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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I used to be a stalker. In college, I chose my study spots on the campus green so I’d have a direct line of sight to my crush’s dorm. A few years later, I pored over my work crush’s Facebook page, analyzing whether the woman he held close in a photo looked more like a sister or significant other. And sometimes, when that crush was in the break room, I made excuses to linger there too, washing out my mug so long my fingers nearly pruned—all to keep myself in his line of sight. This might be why it wasn’t a huge leap for me in my latest novel, Cross My Heart, to write a female character who engages in some stalking of her own—though, unlike my protagonist, Rosie, I’ve nev…
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When my kids were little, I knew a momfluencer who rescheduled her kindergartener’s birthday party because the light wasn’t right for photos. I laughed, but underneath was jealous, because she clearly had the world’s most easygoing child. Mine would freak if I rescheduled a trip to the park, let alone a birthday party. I always knew that society judges mothers, but it wasn’t until I had children that I realized how much moms judge each other, and how much social media amps up the stress. Modern motherhood is struggle enough, and when you throw in the mommy-judging—which gets inside your head—well, the pressure can make a woman crack up. No wonder so many psychological thr…
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When I read technology news these days, I feel impressed and excited—and mostly terrified. We’re advancing so quickly, with so many pitfalls. Self-driving cars that crash, Bitcoin scams that deplete retirement savings, deepfake videos that can change election outcomes, algorithms that redirect children to step-by-step instructions for self-harm. It’s sometimes hard to know how to talk about the risks of technologies that seemed implausible until about five minutes ago. Enter tech thrillers, which peel back the ethical layers of our relationship to technology, entertaining us while also forcing us to confront the consequences of constant innovation. The term “thriller” i…
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Imagine waking up one morning and deciding to become William Shakespeare. You have fantasized about it for years and now you’re taking the fateful step. Overcome by a heady mixture of zeal, naivete, and hubris, you’re freed from feelings of shame or guilt. Although you live in the late eighteenth rather than the early seventeenth century, time won’t be an impediment for you because you’re gifted, studious, and even visionary in a deranged sort of way. Your father is a renowned collector of the original Shakespeare’s works, an authority in the field, so this transition is in your blood. Most importantly, when you present him with your handiwork he will finally come to love…
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When it comes to our understanding of crime and criminals, lawyers and novelists—and lawyers-turned-novelists—might offer the same caution: presume nothing. At the forefront of this elite group of storytellers is attorney Scott Turow, who redefined the legal thriller with 1986’s Presumed Innocent. A breakout bestseller now largely considered a contemporary classic, the book inspired a feature film starring Harrison Ford and a more recent streaming adaptation for Apple TV with Jake Gyllenhaal. Turow has now published thirteen novels and two works of non-fiction, which have been translated into more than forty languages and sold in excess of 30 million copies worldwide. Hi…
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I’m a TV writer by profession, and when I’m not staffing a show, I develop TV series adaptations with the goal of selling one to a buyer. My favorite novel genres to adapt are mysteries and thrillers because I love suspenseful, propulsive storytelling and because thrillers make damn good TV. TV shows demand action and surprises that compel a viewer to keep watching, and since suspense novels are built around twists, with chapters that end on cliffhangers, they lend well to adaptation. In the Age of Streaming, where thousands of TV shows across 400 networks compete for attention, it’s incredibly difficult for a series to gain traction, but a delicious thriller can quickl…
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In 2013, Tim Kreider achieved true Internet meme stardom when he concluded his New York Times essay, “I Know What You Think of Me,” with the line, “if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” The meme-ification of this statement proves just how perfectly it encapsulates the human experiences. It taps into our deepest insecurities—that if someone truly loves us, then it means that they have seen us, all of us. And it is an active submission, to be loved. Just as it is an active acceptance, to love someone. As a thriller writer, I am often asked the ever-dreaded and ever-fascinating question, “Where do your ideas com…
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As a hopeless romantic who writes mysteries, I’ve yet to write a mystery that doesn’t include a love story. In my latest novel, Missing Mom, Noelle is not only dealing with the disappearance of her mother, but with her growing romantic feelings for her closest friend and fellow dancer Ravi. Mystery romances are also definitely among my favorite reads. Below is a diverse assortment of five compelling mystery romances that I found thoroughly enjoyable. Bright Objects by Ruby Todd It’s been more than two years since Sylvia Knight lost her husband in a horrific hit-and-run car accident, and she remains determined to identify his killer and bring him to justice. Still los…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Bradford Morrow, The Forger’s Requiem (Atlantic Monthly Press) “Spellbinding . . . a brilliantly constructed story of revenge, redemption, deception, and betrayal . . . Spectacularly well written and fiendishly clever, this is both a terrific conclusion to a trilogy and a wonderfully satisfying standalone.” –Booklist Leah Konen, The Last Room on the Left (Putnam) “Tipping her literary cap to Stephen King’s The Shining, Konen serves up a superbly crafted novel of suspense that will thrill and delight fans of Lucy Foley, Alice Feeney, and Sarah Pearse.” –Library Journal Scott T…
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Queer authors have been writing great mysteries and thrillers since the 19th century, often living outwardly queer lives and featuring openly queer characters in their work. With four of the ten crime fiction authors on The New York Times Best Of list being queer, this is a pivotal moment for queer crime fiction—but it’s important to remember that queer crime writers have always been here, crafting compelling stories and paving the way for today’s diverse voices. This list could not possibly include all the amazing talent in our genre, but we’ve tried to include the legends and some of the “firsts.” While celebrating the contributions of these talented authors, it’s also…
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Friends, you read that right. A new film is coming to theaters in January that is… Hamlet staged in the Grand Theft Auto video game. Yes, Hamlet acted out by video game avatars, shot in-frame, and edited into its own film. Before you wonder if something is rotten in the stage of filmmaking, or that the rest is violence, consider this… Directed and written by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, and co-starring Crane and his friend Mark Oosterveen, the film, which is called Grand Theft Hamlet, is part digital narrative, part documentary. The film’s frame narrative features Crane and Oosterveen, two out-of-work actors sheltering-in-place during the COVID pandemic in January 2021, …
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2025 has barely begun, but it’s already shaping up to be a terrible year, full of incredible books. As per usual, we’ve assembled a great big list of all the crime, mystery, horror, and thriller titles to keep an eye out for in the coming months; trends I have already spotted and will of course be highlighting in future list articles include: cannibalism! heists! capers! class warfare! swapped identities! serial killers! social climbers! psychotic fame hounds! Georgian England! Thanks to my colleagues over at Lit Hub for allowing me to use a few of their blurbs from the Lit Hub Most Anticipated to fill out our humble list. With the dissolution of social media ethics and …
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At ten years old, I wrote my first song. I remember it vividly because I performed it at my fourth grade talent show. It was called “Be You” and told the story about someone telling their friend to be themselves because they were beautiful just as they were. I didn’t know it then, but it was advice I needed to hear, too. As I’ve grown older, it’s funny how much I realized the things I wrote were often things I needed in disguise. That’s something that’s still true to this day. After that talent show, I started learning guitar and would often retire to my room after school to write songs. I wrote them everywhere. In journals and notebooks, in the notes app of my mom’s iP…
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In my dream, I was trapped. Locked in a cell, deep underwater, where no one could hear my cries. There was no way to escape; I could only run from side to side in the little room, scrabbling at the locked door with my nails, tearing back the orange nylon curtains to find no window behind—just a blank plastic panel, cruelly mocking. Desperately, I cast around for something, anything, to help me break out of my prison—a piece of wood to pry open the door, something heavy to batter the lock. But there was nothing—only a metal bunk bolted to the wall and a rubber tray on the floor. The door was fitted and flush, with no friendly crack I could get my fingers into, no ga…
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In the 1950s Anjette Lyles owned and operated the most popular restaurant in Macon, Georgia. She was an attractive blonde, drove a flashy Cadillac, and hugged every single customer who came into her establishment. She spoke lovingly at every table, dressed in her blue satin dress with the puffy crinoline petticoat. “Hey Betty Anne, gimme some sugar. And Paul, don’t you look just as handsome as you wanna be?” People came into her place as much for her as for the food. “Everybody loves Anjette.” That’s why the whole town was shocked when she was arrested for murder in May of 1958. She’d come by Anjette’s through hard work and tough times. Her first husband, Benjamin Lyles…
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Leos Carax’s 1991 film The Lovers on the Bridge (titled Les Amants du Pont-Neuf in French) is not a crime movie. But it has the same framework as one: for most of the time, it is a gritty, heartbreaking story about the lives of two young homeless Parisian artists, that knowingly props their story up against the pageantry of the Paris’s bicentennial celebration of 1989; were it not for the camera capturing their story, their struggles would be lost, buried amid the rubble of the city’s self-congratulatory pomp. In this way, the film reminds me of Brian de Palma’s Blow Out (1981), in which a killer (hired by a corrupt political official) stalks the overwhelmingly ostentatio…
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The line between justice and vengeance is often as thin as it is subjective. It’s this murky idea that serves as the underpinning of Tracy Clark’s third Detective Harriet (“Harri”) Foster thriller, Echo (December 3, 2024; Thomas & Mercer). On a cold winter’s morning, Harri is called to the scene of a suspicious death near prestigious Belverton College. Legacy student Brice Collier has been found unresponsive in a field outside his family-owned home, Hardwicke House. The son of billionaire Sebastian Collier—one of the school’s alumni donors, whose name graces several buildings around campus—Brice’s untimely passing mirrors a similar death from thirty years ago. But po…
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Researching my historical mystery novel The Betrayal of Thomas True required me to go to some very murky places, and there are few places in Georgian London so very dark as a stretch of scrubland to the East of London. Tyburn was no stranger to the cries of a baying mob, being home to the executioner’s gallows for generations, but on May 9th, 1726, there was more than just the usual cartload of criminals being trundled there in shackles. The sight of a murderess, her hands bound, preparing for the agony of being burned at the stake for killing her husband was promising, as was the hanging of her two male accomplices who’d chopped up their victim’s body with an axe. But …
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It started with a Sunday morning phone call to Kate White, editor-in-chief of Redbook magazine. Her boss at the Hearst Corporation asked her to come to the office immediately. Kate had never been invited to a Sunday meeting and worried the news wasn’t good. She was at her weekend home in Pennsylvania, so she had no work clothes with her. She arrived at the office dressed casually, wearing white sneakers when she was asked to be the next editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine. That’s right, Cosmo––at the time Hearst’s most recognized monthly pub, as in famed women-like-sex-too Editor Helen Gurley Brown. Under Brown’s thirty-two-year reign, it had become the biggest shi…
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(Ed. note: In Alafair Burke’s new book, The Note, three women have struggled to maintain their privacy due to the internet, so we asked Burke how she feels about her own use of social media.) Social media isn’t the real world. We know this. It spews out disinformation. It’s rife with scammers. The carefully curated images posted there create a distorted perception that everyone is richer, happier, and more beautiful than any actual person can be. My latest novel highlights the toxicity of online culture, so harmful that Australia recently banned social media use by children under 16. Despite all that, I credit my own initial ventures into the online universe with help…
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I grew up reading Agatha Christie novels as well as the Little House on the Prairie books, so it’s no surprise that my historical fiction novels come with a touch of mystery. There’s nothing better than a burning, unresolved question threaded through the plot to raise the tension, and it’s especially satisfying when the whodunit reveal is successful: both surprising yet inevitable. Below are five historical fiction novels that incorporate Christie’s signature moves and will keep you on the edge for the entire ride, and don’t be surprised if the grand dame herself doesn’t show up in one or two. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters Fingersmith is a gripping historical crime nove…
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Read an excerpt from Cranor’s new novel below. And check out the book’s cover, revealed here for the first time. 1. Rae Johnson said, “The one with his hands up, number four? He’s what’s called the quar-ter-back,” taking it slow as she explained the rules of American football to Madeline Mayo instead of mentioning her first week as a federal agent, her rookie case. “Hear him? He’s calling out the snap count. UCM just got a first down—” “I know about quarterbacks, but first downs?” Mad said, frown framed in a light blue window on the left side of Rae’s laptop screen. “How many points are those worth again?” Rae rolled her eyes a couple inches to the right, studying th…
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The present is a messy place very concerned with simply getting on with itself. I believe we tend to miss quite a lot of plain and necessary beauty as people living in the present, and particularly this present. Advertisements vie for our attention in almost every space. Horrible realities await in every other headline. “Bleak” is often an applicable word to the general state of things. The vast majority of us are just trying to stay human amid the chaos. One of the most enduring human practices besides being kind to one another is the act of storymaking. From dance, to art, to music and poetry, telling stories has been a way for people to understand one another since lo…
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When we think of espionage adventures, it’s easy to imagine world-consuming conspiracies, a ticking clock, and a general sense of globe-trotting. But, even James Bond spends the eternity of the novel The Spy Who Loved Me in a small motel in the Adirondack Mountains. The point? Not all spy missions have to take place in multiple locations or involve people with full passports, forged or otherwise. In fact, some of the best spy books have a lot in common with the best detective novels; a small-town setting that inherently makes the action and intrigue more human. For fans of mysteries and thrillers, the small-town murder mystery is older than perhaps the genre of murder …
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Catharine Read Arnold Williams was a fearless woman. Her multi-layered skirt firmly in hand, she gingerly stepped over ground littered with broken maple limbs before coming to a stop and gazing down at the green, well-trodden grass. Hoofprints marked various spots where cattle had grazed. I hovered nearby, settling beneath a towering maple tree. It seemed surreal as we both stood where a young woman, gifted with ability and loyalty, had lost her life. We stayed hushed for a bit, out of respect for Sarah Maria Cornell. The tiny lines on Catharine’s alabaster skin around her eyes deepened when she expressed concern. We were the same age, but my freckles revealed years o…
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