Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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When you think ‘Boston Noir,’ you probably think of The Departed or The Town or, David Ortiz help us, Boondock Saints. The best of Boston noir is a different shade of darkness than the more traditional film noir. (And that’s pretty damn dark.) Add on extra layers of guilt and a strong religious presence, and you’ve got something unique. While filming in Massachusetts has become more prevalent in recent years, for decades there wasn’t much of film production in the state. All the films listed below were made in these darker days, when seeing the streets of Boston on screen was a rarer occurrence. These roots of film noir run deep and include some early examples of on-loc…
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We’re a year into the pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of city dwellers have fled their urban apartments for suburban spaces. It is, if you live outside the city limits, a seller’s market. New York City, where I live, is in the middle of an all-time low-rent bonanza. It is a crazy time for real estate, that’s no doubt. If you’re like me, the pandemic has increased your habit of casually browsing Zillow and Realtor.com listings (well, I look at StreetEasy, a site for NY real estate only, but you get the picture), wondering what it would feel like to leave my apartment and swap it for a bigger space. I have dogs who would love a backyard. I would love a bigger closet, or, i…
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At the risk of sounding like an imposter myself, I have to ask: What is crime fiction? This is not, perhaps, a question that someone who has just published a crime novel ought to be asking. But the more I think about it, the more trouble I have answering it. The genre’s borders are decidedly blurry. Is a crime novel simply a novel whose plot involves a criminal act? Perhaps we ought to throw in a measure of suspense too. But in that case, Ian McEwan’s Atonement (winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award) should be found on the “mystery and thrillers” shelf along with Gillian Flynn and Jane Harper. Graham Greene famously drew a distinction between his thrille…
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Quiet Time, my first mystery, was a fictionalized version of the brutal murder of a suburban housewife. Not just any housewife, but Betty Frye, on the eve of my marriage to her son. Back in 1973, he and I were college students at CU in Boulder, practicing karate and living together on the Hill. The morning Betty was murdered, I spoke with her; hours later, I saw her killer. Her death made me a crime writer. Quiet Time was my lab for learning fiction craft. The manuscript underwent twenty-odd drafts, each more heavily fictionalized. I wasn’t imaginative enough to invent brand-new characters, though I did change the killer. And the ending was entirely made up, since in rea…
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On Christmas Eve, 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Republic of France, boarded his coach bound for the Paris Opera. His coachman, César, was drunk, and sped recklessly past a cart piled with hay partially blocking the street. Seconds later, the cart exploded. A hundred yards behind, a second coach carrying Bonaparte’s wife, Josephine—delayed by her decision to change scarves—felt the force of the blast, which shattered her window and sent a shard of glass slicing across the hand of her daughter, a fellow passenger. Josephine’s sister-in-law was hurled against the side of the coach, seriously injuring her unborn child. The cask was packed tight with gunpowd…
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I started working at my local library two years ago. After a decade spent in the city, I knew I wasn’t happy and so left the world of finance behind in order to concentrate on writing. It wasn’t planned. I was called into my boss’s office and offered a promotion, and right there and then decided to quit. I’d recently read a book by the author John Hart, and subsequently an interview in which he talked about turning his back on a successful law career in order to spend more time writing. It was hugely inspiring. My wife was a student at the time, and pregnant, and had no idea I wanted to write a book. She was very supportive (and is slowly learning to love me again). I…
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There’s nothing more delicious than a good scandal, and the best scandals are practically a cottage industry, spawning books, movies, even the odd opera or two. Here are six of my favorite scandals and the novels that bring them to life. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes Oh, how they must have gossiped when the original Real Housewife of Sparta ran off with a younger man! I’m talking, of course, about one of the most legendary scandals in history—Helen and Paris. It’s often referred to as an abduction, but most versions show Helen an active participant, throwing off her arranged marriage for an elopement with a sexy Trojan prince. We don’t know if it was historical o…
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The rule of thumb in book publishing is simple: Unless your name is Harper Lee, your first novel will not be your best and most likely won’t be a bestseller either. All other mere mortals in the world must rely on a well-measured publishing axiom known as the learning curve. Tom Straw is no exception to the rule for first-time authors, but the rest of his publishing career broke every rule in the book. The first rule he broke was his identity. It was a closely held secret for seven years. This seven-time New York Times bestselling author (yes, he hit number one), was only outed in recent years and has earned the moniker as the best unknown author on the New York Times li…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Benjamin Wood, A Station on the Path to Something Better (Europa) Benjamin Wood’s emotional noir about a young boy taken on a desperate road trip by his estranged father is as beautifully written as its title is long. The father promises to take his son to the set of a popular TV series he claims to work on, but the journey turns into anything but, as the father’s untruths catch up with him and he resorts to violence to salvage his self-worth. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor Melissa Ginsburg, The House Uptown (Flatiron) In The Hous…
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My brother, an avid backpacker, carries a satellite phone with him in the backcountry. I suppose it is meant for emergencies, although I’m not sure he’s ever used it for that purpose. The most recent message our siblings text thread received from that phone was a joke about how long he would wait in line for an In-N-Out double-double. I thought about this as I read Zoje Stage’s essay “How Do You Write an Isolation Thriller When Everybody Is Connected All The Time?” It is a very good question, one I have been turning over in my head since I read that piece a few weeks ago. My first, and most flippant, reaction was to think, “You set it in space”—which is admittedly a rath…
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I heard about Tony Costa weeks before I met him. I was seven that summer of 1966, when Mom got the job at the Royal Coachman and the three of us shared a single room on the first floor near the office. Louisa and I did our best to stay out of her hair, and whenever I could, I’d tag along behind Cecelia as she made her rounds through the rooms. If she wasn’t humming some church hymn, she was talking about “my Tony.” “When my Tony gets back from his trip, I’ll have him come over and meet you.” “My Tony is a good man.” “I raised my Tony by myself after his father died in the war.” She didn’t say what war, but I figured it was a long time ago and far away. Cecelia talked ab…
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A horse is a horse is a horse is a horse, except in a Western, in which a horse is a horse while also often embodying something deeply metaphorical. Wildness. Freedom. Beauty. Livelihood. Domestication. Friendship. Innocence. Anyway, I watch Westerns worried for the horses. The job of the horse in a Western is to be both ordinary and special—ubiquitous vehicles as much as they are close companions. Sometimes they are a simple ride out of town. Sometimes they are the cowboy’s only friend in the world. In the Western, no figure is more vulnerable than the horse, particularly because eliminating the horse both incapacitates and exposes the cowboy, who is usually the real ta…
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I was in seventh grade when I picked up The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, and my strongest memory of the book is showing my classmate some inventive swear words in the dialog and giggling about it. I’d been reading science fiction for over two years at that point, but Crichton was my introduction to the sci-fi thriller subgenre. I discovered a love for stories with suspense and high action. Fast forward about three decades, and my first novel fits that same profile. While looking for comp titles (i.e. books with a similar style and theme), I noticed something that’s followed me for much of my life: the best known authors of science fiction thrillers are white men.…
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I grew up near three hundred wild acres that contained woodland, marshland, rocky coves, granite ledge, and a mysterious grave. My sisters and I spent countless hours exploring when we were young—fishing for snapper blues and blue crabs, searching for owl pellets, collecting bouquets of wildflowers and marsh grass—so when the time came for me to set The Shadow Box in a wild landscape, that was the one I knew I had to write about. In the novel, Claire Beaudry Chase has been attacked and left for dead. She has to hide out and stay alive, and she uses her own instincts, her knowledge of the woods and shore, and skills taught to her by her father. Her husband is a state pro…
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“He hadn’t wanted to come here. He’d wanted it less and less as the bus traveled further across the wasteland; miles of nothing, just land, empty land. Land that didn’t get anywhere except into more land, and always against the sky the unmoving barrier of mountains. It was like moving into a trap.” The man we know only as Sailor has arrived in Santa Fe at an inauspicious moment: it’s Fiesta weekend. Sailor is a Chicago gangster, single-mindedly hunting his former patron, a U.S. Senator named Douglass: he believes Douglass has cheated him out of a substantial amount of money. So single-minded is Sailor’s pursuit that he didn’t learn about Fiesta before he got on the bus i…
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Juan Pablo Granda stepped into a small office in a middle-class neighborhood in the permanently foggy city of Lima, Perú, on February 18, 2013. The lights were off. He couldn’t see. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Granda began to make out menacing shapes: two men, short and squat, with handguns strapped to their hips. Behind them, their boss sat at a desk. A single-barreled shotgun leaned against the wall. Granda, a thirty-one-year-old Florida State University graduate with degrees in international business and management, wasn’t there to buy cocaine or weapons, as the room’s bristling tension might suggest. He was there to buy gold, the metal that has mystif…
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Picture the most murderous mammal in the world. Not the best predator, taking down prey with a single swipe of a great talon or claw, but the one that excels in slaying its own kind. Are you picturing a human being? Well, you would be wrong. But you might be surprised to know Homo sapiens actually falls at number 30 out of more than a thousand species on the list of animals that most often kill members of their own kind. Humans, it turns out, are just average members of a particularly violent lot, the primates. And the most prolific murderers* in the animal world are a different species altogether. Which, you might ask? Believe it or not, it’s the meerkat, a cute litt…
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It is a truth universally known that if there’s a dead body found with a knife in their back in the middle of library, the police must be called. Or must they? If there is a list of stock characters you must have in a mystery, the police is on that list. From classic mysteries to modern procedurals, police are generally called in when murder is afoot. The roles police play shrink and grow depending on who’s the main character, but they always come in the end. They are the voice of reason that clears confusion after a locked room mystery at a dinner party gone wrong. They are there to capture a murderer who outsmarted the amateur detective. They might be the anonymous gr…
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A wave of discontent settled over the dusty, low-lit room. The momentary stunned silence crumbled by a low growling hiss. “Booo.” The jeer lingered as all eyes fell on the speaker. Reverberating from a back corner of the room, the sneer seemed surprisingly appreciated. It was obvious he’d felt the disaffection his words brought. He ran his fingers through his summer bleached blond hair, pushing the stray strands back in place. The cheeky smile that had curled at the end of the lips when he first began to speak was put on pause as his eyes drifted to the place the word of scorn had emanated from. “We’re going to, uhm . . . to erect a mall.” He swallowed hard. “A mini ma…
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So, this weekend, every one of us on the CrimeReads staff received texts and emails and notifications from those who know us (people and the internet) to inform us about a new musical sketch that premiered on Saturday Night Live, in which several women, played by Kate McKinnon, Melissa Villaseñor, Ego Nwodim, and Chloe Fineman, reveal their secret loves of murdery true crime shows. So we’re posting it here, in case you missed it, because it is not to be missed. You’re going to laugh, trust us. View the full article
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Abigail Dean, Girl A (Viking) “Girl A, Abigail Dean’s debut novel, shares a kinship with Emma Donoghue’s Room and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones in its harrowing portrayal of trauma. Like those titles, Girl A is certain to rouse strong emotions. It is a haunting, powerful book, the mystery at its heart not who committed a crime, but how to carry on with life in its aftermath … I kept wanting to read Girl A as a fairy tale or parable, to cauterize some of the suffering in its pages, but Dean resists that impulse at every turn, always rooting Lex’s story in the real. Dean looks squarely at …
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They were the all-American couple and their town had been called the typical small American city. The daughter of a doctor and the son of a factory owner, they went to the privileged high school on the rich side of town. Their futures were bright. But the September 1985 murders of Kimberly Dowell, 15, and Ethan Dixon, 16, ended the promise of high school graduation, college years and long, fulfilling lives. And their murders left a mark on the city of Muncie, Indiana: bereft parents, saddened classmates, frustrated investigators. In 1997, my frequent co-author, Douglas Walker, and I first wrote, for The Star Press newspaper where we were reporters, about the tragic de…
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Last November, when it was revealed that Harvard’s fencing coach had allegedly accepted $1.5 million in payments from a wealthy, Maryland businessman in exchange for admitting his two sons into Harvard through its fencing program, the story generated shock, but not awe. After all, it was all so familiar. The thirty plus crazy-rich parents that made audacious headlines in March of 2019—including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin—were charged with paying as much as $1.2 million to get their kids into top institutions like Yale, Stanford and the University of Southern California. Their gateway conspirator was William “Rick” Singer, an independent college counselo…
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Hello chums. This is a very short post whose sole intention is to provide you with access to the following hysterical sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look, the British sketch show featuring the comedy duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb. In this skit, Mitchell and Webb play two famous actors (Michael and Alec) whose egos get the better of them while acting as Holmes and Watson. And then there’s some bonus footage where Mitchell and Webb play themselves, off-camera, while waiting to film the Holmes and Watson sketch. (Mitchell and Webb have other, sadder, Holmes/Watson content, but that is for another post on another day.) For what it’s worth, I laughed so long and ha…
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The SHOT Show held annually in Las Vegas is a multicolored, multifaceted, overwhelming, ballistic, gargantuan, flamboyant, and slightly surreal look at the U.S. firearms industry. The biggest gun trade show on the planet fills the sprawling Sands Expo and Convention Center, boasting more than 700,000 square feet of exhibition space. Closed to the public, it attracts over sixty thousand people from the industry, including gun makers, gun importers, gun dealers, gun repairers, gun specialist lawyers, gun trainers, gun lobbyists, and gun anything else you can think of. Representatives from armies and police forces around the world attend, sealing bulk orders in meetings in g…
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Stephen King's War on Plot
An Algonkian Success Story
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Sci-Fi, Scots, & More
Unbuttoning the CEO Unbuttoning the CEO by Mia Sosa is 99c! This contemporary romance has a bit of a taboo relationship element. However, I’m skeptical about the hero and his redemption arc. Reckless driving is no joke. This is also part of the Forever Yours digital imprint, so it’s a little on the shorter side at less than 300 pages. WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T MIX BUSINESS WITH PLEASURE? As the CEO of a large tech company and a semi-reformed bad boy, Ethan Hill is used to calling the shots. But -
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a:The Odyssey Writing Workshop
The Odyssey Writing Workshop One of the top workshops in the world for writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror Held at Saint Anselm College, Manchester, NH, June 7-July 16, 2021 Only 15 students. The most intense learning experience you’ll ever have. Application deadline: April 1 Six weeks of directed study with Jeanne Cavelos, former senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell, bestselling author, and winner of the World Fantasy Award Guest Lecturers: David Farland * Gregory Ashe * Meagan Spooner Djéli Clark * Melissa Scott * Sheree Renée Thomas Virtual Guests: David Brin * -
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The Heiress by Molly Greeley
TW: child abuse, drug abuse, addiction and recovery Fans of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice might recall meeting Anne de Bourgh for a hot minute and also hearing her referred to incessantly by her domineering mother, Lady Catherine. The Heiress tells Anne’s story from her point of view, beginning in early childhood and extending through the entirety of her life. This book was not what I expected, but I loved it once I adjusted to its tone. While The Heiress contains a romance, it is less about romance and much more about the search of the protagonist for autonomy and purpose in her li -
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a:WOW! Interview with Contest Runner Up Courtney Harler for "Divorce Ranch"
Congratulations to Courtney Harler and Divorce Ranch and all the winners of our 2021 Quarter 1 Creative Non-Fiction Essay Contest! Courtney's Bio: Courtney Harler is a freelance writer, editor, and educator based in Las Vegas, Nevada. She holds an MFA from Sierra Nevada University (2017) and an MA from Eastern Washington University (2013). Courtney has been honored by fellowships from Writing By Writers, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Nevada Arts Council. Courtney’s creative work—which includes poems, flash fictions, short stories, literary analyses, craft essays, book and film revi -
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Fantasy, Historical Romance, & More
All In RECOMMENDED: All In by Simona Ahrnstedt is $1.99! Redheadedgirl gave the book an A: I felt like this was full of Shakespearean drama, and scheming families, and hot sex, and gorgeous clothes, but also some important things to say about how the world is functioning. There’s a lot going on, though, and the ending a tad rushed. In the cutthroat world of Sweden’s financial elite, no one knows that better than corporate raider David Hammar. Ruthless. Notorious. Unstoppable. He’s out to -
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She's a Literary Agent
Overall, this is a great, comprehensive video for new writers just starting out. Heck, it's also good for writers who just finished their first manuscript and have no clue what to do next. Something I very much appreciate about this video is the tempering of expectations, and the emphasis on curating writing advice by its source. Too often I see new writers falling down rabbit holes of terrible advice from friends, family, or writing groups who don't quite know what they're talking about. For new writers, one of the best ways to learn is to know WHO and WHERE to learn from. I once joined -
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a:Congrats on Finishing Your Quarantine Novel
* sense of humor required Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody. Happy Quarantiniversary! Time flies, does it not? Now we’re one year into the pandemic, and many of you reading this have already been vaccinated. It’s time to celebrate not just the prospect of life returning to normal, but also your forthcoming literary success. When all this nonsense started, writers everywhere said, “This sucks, but at least I’ll have more time to write.” A w -
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a:Interview with Meagan Spooner, Instructor with Odyssey Writing Workshop
Photo by Christopher TovoToday I am excited to have another instructor from Odyssey Writing Workshop: author Meagan Spooner. Meagan Spooner will be a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Writing Workshop, where she will discuss techniques for building characters and character arcs, participate in workshopping sessions, and meet in private conferences with students. She grew up reading and writing every spare moment of the day, while dreaming about life as an archaeologist, a marine biologist, an astronaut. She graduated from Odyssey in 2009 and currently lives and writes in Asheville, -
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Outlawed by Anna North
A- Outlawed by Anna North January 5, 2021 · Bloomsbury Publishing TW/CW for the book and this review: discussions of infertility, death in childbirth. Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wish I could read a Western that has a queer girl gang”? Well, guess what? I have great news. While I don’t typically read Westerns, I was drawn in by the blurb for Outlawed: The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada’s life looks good; she loves her -
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She's a Literary Agent
Her take on the learning curve to becoming a marketable author was realistic. The special "helium voice" effects were annoying, but her delivery overall was professional. Check the box with her on: - DO YOUR HOMEWORK on plot, characters, etc. - READ BOOKS on how to write a novel (okay, but the right ones). - OUTLINING a better idea than PANTSING. Uncheck the box on: - READ BLOGS AND ONLINE VIDEOS to learn how to write. They will inevitably be filled with quasi-productive, very poor, or contradictory advice unless chosen very selectively. How is a neophyte novel wr -
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She's a Literary Agent
Meg Latorre's "11 ways to improve your writing" are worth learning about if you're a new writer. While I find that she covers a lot of the same points that have already been addressed in other videos, there were a couple things that stood out that I think new writers should definitely take note of. Critique groups vs. beta readers - Meg takes the time to explain the difference between these and why you would find them useful during the editing phase of your manuscript. More than once she kindly encouraged writers to be open to making changes to their story upon receiving constructive crit -
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Staff Picks: Raisins, Rhythm, and Reality
Allan Gurganus. Photo: © Roger Haile. Courtesy of W. W. Norton. In his Art of Fiction interview, Allan Gurganus preaches the power of the sentence. But for me, the real satisfaction to be had from the newly released Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus comes from the layers: a shrewd grad student’s thrifting trip becomes the story of a portrait, which is actually the story of a tragic moment in a small town’s history; a local news report becomes a firsthand account of the incident told by a police officer to his tape recorder. (In fact, local news reporters are more than once a way of gettin -
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Episode 447, Your Transcript is Ready!
http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/themes/smartbitches/images/podcast/header_05c.jpg The transcript for Podcast 447. Hanging Out with Sarah J. Maas has been posted! This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks. ❤ Click here to subscribe to The Podcast → View the full article -
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Hot Contemporaries, Princess Brides, & More
Hot and Badgered Hot and Badgered by Shelly Laurenston is $1.99! This is the first book in the Honey Badger Chronicles. Sarah read this one and gave it a B grade: Among my favorite things about Laurenston’s writing is how very affirming and inspiring and a whole lot of fun it is, because angry, fearless women make room for themselves, they get shit done, and they’re the heroines. More honey badgers, please. It’s not every day that a beautiful naked woman falls out of the sky and lands fac -
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Author Spotlight – Gabriela Houston (THE SECOND BELL)
Gabriela Houston is a London-based writer. She was born in Poland and raised in a book-loving household on the nourishing diet of mythologies, classics and graphic novels. She had spent much of her early school years holed up in the library, only feeling truly herself in the company of Jack London’s trappers and Lucy Maud Montgomery’s red-headed orphan, among many others. She came to the UK at 19 to follow her passion for literature and she completed her undergraduate and Masters degrees at Royal Holloway, University of London. After her studies she worked in publishing for a few years. She
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