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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Any study of Aphra Behn is really a study of shifting disguises and political guesswork. She is remembered in history as the first woman to make a living by writing in English, all the way back in the seventeenth century. Few know that she became a writer while exploring her first intriguing career: Spy for the British crown. Fittingly for a spy, Behn was secretive and her reputed garrulity among friends did not extend to anything autobiographical for future generations to rely on. Most of what we know of her is uncertain, gleaned from the literature she left us. Her espionage career might have begun in 1659, when she was about nineteen years old. The death of Oliver Cr…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Steve Cavanagh, Kill for Me Kill For You (Atria) “Explosive, game-changing reveals that, combined with an uncommon attunement to the central characters’ emotional arcs, make for a wild, deliciously satisfying ride.” –Publishers Weekly Sulari Gentill, The Mystery Writer (Poisoned Pen Press) “Gentill’s worthwhile novel is full of compelling characters, including doomsday preppers, online conspiracy theorists, and overzealous publishing agents. Recommended for readers who enjoy mysteries from Riley Sager, Ruth Ware, or Louise Penny.” –Library Journal Nova Jacobs, The Stars Turned…
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If Chris Bohjalian were to write a memoir—or a manifesto on craft—it could be called: I was a teenage magician. It’s a history that has served him well. A master of misdirection, Bohjalian—the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books including The Lioness and The Flight Attendant—occupies unique territory in the literary landscape. While his novels often incorporate crime, they aren’t often considered crime novels (which is why you’ll usually find them shelved in Fiction as opposed to Mystery). And yet Bohjalian considers crime his MacGuffin, or the pistol that marks an opening salvo. Case in point: While Bohjalian’s newest genre-bender, The Princ…
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Who is a lady going to call if she’s been wronged by an insufferable rake in Victorian England? If the lady is the main character in a historical romance, a lady’s reputation—and the reader’s favorite tropes—call for the FPI. The Fictional Private Investigator. Unlike PIs in contemporary crime fiction, the FPIs of historical romance do not sit outside a cheating man’s house in a beat-up Ford peeing in a bottle. Instead, they have a backstory that leaves them flawed and brooding, usually in possession of a small fortune or at least enough money to make a good match, and with muscular forearms. (That last part is just my humble opinion.) My latest release, The Love Remed…
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In The Hunter, her ninth novel, Irish-American author Tana French takes us back to the small West Ireland village that she introduced in The Searcher. Retired detective Cal Hooper has made a home in Ardnakelty at the foot of the mountain, away from police cases and the city bustle. It’s a blazing hot summer, and while farmers worry about their crops, Cal’s life seems to have settled in a peaceful groove. His relationship with local Lena is going strong; meanwhile Cal keeps a watchful eye over teenage neighbor Trey, his now trusted carpentry assistant. But Cal’s makeshift family comes under threat when Trey’s father, Johnny, marches back into town with a scheme to find gol…
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Remember Pizzagate? In 2016, a conspiracy theory that high-ranking Democrats were running a pedophile ring out of a D.C. pizzeria compelled a man to open fire inside the restaurant in an attempt to rescue the imprisoned children, who didn’t exist. The story dominated headlines for five minutes before fading into the category of “well, that happened.” The bamboozled gunman, Edgar Maddison Welch, was sent to jail and mostly forgotten, his identity blurring into an avatar for a certain set of social anxieties—that liberalism breeds perversion, that politicians lie, that modern life is emasculating. Any larger lessons which Pizzagate may have held for society were swiftly bur…
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As a writer of narratives, I’m leery of them. Especially historical ones. I’m not skeptical of events; I’m skeptical of wording and connective tissue. Of the clean causality. Take the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. (Seven men murdered in a garage, no one was ever convicted). Because speculating on whodunits is great fun, and because politicians at the time did what they do—spun the events to their advantage—and because that advantage played into anti-gangland sentiment that eventually, indirectly resulted in a RICO case against Al Capone (who was never connected, materially, to the murders), I wasted several hours of my youth waiting for Geraldo to open an empty vault. A…
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Here are some of the trickiest pitfalls to sidestep while crafting your novel. Remember, in each pitfall to be avoided is also an opportunity to be seized. Don’t set the stakes too low. Something vital has to be at risk. Anything from one person’s life to the survival of all humankind. Don’t wait. Hook your reader immediately. Maybe with a bang. My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. The beginning of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold draws you right in with a startling detail that throw…
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At the turn of the twentieth century, American crime fiction was at a shallow ebb. Anna Katharine Green, who had achieved great success with The Leavenworth Case in 1887, continued to produce popular novels (and would do so until 1923), but the tastes of American readers of mystery fiction had turned to England. Certainly the popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories had focused attention on British crime writing, but not until Mary Roberts Rinehart, whose first novel appeared in 1908, the popular The Circular Staircase, did American mystery writers again achieve success. It is not surprising, then, that Richard Harding Davis— the most popular American journalist of the …
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CrimeReads editors make their selections for the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Andrew Boryga, Victim (Doubleday) In Boryga’s debut novel, Victim, a young hustler on the rise learns to manipulate the currency of identity as he bends the truth about his past and establishes himself in the world of New York media and letters. The satire in this novel comes in sharp and merciless, but the friendship at the story’s center steals the show, rounding out all the complexities and contradictions of two young men on different sides of the truth. Boryga is a keen observer of culture and a storyteller with style to spare. –DM Jennifer Croft, The E…
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In a late episode of Better Call Saul, Saul Goodman beseeches his wife Kim Wexler, “What’s done can be undone.” Caught up in a web of lies and deaths, and questioning what she has become along the way, Kim has relinquished her law license, and Saul implores her to undo her decision in an act of desperation. He knows what she has worked to achieve; he knows the people she has helped. He knows that their partnership is on the line. His plea is also an interesting inversion of a line from Shakespeare’s historic play, Macbeth. Lady Macbeth, haunted by remorse to the point of bloody hallucinations, knows there is no going back from the murderous machinations she and her husba…
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Sometimes novels inadvertently reflect some aspect of the current zeitgeist, and Irish writer Claire Coughlan’s first one is this kind of story. Set in 1968 during the Christmas season, Where They Lie is a complex tale with a large cast—both living and dead—about the mysterious disappearance in 1943 of a theatre actress, Julia Bridges, and a former mid-wife, Gloria Fitzpatrick, who may or may not have played a role in that disappearance. Gloria was also a patron of the theatre where Julia performed. While never charged with a crime related to Julia’s disappearance, in 1956 Gloria was sentenced to hang for performing a backstreet abortion. Fast forward to the night befo…
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I joined my first cult when I was…just kidding. Mostly. When I was born in the early 80s, my parents were part of a church in Virginia Beach, an area influenced by the likes of Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network as well as Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. These are the kinds of organizations that helped fuel the Satanic Panic, decrying games like Dungeons & Dragons and any Halloween celebration that wasn’t spent as a simple “Harvest Festival” in a church gym. My family’s Southern Baptist Church was no exception, inviting my parents to break their classic rock records in order to avoid “backmasking,” the supposed subliminal evil messages encoded in rock s…
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I don’t think of myself as a reader or writer of crime novels, and yet (knocking on my own skull to see if anyone’s inside) almost all of my novels do have a crime—or a strange disappearance or a person concealing their identity or a similar mystery. My latest novel, Discipline, involves three stolen paintings, a no-doubt-about-it-crime story, inspired (in part) by reading about a man fleeing from police who, perhaps to conceal evidence, burned two of a famous painter’s canvases by the side of the road. I realize (more knocking on my own head) that I loved Donna Tartt’s A Secret History and am a fan of Kate Atkinson’s fantastic Detective Brody series, so I am as delud…
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“They had gold and my baby was sick.” —Mahin Qadiri About ninety-five miles northwest of the Iranian capital Tehran is the city of Qazvin. Located on the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, it has a population of more than four hundred thousand people. It’s a place rich in cultural and historical significance. It’s also a place where people are turning up dead. A man is murdered in 2006. Between February and May 2009, five women are murdered. The method used in the killings is similar, as is the method by which the bodies are disposed of. Each of the victims has been strangled and, apart from the first victim, all of them are women. Specifically, older women. Is th…
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Anyone who knows me, or has read my second book, or has stood too close to me at a bookstore knows I despise the concept of genre. I despise the tweed coat that genre wears when it decides what is literary and what is not. I despise the lab coat genre wears when it separates hard sci-fi from soft sci-fi. I despise genre’s internalized misogyny as it reliably separates anything feminine into whatever category is least likely to garner acclaim. There is one thing, though, that I find genre invaluable for: communicating a contract with the reader. Imagine a line with “Safety” at one end and “Threat” at the other. Genre determines where on this line your reader can expect t…
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I was 25 years old and had a novel written when someone named the feeling that has chased me my entire life. Survivor’s guilt. I sat on a Zoom call with someone I didn’t know, but who’d read my debut novel and used these two words to describe it like it was nothing more than a theme. She asked me how survivor’s guilt impacted me as a Syrian American. I stared back at her blankly. Some people search their whole lives for a diagnosis—visiting countless experts, regurgitating their symptoms—until they obtain the validation that comes with uncovering what is wrong with them. At first, I liked it: Two words that captured what I’d needed ninety thousand words of a novel to u…
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I’d been told to wait at the airport for an official car to arrive. There were always detailed, specific instructions in case the car was late or didn’t show up at all. Under no circumstance was I, a single, unescorted woman, to get into a “taxi.” That would be “provocative” behavior, marking me as a woman looking for trouble, so instead I sat on an airport bench and waited. All too aware of the leering stares of men walking by, I unzipped my bag and retrieved the large shawl packed by Maggie, our housekeeper and lifelong friend. I draped it over my bare arms, eager to cover my pale skin. The next morning, I was to report to the field office. I was in my mid-twenties b…
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In the labyrinthine world of crime fiction, few elements stir the plot’s pot as effectively as sibling bonds. The mercurial relationships between sisters and brothers carry lifetimes of camaraderie, shorthand, grudges, tiny triumphs, and shared histories. They can be crucibles for narrative tension and foundations for epic plot twists. I believe that when siblings are centered in mysteries—particularly those interested in intersectional feminism and queer and trans identities—the narrative stakes feel amplified and nuanced. These four novels show us how sibling relationships can be much more than backdrops or backstories in crime fiction, supercharging narratives with pri…
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When people first meet authors, they always ask the same question—how did you get started in this business? I’m a bit a rarity. Wrote my first novel at seventeen, sold it at twenty, hit the bestseller lists at twenty-eight. Trust me, if you’d told my 12-year old bookworm self, armed with a library pass and overactive imagination, that this would be my life, I never would’ve believed it. And yet, a sometimes heartbreaking, always incredible three decades later, here I am. Better yet, here’s what I’ve learned along the way. 1. Write from the Heart Needless to say, I’ve sat through a lot of advice on trends over the years. Write whatever you want to write…but make it about…
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I am a pony. But not just any pony. I am a pony who is bent on revenge. I am the Iago of ponies, a furry Fury. I am both adorable and devious, and, until I get what I want, I’m going to make every human I meet pay for your collective crimes. I am a tiny, mop-topped demon, and I am coming for you. Picture a riding stable. If you haven’t been in one, a row of horses hang their heads over their stall doors, gently bobbing to escape the flies, pricking their ears when a human appears who might have a carrot or a peppermint in her pocket. In the riding arena, a sandy rectangle outlined by a white wooden fence that could use a coat of paint, there’s a small dapple gray pony n…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Lisa Gardner, Still See You Everywhere (Grand Central) “Gardner skillfully weaves threats into this pitch-perfect variation of the locked-room mystery, pitting ‘missing person finder’ Frankie Elkin against an untamed tropical environment, a raging serial killer, a diabolical saboteur, and her own misleading tunnel vision… Gardner’s Frankie Elkin series gets more magnetizing with each installment.” –Booklist Deanna Raybourn, A Grave Robbery (Berkley) “The ninth Veronica Speedwell book, following A Sinister Revenge, spins off Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s possibly the best in t…
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Mention the word “thriller” in the same sentence as Washington, D.C., and most people conjure up fast-paced tales of spies, political intrigue, and military operations. Mystery and thriller writers like David Baldacci, Margaret Truman, Julie Hyzy, and Tom Clancy, to name just a few, have had huge success mining the halls of power at the Capitol or settings like the White House. But there’s more to the DMV— as locals call the District, Maryland, and Virginia — than politics. It’s a city like any other, a place where ordinary people navigate relationships, raise families, care for ailing parents, and occasionally stumble across a dead body. All three of my domestic suspen…
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What could be more destabilizing—or trail more fascinating narrative threads—than a person vanishing without a trace? It’s no mystery why countless authors kick off their books with people gone missing. Marry this trope with speculative fiction, and you’ve got stories whose possibilities are literally limitless. In my new book, The Bad Ones, four people vanish from around a wintry suburb in a single night. The best friend of one of the lost learns that a slumber party game centered around a figure of local lore is key in unlocking the mystery. Here are six more supernatural and horror-inflected stories in which vanishings drive the plot. Knock Knock, Open Wide, by Nei…
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Seems things can be fun in Tijuana, Mexico – TJ to the initiated – but things can also go very, very wrong. Of course a popular destination being right on the US-Mexico border, with two million people, a population seriously swelled by sojourning day trippers and US college students looking for adventure plus a few DEA agents and cross-border migrants waiting for their chance to head north. Home to the infamous Tijuana Cartel of course, nobody will be surprised to know Tijuana is a narcotics smuggling centre. The drug wars were known for their super violent turf battles between 2007 and 2010. Homicides peaked in 2010 – when 844 people were killed. In May 2022, it was repo…
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