What algorithms/reading matter would you recommend on resolving transactions / read-write locks?
The book Transactional Information Systems by Weikum and Vossen covers quite a lot of the area, both in theoretical and practical terms, from different perspectives, not just transactions. It's about 1000 pages long, so will keep you busy for a weekend or two. On the other hand, it's nearly 10 years old, so there might be something more up-to-date available. Other books in the line include Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems by Bernstein, P., Hadzilacos, V., and Goodman, N, Addison-Wesley, 1987, Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques by Jim Gray and Andreas Reuter, and Principles of Transaction Processing by Philip A. Bernstein and Eric Newcomer, 2009. I haven't seen the latter one, but being the most recent it could be a good place to start, although your solution may well be found in older texts. A trip to the library may be worthwhile.

A monumental text in this area is Atomic Transactions by Nancy Lynch et al. It presents a formal account and proofs of a number of the kinds of algorithms you are interested in. It's rather formal, and tedious, so may not be to your taste.

A lot of recent work is devoted to Software Transactional Memory, which is applying the transaction ideas to multi-threaded applications. There are tens of publications on this topic each year: the wikipedia page provides plenty of references.