If what hooked you was Ned Beaumont’s smooth, often amoral maneuvering—lying to cops, cutting deals with Shad O’Rory, and playing Janet Henry and Paul Madvig against each other—you’ll relish Tom Ripley’s silken schemes in The Talented Mr. Ripley. You get that same unsettling pleasure of riding shotgun with a charming fixer who always finds one more angle, one more mask to wear, and somehow keeps you rooting for him even as the bodies and lies stack up.

You liked how The Glass Key put you inside a crooked city—Paul Madvig’s machine, Taylor Henry’s death, O’Rory’s racket, and those smoky backrooms where promises buy power. The Big Nowhere cranks that to eleven in 1950s Los Angeles, with red-baiting committees, vice squads, and mob influence colliding. As the investigation spirals, every favor has a price, every ally a knife; it’s the same ruthless ecosystem Ned Beaumont negotiates, only bigger, dirtier, and even more combustible.

If the novel’s bruising atmosphere grabbed you—the brutal beatings Ned endures from O’Rory’s men, the cigarette-smoked rooms, the sense that decency is a losing hand—Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me is the pitch-black vein of noir you’re after. Deputy Lou Ford’s small town smiles hide rot and savagery, and as with Madvig’s city, civility is just the thinnest cover for menace. It’s grim, intimate, and relentless in the way The Glass Key only hints at before the hammer drops.

If you loved how The Glass Key keeps shifting the ground—Ned’s slippery loyalties to Madvig, the shocking turns around Taylor Henry’s death, and Janet Henry’s layers—The Long Goodbye delivers that same whiplash. Philip Marlowe’s friendship with Terry Lennox tangles into a case where every confession spawns a new lie, and Eileen Wade’s glamorous facade hides a devastating truth. It’s a masterclass in twists that reframe everything you thought you knew.

If Ned Beaumont’s interior tangle—his fierce loyalty to Madvig, his calculating streak, and the push-pull with Janet Henry—was what pulled you in, In a Lonely Place goes even deeper. Hughes drops you inside Dix Steele’s head as charm and self-justification curdle into something darker, the way Ned’s cool exterior masks conflict. It’s tense, psychologically exacting, and lets you feel every rationalization as the noose tightens.