Cogan's Trade

Cogans Trade is a razor-sharp crime novel that strips the gangster genre down to its cold, transactional core. Written by George V. Higgins, this landmark work follows low-level Boston criminals as they plan a robbery—not out of ambition or loyalty, but simple economics. What sets the novel apart is Higgins’s electrifying dialogue: tense, profane, and brutally realistic conversations that reveal a world governed by money, mistrust, and survival. There are no romantic antiheroes here—only men calculating risk, profit, and betrayal in a morally exhausted urban landscape. Lean, unsentimental, and profoundly influential, Cogans Trade is essential reading for fans of hard-boiled crime fiction and modern noir realism.