George V Higgins Books in Order

Small-time gunrunner Eddie Coyle is staring at prison and looking for a way out. As bank robbers, cops, and killers close in around Boston, he has to decide which of his so-called friends he can afford to betray.

Jerry Digger Doherty, an ex-con bartender with a weakness for gambling, comes back from Vegas deep in debt. A fresh criminal job looks like his way out, if it does not get him killed first.

Mob enforcer Jackie Cogan is called in after a high-stakes card game is robbed. He follows the money through Boston's underworld until restoring order means doing exactly what his employers hired him to do.

Hank Cavanaugh, top aide to Massachusetts congressman Sam Barry, spends his days testing Barry's presidential chances in early Watergate-era Washington. It is a political novel about ambition, spin, and all the talk behind public life.

A nonfiction account of the Watergate trials and the men around Richard Nixon. Higgins approaches the scandal with a lawyer's eye for testimony, pressure, and the ugly mechanics of political self-protection.

A moody political novel shaped by the aftershocks of Watergate. Higgins follows damaged people through ambition, betrayal, and uneasy compromise, letting the pressure build through conversation more than action scenes.

Deke Hunter is a Massachusetts State Police plainclothesman who is not especially elegant, just stubborn, lucky, and persistent. Higgins builds a police novel around the messy, accidental way justice sometimes arrives anyway.

Edgar, a Boston political correspondent, talks his way through work, women, baseball, and Washington over a loose stretch of years. The plot matters less than the sharp, funny accumulation of voice, memory, and opinion.

Jerry Kennedy wants a quiet break with his family, but Boston's thieves, dealers, and desperate clients keep finding him. When a knife-carrying intruder crashes into his home life, work and private loyalties collide hard.

Slumlord lawyer Jerry Fein decides rats and unpaid rent are reason enough for arson. Once crooked cops, an obliging fire marshal, and hired burners enter the picture, his dirty little solution turns into a much bigger problem.

Federal agent Pete Riordan hunts an arms runner supplying the I.R.A. With help and obstruction from Boston crooks, ex-cons, and barroom gossips, the case becomes a guessing game about leverage, silence, and divided loyalties.

Set in Massachusetts politics, this novel follows the effort to bring down Speaker Bernie Morgan, a master of patronage and abuse. Higgins treats corruption not as spectacle, but as ordinary business done in better suits.

A shorter Higgins work set far from the usual mob machinery. It traces small-town lives, old loyalties, and the slow way personal history keeps shaping the present long after people think the story is over.

Higgins's nonfiction study of Boston mayor Kevin White and his relationship with the press. It is a close look at image-making, city politics, and how public power is managed, packaged, and sold.

Boston defense lawyer Jerry Kennedy finds his supports vanishing at once, his accountant jailed, his marriage strained, the IRS looming. Forced into uneasy alliances, he has to fight to keep both his practice and his name intact.

Boston media owner Mark Baldwin hires freelancer Connie Gates to get close to a murder trial and learn what dangerous testimony may surface. The scheme opens into a web of manipulation, desire, and old secrets that refuse to stay buried.

Years after the 1960s, cop John Richards and lawyer Terry Gleason are still chasing radicals tied to robbery and murder. The case becomes a long, tense argument about terrorism, law, and what justice can actually deliver.

This story collection shows Higgins in shorter form, but with the same ear for pressure and self-justification. The pieces circle crime, family strain, class, and the compromises people inherit and repeat.

A big Massachusetts contractor who hired ex-cons and knows an old political secret finds his past pushing back. Higgins turns the setup into a dark, talky novel about power, loyalty, and the slow collapse of carefully managed lives.

A nonfiction look at baseball over forty years in one American town. Higgins writes about the game as memory, habit, community, and local life, not just as scores and statistics.

Fresh out of jail and still chasing easy money, Earl Beale sells cars and schemes his way through one bad idea after another. Old business catches up with him in a cold, sharp novel about greed, blackmail, and self-delusion.

Higgins's practical guide to writing for publication is blunt, funny, and unsentimental. He talks about craft, reading, revision, and professional discipline in the same plain voice that gives his fiction so much bite.

A onetime baseball hero gets talked into a seemingly doomed congressional race in New Hampshire. Higgins turns the campaign into a close look at ego, money, and the small compromises that sit behind every public victory.

Joe Corey, a disillusioned Manhattan lawyer, gets pulled into the decades-old shotgun murder of his wife's grandfather, a small-town bank president. Chasing the old case turns a family mystery into a dangerous search through buried local secrets.

Jerry Kennedy, older and shakier than he once was, takes the bribery case of Massachusetts public works boss Billy Ryan. To break the prosecution's story, he has to squeeze every favor and contact he has left.

Detective Harry Dell'Appa is pulled back to Boston to help hunt suspected mob killer Short Joey Mossi. As cops trade stories and grudges, every lead circles the same hard rule, people usually do it for the money.

Massachusetts banker David Carroll and his wife Frances board a transatlantic liner hoping a change of scene will steady a strained marriage. Instead, old infidelity and a too-talkative stranger turn the voyage into a slow, uneasy reckoning.

When the body of long-missing Sandra Nichols turns up in a Massachusetts wetland, Jerry Kennedy is drawn into a wrongful death case. Higgins uses the lawsuit to uncover old lies, bruised loyalties, and the cost of delayed justice.

Court clerk Ambrose Merrion and politician Danny Hilliard rise together through Massachusetts machine politics. When scandal and a zealous federal prosecutor close in, old habits that once felt ordinary suddenly look like felonies.

A sharp, talky mystery set in the world of big-time sports agenting. After a powerful agent dies, the people around him sort through rivalries, deals, and grudges to figure out what really happened.

Arthur McKeach and Nick Cistaro have ruled a big piece of Boston crime for decades, helped by a secret arrangement with the FBI. When that protection starts to crack, the novel exposes corruption on both sides of the law.

A posthumous collection of unpublished fiction that lets readers see Higgins in shorter forms. The pieces range across crime, conversation, and character study, all driven by the sharp ear that powers his best novels.