If the way C.W. Sughrue drinks and brawls his way from Montana beer joints to California backrooms hooked you, you’ll love the night-black mood of L.A. Confidential. Ellroy plunges you into a Los Angeles as tainted as the dive bars where Sughrue tracks Betty Sue Flowers, following three cops through corruption, tabloid scandals, and brutal reckonings. That same sense of the American dream curdled—so palpable when Sughrue finally confronts what Betty Sue became—permeates this book’s every scene.

Crumley’s mordant one-liners—like Sughrue wisecracking even while scraping up clues from bar floors and motel ashtrays—have a kindred spirit in A Rage in Harlem. Himes turns scams, shootouts, and desperate lovers into razor-edged comedy without ever blinking at the hurt beneath, much like the way Sughrue’s banter with Abraham Trahearne masks the emptiness both men carry. You’ll get the laugh-then-flinch rhythm you enjoyed when the search for Betty Sue kept zigzagging into the absurd and the tragic.

If you were compelled by how Sughrue bullies, bluffs, and drinks his way through leads—bending rules while chasing Betty Sue Flowers—Hammett’s Red Harvest is the template. The Continental Op wades into a town nicknamed Poisonville and pits gangs against each other, much like Sughrue’s bare‑knuckled pragmatism in barrooms and back alleys. Both books ask how much blood a man can spill in the name of ‘truth’ and still live with himself.

C.W. Sughrue’s voice—wry, bruised, and lyrical as he tails Abraham Trahearne and digs into Betty Sue’s past—is echoed in Philip Marlowe’s narration in The Long Goodbye. Marlowe’s friendship with Terry Lennox spirals into betrayals and bodies, and his barbed asides hit with the same weary bite as Sughrue’s roadside philosophizing. If you loved being inside Sughrue’s head for every drink, detour, and bad decision, Marlowe’s intimate, cutting monologue will feel like home.

Under the missing‑person mystery, The Last Good Kiss is about the wounds Sughrue, Trahearne, and even Betty Sue carry—wounds that fester across years. Mystic River digs just as deep, showing how a childhood trauma echoes into a murder investigation and shatters friendships. If the revelations about Betty Sue’s past—and how they corrode everyone around her—stuck with you, Lehane’s slow, devastating unspooling of guilt and loyalty will hit the same nerve.