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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Give me an 85,000-word novel to write, and I’ll dig in eagerly, but tell me to write a 2,000 to 3,000-word synopsis of the same novel and I might sulk a little. Admittedly, brevity has never been my strong point. So, needless to say, I struggled when I had to come up with one line to describe my thriller, Not So Perfect Strangers, inspired by the Alfred Hitchcock film Strangers on a Train, which was based on the 1950 novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. I needed something pithy that conveyed not only the premise but also encapsulated everything I’d been trying to say in this book thematically. After a few drafts, I finally settled on, “A twisty thriller inspired…
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In March 2020, the world stopped and I, who had just returned from a trip to Munich and Amsterdam, started to realize that the Rijksmuseum would be one of the last I would see in a long time, and the Michelin-starred restaurant Vermeer would be one of the last I had eaten in. I had several trips planned in the following months and one of them was to Copenhagen, my favorite city in the world. I lived in Denmark for fourteen years and moved to southern California in 2016. I went to Copenhagen regularly after I moved and now all of a sudden, I couldn’t. I missed the city. I missed the cafés, the blues bars, the jazz clubs, the restaurants and just walking through Strøget, t…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Josh Weiss, Sunset Empire (Grand Central) “In Weiss’s superb sequel… Imaginative worldbuilding enhances the page-turning mystery plot. Fans of Robert Harris’s Fatherland will be enthralled.” –Publishers Weekly Victor LaValle, Lone Women (One World) “A counter to the typical homesteading narrative, this moody and masterful western fires on all cylinders. Readers are sure to be impressed.” –Publishers Weekly Harini Nagendra, Murder Under a Red Moon (Pegasus) “I’m pleased to report that Murder Under a Red Moon exceeds all my expectations. Against a roiling political backdrop …
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Cyprus, the third-largest and third-most populous island in the Mediterranean and historically acrimoniously divided between Greece and Turkey. The Northern portion of the island declares itself the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus; the south the largely Greek-populated Republic of Cyprus with its capital in Nicosia. An island paradise, but also a fraught geopolitical frontline. And long a popular destination for thriller and mystery writers. John Bingham’s Vulture in the Sun (1971) is a spy thriller featuring a British intelligence agent operating out of Cyprus. Bingham’s rather forgotten these days though was more popular back when his Tom Carter (the British agent…
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The two-seater biplane had been roaring above Santa Monica for about twenty minutes, executing a series of graceful loops against a cloudless sky. Motorists fleeing the stifling heat of Los Angeles on 1923’s Fourth of July holiday pulled over to watch from the side of the main highway to Venice and Ocean Beach. Thousands of people, it was later estimated, stopped what they were doing and looked up. Venice residents would have recognized the plane preforming the impromptu airshow. It was The Wasp and at the controls was B.H. DeLay, “one of the best known aviators in Southern California,” as the Venice Evening Vanguard described him. He operated the airfield in the resort …
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The first time I cared about mass hysteria was Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Technically, I first learned of the concept through the Salem Witch Trials, when nineteen were executed on suspicion of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts. But the Trials were merely a historical footnote to my assigned junior high reading—The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter—and it was easy to look down my 20th century nose at those primitive and superstitious Puritans. Witches? Seriously? But Grovers Mill had aliens. The New Jersey town was ground zero for the infamous October 30, 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. Led by a young Orson Welles, the show eschewed a traditional presentati…
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Locked-room mysteries are the type of mystery in which a crime looks impossible. (Not to be confused with a “closed circle” mystery, in which the characters are stranded in an isolated setting.) Why are these mysteries appealing to so many readers? I’ve been a fan of locked-room mysteries for decades, and more recently I’ve become an author in the genre. Here are the three reasons why it’s such an enticing type of mystery. First, you know you’re getting a “fair play” puzzle. Many mysteries include clues that are fairly presented, but readers don’t always know which of the many terrific mystery novels they’re picking up includes a puzzle as part of story. In a locked-room…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Vibhuti Jain, Our Best Intentions (William Morrow) The characters in Our Best Intentions are immigrants under the powerful sway of the American Dream. Babur Singh—call him Bobby—is a single dad who owns a rideshare business, Move with Bobby, which would also be a good name for a man with a van or a dance class. Bobby dotes on his daughter, Angie, and they live in a wealthy suburb where Angie never feels comfortable. When she stumbles on a body, a classmate named Chiara Thompson, on her way home from swim practice, the news rocks the town and sheds light on the issues of p…
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There’s nothing quite like a messed up student-teacher relationship when it comes to stirring up drama. First of all, it’s relatable. Most of us have been a student or a teacher at some point, so we understand the inherent dynamics. Even if we’ve never filled those roles officially, you’d have to be a serious loner not to have interacted with someone either as a mentor or a mentee. Second, it’s loaded. The desire to emulate someone we admire is fraught with tension, and the urge to mentor can be just as complicated. Mix some deep-seated parent/child pathos with the struggle to prove one’s self and…voila! You have an irresistible recipe for drama. Novelists, filmmakers…
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When I sat down at my desk and began to write the story that became my first published novel, Maisie Dobbs, I didn’t really have a distinct literary form in mind. I wasn’t thinking “mystery” and certainly wasn’t thinking “crime.” I had a story in my head about a young girl who makes a transition from one social class to another, and who has a life-changing experience of war that effectively removes any vestiges of youthful innocence. As she was now thirty-two, I had to give her a job, and within a few lines, I knew she was an investigator of sorts, one who had a deep sense of the human condition and psyche—the “soul.” As writing progressed, other characters entered to he…
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We have a proposition for you. You’ve heard it before that 1971 is the best year that crime movies have ever had. The French Connection, Shaft, Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, Diamonds Are Forever, Get Carter, Klute. Even the non-crime movies are amazing: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Last Picture Show, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Maybe you’ve heard it floated 1972 is the best year for crime movies. The Godfather, Deliverance, The Hot Rock, Superfly. Not as many crime masterpieces as the previous year, but a contender for its saga of the Corleone crime family. And you’ve definitely heard it argued that 1974 is actually the best year for crime movies. The Godf…
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Is Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye the most overrated crime film of 1973? For that matter, is it one of the most overrated crime films of the 1970s? When I recently posed this question on social media, it was interesting to see how polarised views are. For many, The Long Goodbye remains one of the most memorable and distinguished films of the 1970s, fully deserving of the canonisation its reappraisal over roughly the last decade has brought, including a 2021 decision by the American Library of Congress to include it in its National Film Registry. For others, it is not only a terrible take on Raymond Chandler’s iconic gumshoe character, Philip Marlowe, but a completely …
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The Knapp Commission into corruption in the New York City Police Department started public hearings on October 19th, 1971. Established by then mayor John Lindsay, the proceedings were televised live on public television across the five boroughs of New York and covered in the print media. The Commission’s final report, handed down in December 1972, was damning. Months of testimony from low level pimps and narcotics dealers who paid regular bribes to the police in return for protection, to police whistleblowers, and the flamboyant escort and madam Xaviera Hollander, revealed that the city had a sixth organized crime family in addition to the Gambino, Lucchese, Genovese, Bon…
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Last month, San Francisco’s distinguished Castro Theater provided the setting for a birthday party of sorts. The Long Goodbye, a 1973 neo-noir thriller, based on the 1953 novel by celebrated pulp scribe Raymond Chandler, was about to turn fifty. The guest of honor, star Elliott Gould, preceded the screening with fun and happily meandering reminiscences about the film and his exceptional career. Besides being the sort of occasion that made you grateful for a return to inhabiting other people’s physical presence, the screening highlighted what a valuable and challenging contribution to popular culture this film has always been. In The Long Goodbye, Gould plays Philip Marl…
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This week we’re highlighting the recently 50 years-old crime movies of 1973, and if you haven’t gleaned this already, it was a hell of a good year for robbery on film. Heisters, hustlers, scammers, confidence artists and thieves of all stripes were all the rage on the silver screen, so much so that some have practically been forgotten to today’s viewers. (Seriously, consider the Gene Hackman picture below.) Fortunately, you’ve got a weekend to get caught up on the action. Maybe you’re in the mood for a little robbery-implicated gun-running in the Boston area? Or a classic vengeance tale? How about a road trip? 1973 has got you covered, it all just depends on your mood. D…
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Each month, I get to highlight crime books from across the globe, in one of my favorite tasks for CrimeReads, and March brings an exceptionally diverse host of international offerings. This month’s best crime fiction in translation features serial killers in Spain, a feminist Mafia novel from Italy, a Kafka-esque hospital dystopia set in China, a crime caper from Uruguay, and a Russian plague thriller. Juan Gómez-Jurado, Red Queen Translated by Nick Caistor (Minotaur) Red Queen feels made for multiple seasons of television with its compelling main character, a brilliant but reclusive woman who refuses to put her forensic skills to work after a personal tragedy. When…
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My debut novel, A Flaw in the Design, has at its center a character who was a terrible, violent child, who grows into an arrogant, possibly dangerous, possibly even murderous teenager. My Matthew is part of a long literary tradition of what are known as bad seeds, children who seem not just troublesome in the normal, run-of-the-mill sort of way, but who are, possibly, truly evil. There’s something irresistible about this for me as a reader, and as a writer: What if evil were innate, a person’s truest self? How would that person fit into the world, or fail to fit in? How would the people around them, especially family, who love this problematic, possibly-evil child, respon…
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Did you know that this fall will be the fortieth anniversary of the worst nuclear war crisis in world history? You may remember that 1983 was the year that Microsoft Word was introduced but are completely unaware of the nuclear war crisis. After all, American school children didn’t practice ‘duck and cover’ drills under their desks in 1983, as their predecessors had in 1962. The events in 1983 were at least as dangerous as the Cuban Missile faceoff between the Untied States and the Soviet Union in October 1962, yet they remain largely unknown. Unlike in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy’s televised speeches received blanket coverage and alarmed the world, the 1983 cri…
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In the spring of 1961, Georges Lemay, a dapper thirty-six-year-old French Canadian, spent his days holed up in his cottage on a private island on a river in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal, devising his greatest feat yet: the perfect bank burglary. Emerging in a crowded field encompassing every kind of Montreal criminal, from competing mobs to well-organized groups of bank robbers, Lemay clawed his way to the top of the heap. Maybe claw wasn’t the right word. Lemay was from an upper-middle-class family and had never wanted for anything. Joseph Louis Georges Etienne Lemay was born in Shawinigan, Quebec, a hundred miles north of Montreal, on January 25, 1925,…
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Betsy Martin looks out at the contestants for the first time. The rows of baking tables are staggered slightly so that from the front she can see each of their faces. They wear identical half smiles to mask their nerves. Each one of them is completely distinct, but she still has trouble telling them apart. It’s always like this at the beginning of filming before their individual personalities crystallize, before the cracks and eccentricities start to shine through. Everyone starts out almost the same, all on their very best behavior for the cameras, but it won’t take long for a bit of adversity and competition to bring out their true personas. Of course, for one of them i…
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Reality television: it’s trashy. It’s fun. It’s the backdrop to our century, the deeply embarrassing soundtrack to our lives. It’s also….common as a trope in crime fiction? And since I noticed this weird fact, I had to put together a little roundup of some of the great thrillers and mysteries coming out over the past few years that engage with reality TV, its artifice, its strugges, and its discontents. Claire Jiménez, What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez? (Grand Central) In this moving take on the vanished woman trope, Ruthy Ramirez disappears on her way home from school at age 13, leaving behind a family in tatters. Twelve years later, she seems to have reappeared—on a t…
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Most of Washington was still asleep on the morning of Memorial Day 1923 when a gunshot rang out from a sixth-floor apartment in the fashionable Wardman Park Inn. The first law enforcement officer on the scene was none other than William J. “Billy” Burns, director of the Bureau of Investigation. Burns, who happened to live one floor down, was the nation’s most famous detective, the twentieth century’s Allan Pinkerton, instantly recognizable in his derby hat and bristled mustache. Before taking over the agency that would later be immortalized in three initials—FBI—he’d earned a reputation as a crafty sleuth for whom no secret was unobtainable. It wasn’t a sterling reputat…
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People who know me as a romance writer might see my new suspense novel as something that came out of nowhere. At first glance, my history would bear that out. When my first novel was published by a small press, I really didn’t like the title they picked. It sounded too romantic for a book where, to me, the entire point was something else: the concern of a mother for her child. I made some tweaks so the title would point to that underlying theme. It had a suspense subplot, but there wasn’t really a way to get that across in the title or cover. My second novel also had a romantic arc and a suspense subplot. My third was my first foray into historical fiction, which scar…
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It was a freezing day in January 2016 when I passed through a long-locked door and first set foot into what had once been St. Joseph’s Orphanage. The beautiful, spooky old hulk of a building was dark and frigid, and as I walked through the hallways, the sound of my feet against the worn wood floors was amplified in the long corridors. In the cold winter light, the basement dining room, once an optimistic yellow, had an uneasy green tinge. Here and there the paint blistered. I tried to picture all the children sitting here at their little tables, eating their food and keeping their heads down, dreading the consequences if they got sick. I walked up the stairs, above th…
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When you work at the CIA, you’re taught that everything you do is a secret. You need to be invisible. But when I sit down to read a spy novel, it’s difficult to divorce my experiences from what I’m reading. I’ve had some courageous former CIA colleagues tackle both fiction and nonfiction and I’ve been impressed. But what I find fascinating is when authors manage to capture the true essence of espionage after having never worked in intelligence. Below is by no means a comprehensive list of spy thrillers and nonfiction works. It is a sampling of the spy books that I’ve picked up over the years and my thoughts on how they hold up against real spy work. Fiction: The Kill…
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