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 Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2024) opens almost exactly the same way Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) closes, with two cornered spies and lovers deciding to quit running and fight the world together. There is one difference: in Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane’s reimagining of Doug Liman’s film, our couple is immediately gunned down. They’re not the stars of this show, and this is not that movie. After bottling the 2005 cult classic (?), stuffing it with a rag, and flicking the lighter, this new take on the movie that launched Brangelina proceeds to invert the original’s basic formula in almost every way. Specific where the film was broad, biting where the original was cuddly—if Lim…
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During his lifetime the American theater director, drama teacher, attorney and amateur magician Henning Cunningham Nelms published but two detective novels under his pseudonym Hake Talbot: The Hangman’s Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944). (Sadly his initial essay in the crime genre, written around 1940 and titled The Affair of the Half-Witness, never found a publisher and now seems unlikely ever to be recovered.) The Hangman’s Handyman was, like Rim of the Pit, well-reviewed at the time of its publication, yet the former novel faded soon enough from the memory even of mystery aficionados. However, Rim of the Pit clung tenaciously to fame by its gruesome horned fing…
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Thirty years ago, the first Mary Russell book (do not call it a Sherlock Holmes book, or, for heaven’s sake, a pastiche), was published. It was a cause for celebration then, and a cause for celebration now, especially with the 18th book, The Lantern’s Dance, now on our doorstep. Let’s take a closer look. It was in 1987 that the thirty-five-year-old Laurie Richardson King sat down at the kitchen table in the farmhouse she’d help build herself, and picked up a fountain pen. She’d spent years roaming the world with her husband, Noel, from the far Pacific to South America to India to Israel. She held both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in religion, and would undoubtedly …
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I don’t want to kill again. It’s just too stressful. My first major kill was of a family: father and two daughters drowned in a flash flood. I got a lot of flack for that from friends and family members with small children, all of whom seemed to take it personally. Next, there was the ex-lover of a main character who died along with his wife in a fluke car accident—decapitation—that was far too bloody, I think, for the story. In general, I’ve killed off at least one character in nearly everything I’ve ever written. I mean nothing malicious by it. My latest killing, however, in my novel Dixon, Descending has shattered me. Partly because I truly love the character I killed…
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I grew up reading a combination of crime (both true and fictional), horror, and satisfyingly dense, meaty literary fiction about families by the likes of Dickens, Jonathan Franzen and Elizabeth Jane Howard. In some ways, though stylistically divergent, I feel that all these genres fed a similar impulse in me, which was to challenge the apparent impossibility of comprehending the mind of another. The early, salacious true crime books about serial killers which I devoured in private as an adolescent were infinitely compelling because they revealed instincts and desires which were so far removed from my own as to be not just ghastly but instructive also, insofar as they warn…
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Three East 236th Street is a trim little house on the eastern border of the park, just north of where the old Mosholu Parkway once emerged from the woods. In the winter of 1931, a middle-aged man named Emanuel Kamna lived there with his wife, in-laws, and two daughters. He had enlisted with the National Guard in his twenties and never left the military. He’d patrolled the Mexican border during the Pancho Villa Expedition and survived the shell-shredded trenches of Flanders during the Great War. After returning from Europe with an honorable discharge, he found work at the Kingsbridge Armory, just south of the park, where he earned $7 a day maintaining guns and rifles for t…
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The Athenian General Alcibiades, a former student of Socrates, determines that he should reopen the road to the Temple of Eleusis and guard the sacred procession. The Spartans, however, still occupy the road, blocking the way from Athens to the temple of Eleusis… This endeavor to reopen the route will not be without risk for Alcibiades; the Spartan soldiers of King Agis are quartered there and are still under orders to execute Alcibiades on sight… [During his time in Sparta, Alcibiades had impregnated King Agis’s wife, Queen Timaea. King Agis has a very personal reason to unleash his Spartan army on Alcibiades.] On the morning of the sacred procession from Athens to El…
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I once heard a joke that went something like: A man tells God, “I think my role should be to protect my family.” God says, “Great! Since infection is one of the most common risks to children, that means you’ll sanitize your kids’ bottles, change their diapers, find a pediatrician, schedule and take them to doctor’s appointments, be sure to wash—” and the man interrupts, “No, no, no, I didn’t mean protect like that.” My debut thriller, Nightwatching, begins with a scenario in line with what the man in the joke was clearly imagining: a bump in the night. An intruder in the house. A parent forced to protect and defend. But the unnamed heroine’s husband is absent, leaving …
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Authenticity is a big issue in literature. Who wants to read a fake? Nadie. Nobody! Now, when discussing English texts, the topic of authenticity tends to focus on how to express in this language events or dialogues that happen in another. My previous piece, “Writing with an Accent,” was precisely about how I used a foreign language (Spanish) to preserve authenticity without compromising understanding in my novel Death under the Perseids, which takes place in Havana. But I have also encountered the opposite problem—how to write realistic-sounding scenes from the point of view of an American character, considering that I am not American myself and English isn’t my first l…
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William Randolph Hearst was among the most important American titans Churchill hoped to add to his network. His twenty-eight newspapers reached 10 percent of the American population on weekdays, 20 percent on Sundays, and dominated West Coast markets, giving him an enormous influence on American public opinion and, by extension, the nation’s politics. He owned the outlets to which most statesmen sought and needed access, and he had the money to pay them well for their literary output—in 1931 he paid Benito Mussolini $1,500 for each of twelve articles. His newspapers ran articles by Eleanor Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, and a series of pieces compiled…
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For more than three decades I have worked in prisons, in secure units in hospitals, and in the community, acting in both assessment and treatment roles and working with female and male patients. I initially trained in clinical psychology, using treatment models including cognitive behavioral therapy (a talking therapy that focuses on identifying and altering harmful patterns of behavior and thinking patterns) and the psychodynamic approach, which seeks to help an individual access and then understand their unconscious thoughts and feelings. But the vast majority of my work has been in the field of forensic psychotherapy, which brings the psychoanalytic approach into the f…
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When the fine folks of Boston think about organized crime in their fair city, if they think about the subject at all, they think of Whitey Bulger. Or maybe Johnny Depp playing Whitey Bulger. They think of the Patriarca crime family, also called the Boston Mafia, most of whose members are dead or in jail. They think of thugs they’ve seen in movies, guys whose last names end in vowels, wearing tracksuits and stocking caps as they unload boxes from a hijacked truck. What they don’t think about is Carson Newman and Newman Enterprises. Carson Newman doesn’t wear tracksuits. He wears suits made by Dior that retail for five grand. His headquarters occupies the entire thirty-fi…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Hank Phillippi Ryan, One Wrong Word (Forge) “Smart, propulsive, and unique…One Wrong Word grabbed me on the first page and didn’t let go. Ryan never fails to amaze me.” –Mary Kubica Nick Petrie, The Price You Pay (Putnam) “Petrie shows off his action-writing chops with a series of vivid, remarkably clear firefights and, in between, pauses to recover.” –Booklist Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (Scribner) “A richly entertaining take on the crime story, and a country that might’ve been.” –Kirkus Mike Lawson, Kingpin (Atlantic Monthly) “Assured prose matches the two capab…
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German storyteller Ivar Leon Menger has written and directed award-winning short films and advertisements before creating epic radio plays as a show runner with Audible. His debut novel, What Mother Won’t Tell Me, has now been released in the United States for the first time. Literary critic and scholar Thomas Scholz has covered Menger’s work for more than a decade. Talking about What Mother Won’t Tell Me, they discuss the appeal of villains and antagonists, how a thriller can resemble a fairy tale, and why Ivar Leon Menger chose writing his second novel over directing his own movie. Thomas Scholz: Ivar, your first novel is being released this week in the USA, and in Ger…
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The megalopolis of Chennai Formerly known as Madras, and capital of Tamil-Nadu, the most southerly state of India on the Coromandel Coast. India’s sixth biggest city with over 12 million people. Home to terrific hot curries, and also known as India’s healthiest and safest city – not that that means there’s no decent crime writing. Before we get into modern Chennai, first a little old Madras. Brian Stoddart is a writer of fiction and non-fiction based in Queenstown, New Zealand but who has written extensively on India and south Asia. A Madras Miasma (2014) was the first in a series of four books set in 1920s Chennai featuring Superintendent Chris Le Fanu, who happens to…
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In my new novel Sleeping With Friends, a woman wakes from a coma with only her memories of movies to guide her through the mystery of her injury. Writing it, I discovered that films live in the same half-remembered place as our dreams. But films are also made by real people, like Marianne Rendón. A mesmerizing and fearless performer, her screen debut was in the black comedy series Imposters in 2017. The following year she played Susan Atkins alongside Matt Smith in Charlie Says, from American Psycho’s directing and writing team of Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner. Marianne was most recently featured in the series In the Dark, and Scott Z. Burns’ Extrapolations. As I’ve g…
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Lately, I’ve been in the mood to watch Throne of Blood, the Japanese jidaigeki film directed by Akira Kurosawa. Maybe it’s the wind or the chill in the air or the mysterious fog enveloping Manhattan, but I’ve been longing to be transported, eerily transfixed in the way that Throne of Blood can transport and transfix. Released in Japan in 1957 and released in the United States in 1961, Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth, setting the events in feudal Japan rather than its temporal counterpart in Scotland. The first man to appear onscreen in the film does not look like a man after he dismounts his frantic horse and thrusts himself against the giant doors of Spider’s Web Ca…
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I first met Katie Gutierrez at the Edgar Awards ceremony in the spring of 2023. I was impressed by her honesty and her kindness. I didn’t know much about her work at that point. I had no clue her debut novel, More Than You’ll Ever Know, had been selected as a Good Morning America Book Club Pick that June. I didn’t know she’d written for Time, or been nominated for a National Magazine Award. I just knew Katie was good people. It wasn’t until I read More Than You’ll Ever Know that I began to understand just how talented Katie really is. Her lines are tight, her characters three-dimensional. On a structure level, Katie’s books are sprawling and experimental in all th…
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In an early scene in the first episode of “Slow Horses,” the British spy thriller series streaming on Apple TV+, a stack of newspapers is delivered to the run-down Slough House office of MI5, the British intelligence agency. The print papers seem as obsolete as the cast-off, screw-up agents who have been sentenced to this out-of-favor outpost by author Mick Herron, who wrote the books the series is based on. The agents couldn’t have cared less about the newspapers. On the other hand, I was thrilled. As a longtime newspaper reporter and editor, who started writing for Indiana newspapers when I was in high school, there’s something about seeing print newspapers figure, in…
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One of the joys of writing historical fiction is that you get to meet so many interesting people. And I don’t mean other writers, I mean you get to meet people from history—and not only meet them, but recreate them too, and give them your words and introduce them to readers of today. In my Irregular series of books, I took the hero Wiggins from fiction (he was a street-kid assistant of Sherlock Holmes from the Conan Doyle stories), grew him up but then placed him in real history. He does still interact with Holmes but most of the people he interacts with were real. In his latest adventure, Spy Hunter, he becomes entangled with Mata Hari – the ‘exotic’ dancer executed for…
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“Whatever happens, don’t be a hero.” Trance’s opening close-up is of a Rembrandt: not only the artist’s painting Storm on the Sea of Galilee but, as the narrator alleges, a cameo the painter included of himself within its pastels. Ostensibly at the stern of the beleaguered vessel, Rembrandt glares out at us from the oil, incredulous at the disciples’ plight before us: a self-portrait within a Biblical illustration that, like our guide in the film, breaks any semblance of art’s ‘fourth wall.’ The painting, the artist’s only seascape, was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 and has never been recovered. Our narrating auctioneer Simon, played by James Mc…
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In fiction, architecture has the ability to both contrive a novel’s setting and to participate as a character. When I began work on my novel A Brutal Design, it was Brutalism—a fitfully popular architectural style born in the 1950s and characterized by hulking, exposed concrete—that presented itself as the right architecture for my novel. But the more I researched the movement, the further my aspiration evolved: I didn’t only want to populate my novel with Brutalist designs; I wanted to write a Brutalist novel. No other architecture is better suited to mirror the internal contradiction of character, the wrestling, the irreconcilability between who we are and who we aspir…
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When asked what it was like to publish her first novel, bestselling author Lisa Gardner immediately replies, “Which time?” After all, Gardner started her career at seventeen, writing category romances before breaking out big ten years later with her first thriller—the career her publishers prefer her to highlight. “I met Tess Gerritsen when my debut thriller The Perfect Husband was launched. I remember her laughing and telling me in her experience, suspense publishers would prefer it if the romance books never happened. ‘Only in publishing,’ Gerritsen said, ‘can you become a virgin again.’” So, how did Gardner sell her first, first book? “I was 17 and didn’t know any …
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Crime fiction sometimes seems like a solo sport: one man or woman coming up against the forces of confusion and chaos and fighting through them to identify a solution. We start in disorder and end in (some version of) order. At least that was my assumption, before I read Chester Himes. A native of Missouri, Himes spent his most productive years in France, where he began writing hardboiled detective fiction set in Harlem. In some ways, this was a practical decision—Himes had failed to find success writing screenplays and traditional literary fiction—but it also enabled him to explore a community that hadn’t been represented in crime fiction to that date. Like the other no…
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When I was nineteen and a college junior, I spent what was supposed to be an exotic, sultry, educational summer semester in Madrid. But my long-term boyfriend back home and I had recently broken up, and instead of being excited by my new surroundings, I was miserable. All I wanted to do was to talk to him. If I could just hear his voice, I told anyone who’d listen. If I could tell him I loved him, and hear him say the same in return, everything would be okay. This was in 1989, before cell phones were ubiquitous, and that summer every one of the Telefónica de España’s public pay phones I tried were out of order. One night toward the end of our trip, some classmates and I f…
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