The Hitman Cometh

by Raymond Chandler

Chandler's Marlowe operates in that same morally ambiguous Los Angeles underworld where Ray's Branko hunts—a detective surrounded by wealthy phonies, criminals with codes, and victims who aren't always innocent. The difference is Chandler's prose has this weary, sardonic rhythm that makes the violence feel consequential rather than sensational, which deepens the noir atmosphere Ray's working in.

by Dennis Lehane

Lehane does what Ray does—assembles a cast of damaged, interconnected characters where everyone has motive and secrets—but he takes his time letting you understand how their pasts collide with the present crime. The investigation becomes less about finding the killer and more about watching three men confront who they've become, which gives the procedural elements real weight.

by Roberto Bolaño

This is your left-field pick, but hear me out: Bolaño's novel is structured like an investigation into a disappearance, told through fragmented testimonies from a bizarre cast of poets, drifters, and obsessives. It has that same quality as Ray's work—a long list of strange suspects and witnesses whose stories don't quite add up—except Bolaño treats the mystery as almost secondary to the texture of their lives. It's messier and more literary, but the DNA is there.

by Jim Thompson

Thompson writes con artists and small-time criminals with the same unflinching eye Ray brings to his evangelist and mercenaries—no one's sympathetic, everyone's scheming, and the prose moves like a switchblade. The family dynamics here (mother, son, girlfriend all running their own angles) create that same claustrophobic tension of people circling each other with hidden agendas.

by Michael Chabon

Chabon takes the detective procedural and builds it inside an alternate-history Jewish settlement in Alaska, which means you get the same detective-chasing-suspects structure Ray uses, but filtered through this wonderfully strange world with its own rules and mythology. The humor is drier, the worldbuilding more elaborate, but that restless energy of a cop working through an increasingly bizarre cast of witnesses—that's exactly what hooked you in The Hitman Cometh.