organisation in the long history of New York street gangs'. Upping the ante on brutality and depravity, their speciality when it came to punishment and killings was dismemberment. Their reign lasted almost twenty - their end would come as their own violent natures got the best of them and precipitated a downfall as infamous as their rise. This revised and updated edition, brings the story of the Westies up to date with 'where are they now' snapshots of the men - and women - of the Westies.

From the bestselling, prize-winning author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London's glittering surface In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain's spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river. In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: her son was dead. In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter-ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji, and a murderous gangster known as "Indian Dave." As the Brettlers set about investigating their son's death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they'd always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac's life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable--or unwilling--to bring the perpetrators to justice. In a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the Brettlers' quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private nightclubs, a city in which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerizing investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by suspense and staggering revelations. But it is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.

A dead girl, a wealthy family, and indications of drug use. It's a toxic mix that leads Philadelphia detective Matt Payne deep into an unexpected maelstrom of deceit and madness in the latest entry in the New York Times bestselling Badge of Honor series.In the dark shadows of downtown Philadelphia, the body of a seventeen-year-old suburban high school cheerleader, clad only in her uniform top and with massive bruising on her throat, is found floating in the Delaware River. When Homicide sergeant Matt Payne surveys the scene, he shakes his head at yet another vicious murder in a city that's suffering a record number of killings. And he knows this one, involving the petite, pretty daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur, will play long and loud in the media. Payne soon learns that the father had his vessel outfitted with miniature security cameras. Almost the entire crime was captured as digital video. Despite some imperfections, the video shows--in painful, shocking detail--what happened. And who the parents feared was responsible: the University of Pennsylvania student, an ill-mannered and arrogant Middle Easterner with movie-star looks, who they had forbidden their daughter to see again.    Still, it's not case closed. The murderer has gone underground. Payne races to find the killer before he can unleash an even more savage attack.