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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Cardiologist Doug “D.P.” Lyle kept telling himself he would write a novel someday—someday when he finally retired. His biggest problem was he loved his career and had no plans to retire. Was this just an excuse not to write? He finally asked himself the age-old cliché: “If not now, when?” Now finally won out when he was about to turn 50 and “someday” became his second career. He wrote. And wrote. For ten years he wrote, enduring 27 drafts. Finally, he completed his novel Stress Fracture. It was his first professionally published novel, although he’d self-published an earlier one. He’d also had several non-fiction books published on forensics topics for writers—he is a do…
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Set largely during covid lockdown, Sing Her Down introduces Florida, recently released from prison due to issues with overcrowding, thus finding herself with a second chance at life. Pursued by a woman named Dios, also recently released from the same prison, Florida has to reckon with her own past and what the future might hold in a world that seems to be on fire, the pandemic only intensifying the sense of desperation that permeates Florida’s world. Florida skips parole and travels out of state to find her most prized possession, a car she left behind when she was locked away—only Dios, and Florida’s own true nature, can’t seem to leave Florida alone. Sing Her Down pr…
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The 1920s was a decade of strict social hierarchies, with huge divides between wealthy elites and poor workers, bias against immigrants, racial segregation, and laws against homosexual activity. But the free-for-all nightlife of the Jazz Age was built around embracing everything naughty, illegal, and new. This meant that at night, many of those strict hierarchies came toppling down. Prohibition was created by the Eighteenth Amendment, and it ended the nationwide production, import, transport, and sale of alcoholic beverages… in theory. In reality, it was easier to get a drink during Prohibition than it was after. When liquor was illegal, it was unregulated, and speakeas…
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The appeal of the procedural is built upon a simple human desire: we love to solve problems, and we love to watch others solve them. Even better when solving a problem feels like revealing a hidden connection beneath the skin of the world. In a class I teach on the procedural genre, we start with Poe and Doyle and Collins and Sayers and work our way to Mosley and French. We watch the Spielberg-directed pilot episode of Columbo, which is (apologies for the fifty-year-old spoiler) about a murderous mystery novelist. We watch the crass pilot of Law & Order: SVU, studded with homophobia and transphobia, and then we read Carmen Maria Machado’s hallucinatory novella “Espec…
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Die Hard had started with a man named Roderick going to see a movie in 1975. Novelist Roderick Thorp, a burly, bald former private investigator best known for his novel The Detective, bought a ticket for The Towering Inferno, sat through 165 minutes of Paul Newman and Steve McQueen trying to save a large ensemble cast of tanned celebrities, and then went home and had a horrific nightmare. Just as the image of a Terminator rising from flames first came to James Cameron in a bad dream, so Thorpe that night imagined a lone figure trapped in a high-rise, fleeing men with guns. He expanded the image into a 1979 sequel to The Detective, Nothing Lasts Forever, in which a reti…
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The original opening credits of “Lou Grant,” the late-1970s, early 1980s TV series about the newspaper business, are of a particular time but also timeless. The credits montage for the first season shows a bird sitting in a tree, trees being chopped down and turned into newsprint, the reporters and editors of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune gathering news and writing stories, rolled-up newspapers being thrown into puddles and onto roofs and, finally, the newspaper being used to line the floor of a birdcage. The life of a newspaper – and a newsroom, for that matter – is very different now than in 1977. To be sure, print editions are still produced and delivered, some…
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There are several reasons why corporations and/or billionaire CEOs make such good villains in works of fiction. First, all mysteries and thrillers need a power imbalance favoring the bad guy. Second, because in real life, we keep seeing tech titans do reprehensible, insane and/or criminal things. And third, as Arthur C. Clarke told us, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Let me take on that last one first: High tech corporations do stuff that, to a guy like me with a bachelor of arts degree in political science, is simply arcane. I read articles about, or ads for, Silicon Forest juggernauts and realize: I don’t know what any of those n…
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Horses are highly sensitive herd animals and as such, they reflect the emotions of those around them—including their human partners. To quote my latest novel, Girls and their Horses, “Horses are like mirrors. They reflect all the best parts and all worst parts of ourselves back at us.” Horses in fiction are often used to echo the qualities of their human counterparts. They also inspire fast-paced, passionate stories of determination. Horses are often used to represent deeper emotional struggles or iron will. While perhaps not strictly thrillers, the following stories are fast-paced, thrilling and filled with twists. Dark Horses by Susan Mihalic \Dark Horses tells the…
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It’s the not knowing, really, Isn’t it?. When we read mysteries and thrillers centered around solving a murder, we know the person is dead… but a missing persons case opens up a slew of psychological aspects to explore. There is no closure in cases of people disappearing. There is never an ability to mourn and move on because there is still a lingering flicker of hope. A character holding onto hope and simultaneously torturing themselves with endless possible worst-case scenarios is what really draws us into missing persons stories and what makes us resonate with them–empathize with the pain and grief of the family. Not only can we deeply sympathize with the character se…
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Janice drove slowly to avoid jostling the plastic containers of food on the floor behind her seat. She had better ones at home, but her father was likely to use them for storing nuts and bolts. She brought him food twice a week and resented it—the cooking, the drive, the awkward struggle for a topic other than weather or his cars. It was a matter of proximity. Janice was the oldest of his four adult kids and the only one who lived close. She often wished he’d died before her mother. With his wife gone he’d turned useless and low. Nothing engaged him but working on cars and taking care of his chickens. At the turnoff for his holler, she tried to straddle the mud holes, an…
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I was born into a second-floor flat on the Lagos mainland. It was the kind of flat with a living room that blurred into pale muslins of smoke whenever we forgot to shut the kitchen door before turning on the cooker. Outside the flat’s door, stray dogs and cocks bathed in the afternoon heat and rangy cats maundered through refuse for abandoned ponmo. In the mornings, I would rush out the flat to buy powdered milk and butter mints on credit from far mallam, a tall smiling Hausa man whose corrugated metal kiosk flanked our building. In the evenings, I would stand by my bedroom’s louvers to watch the neighbors perform ablution outside the estate’s mosque, a sea of plastic ket…
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I wish I was the kind of person who could live happily in all kinds of places. Don’t get me wrong; I love to travel, and I’ve lived in most regions of the country at one time or another, from Washington, DC to the Central Coast of California, to Missouri and northern Michigan. There were things I liked about each of the cities and small towns I briefly called home, but I couldn’t see myself settling permanently in any of them, and after a while I figured out why: I’m a Southerner. This is partly background, partly temperament. My father’s family settled in Virginia in the mid-nineteenth century, and I feel in a way that’s hard to put into words that the Blue Ridge Mounta…
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The success of Thomas Harris’s “Silence of the Lambs” unleashed a tide of serial killer novels throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s. You couldn’t walk through the front door of a bookstore or past an airport book kiosk without spying at least three or four titles dedicated to a mad butcher with a pun-y nickname and an inventive (or derivative) modus operandi. While many authors of those books succeeded wildly (including Harris himself, who followed up “Silence” with two sequels), the genre’s omnipresence put it at risk of exhaustion. How many ways can a diabolical genius kill the undeserving or hold a city hostage? How many different psychologists and cops can you set against …
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I’ve often, in my mind, likened the perfect reading experience to sitting in a bar and finding myself drawn—at first reluctantly, then less so all the time—into a stranger’s story. There’s something unique and compelling in that narrative space, and it’s an effect Jon Michaud conjures up masterfully in his new book, Last Call at Coogan’s: The Life and Death of a Neighborhood Bar. For a span of about thirty-five years, until its 2020 closure, Coogan’s was an uptown institution: an Irish bar in a Dominican stronghold, marrying the saloon ideals of a bygone New York with the practical, workaday concerns of a neighborhood in need of meeting spaces. Michaud, a talented noveli…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Ashley Audrain, The Whispers (Pamela Dorman) “The novel soars via Audrain’s clever revelations of the ways her protagonists’ lives are linked in ways they never suspected. Both artful and pulse pounding, this isn’t easily shaken.” –Publishers Weekly Paul Goldberg, The Dissident (FSG) “[A] darkly comic tale . . . A refreshing and literary take on the genre that appeals to the intellect as well as the pulse.” –Library Journal S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron) “The hard-edged storytelling is supplemented by richly developed characters, especially Titus and his fami…
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With the pool at your feet and a cool beverage nearby, summer is the perfect time to pick up these novels and get lost in their pages. Queer thrillers and mysteries have a long history of offering fresh perspectives on traditional modes of crime fiction, whether it’s hard-hitting noir, historical thriller, detective story, or the cozy (the queer cozy, a.k.a. quozy). The genre boasts legendary writers—Joseph Hansen, Val McDermid, Michael Nava, Katherine V. Forrest, Ellen Hart, and Patricia Highsmith, to name a few—and of course, exciting newer voices, a sampling you’ll discover in the round-up of spring and summer releases below. Each quarter, Queer Crime Writers will hig…
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Panama City, capital of the Republic of Panama. Nine hundred thousand people with rather a lot of banks and lawyers as well as being, of course, on the transcontinental canal bisecting the narrow isthmus between the Caribbean and the Pacific. The city has been sacked several times since its foundation in the early 1500s – Spaniard vs Genoese; privateer vs mercenary, General Noriega vs the US military. First railroads, and then canals, brought American and French influence, as well as migrants from the Caribbean and across Latin America, into the city, turning it into a vibrant and lively, though segregated and often socially enflamed, city. And that canal – mired in corru…
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This year marks the 125th anniversary of one of the most influential ghost stories ever written. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is a novella of shadows, lurking dread and psychological menace. The story is deceptively simple: a vulnerable, highly sensitive young woman takes the position of governess at Bly, a remote manor house. The children she is employed to care for, Miles and Flora, are delightful, and at first Bly seems to be a place of sun-dappled sanctuary. That idyll is soon shattered. The (unnamed) governess’s pleasure in the role swiftly turns to terror when she becomes convinced that the manor, and particularly the children, are haunted by the ghosts of …
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Are you worried about the future of, well, just about everything, given the decidedly-not-creeping rise of AI? The way concepts like “deep learning” and “neural networks” will soon worm their way into all manner of media, from podcasting to my own dearly beloved scribbling? I know that AI is nothing new (Philip K. Dick was writing about the concept way back in the ‘60s), that the current model upon which the open-use version of ChatGPT is based is not “new” itself. Instead, it’s stuck in a Palm Springs-style time loop of sorts (its knowledge base stops at September 2021.) Back in September 2021, generative AI was the furthest thing from my mind. I was fresh off a road …
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If I could have one person with me in an emergency, it would be a mother. Mothers, shepherds of the toddlers, the most chaotic group to herd. Mothers, whose bags are filled with every conceivable tool plus snacks. Mothers, whose transition into motherhood is such a total and radical transformation, and yet, they find ways to adapt. While my debut novel, The Perfect Ones, centers on the mysterious disappearance of an online influencer on a promotional trip to Iceland, I think the heart of the book is motherhood and the profound effect it has on women. I wanted to explore how motherhood drives the women in my story—and how, sometimes, it doesn’t. Because as a mother, I thi…
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I have a confession to make: I can’t watch horror films. As an author of dark and violent novels, you would have thought I would devour them but no. They scare the crap out of me. But what I do love are serial killer books. I save them for the downtime. For the gaps in between writing when my life is taken up with the minutiae of life I’ve forgotten about while I’ve been buried, trying to hit a deadline. I store novels like a squirrel hoarding nuts for winter, waiting for the time when it’s safe to catch up on what I’ve missed; when I’m sure I’m not going to subconsciously feed a plot line into my current work in progress. Why the difference? Who knows. Maybe, when I re…
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Sleuthing in Regency England is a tough gig, especially for a lady. And even more so for that that lady’s creator. Namely me. Like most writers of historical mysteries, I had to solve several problems created by the realities of my historical setting to write my Regency lady sleuths in The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies. The ‘Ladies” of the novel are Lady Augusta and Lady Julia Colebrook, two fierce 42-year-old spinster sisters who use their privilege and invisibility as ‘old maids’ to solve mysteries and extract other women out of perilous situations in 1812. I call the novel a serious romp, and I chose to reach for a very high level of historical authentici…
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The flowers are blooming, the temperatures are climbing, the schools are out and summer reading season is officially in full swing. These June releases, featuring historical mysteries, psychological suspense, American gothics, supernatural thrillers, and classic espionage. There’s also new books from big names, as well as quite a few new voices to discover. So grab your pool towel, your sunglasses, and your 50+ SPF sunscreen, and enjoy! Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant (Knopf) I just got my advance copy of Clémence Michallon’s much-anticipated new novel and I *can* confirm that it’s worth the hype!! It is a beautifully and thoughtfully written book with a pitch-p…
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As essential to the world of mystery novels as arsenic-laced sugar cubes or blackmail from beyond the grave, the remote country estate pops up in hundreds mystery novels from masters of the genre like Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But each of those writers is distinctly of their setting and time period, of course, as most were publishing their celebrated works prior to World War II, and those listed are of the British Isles or from a territory of the Commonwealth. American writers, being slightly less defined by legally entrenched aristocracy, can’t as easily swoop its detectives and do-gooders into manorial seats as caval…
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Imagine you’re trapped in a locked room, forced to use your deductive reasoning, cunning, and wit to escape. Now up the ante with a ticking time bomb set to detonate in less than a minute. To make things worse, each incorrect solution speeds up the countdown clock. Finally, throw in some cutthroat competitors, and only one of you is allowed to make it out alive. If this sounds like the makings of a great read, you’re not alone. Locked room mysteries have made a comeback, but with an added twist of grisly consequences and diabolical machinations on the part of the one pulling the strings. People are hard-wired to seek answers. Since ancient times, humans have been for…
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