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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“Do you hear that?” My treasure-hunting partner, Beep, kept his eyes glued to the map. “Hear what?” he asked me without looking up. “It sounded like thunder,” I said, glancing up at the sky, which minutes before had been clear and blue and pristine. Now it was blackening, suddenly ominous. We were standing on the side of State Road 68 a few miles north of Pilar, New Mexico, several hundred feet up the highway from the Rio Grande Gorge Visitor Center. In front of us stood an impenetrable mass of rock and brush, right where the map said the trail leading to Agua Caliente Falls was supposed to be. Except it wasn’t there. It didn’t exist. A rumble echoed through the ca…
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Long ago when I was a young photojournalist for the Mississippi Press, I was assigned to cover the Mississippi Legislature. At the time there were a number of newly elected representatives and senators who had vowed to reform the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. At the time, in the 1970s, Parchman had a hard reputation as one of the most brutal prisons in the nation. The penitentiary was an 18,000 acre “farm” where inmates worked. (In the past convicts had been leased out for hard labor in swampy areas that killed many.) At times, Parchman raised produce for all the state prisons and some state hospitals. Cotton was also a big crop. The prison was notorious fo…
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The Place de la Cathédrale was packed with tourists. They stood shoulder to shoulder, studying the gargoyles as their guides droned on about history, the quality of the stones, and the mastery of the craftsmen. Helena skirted the periphery, stepping around tables and chairs, children with ice cream cones, waiters with trays, and a range of well-behaved dogs. She continued to the south side of the cathedral, past the lineup for the public toilets, past the cathedral’s museum where there was no lineup, and down Rue de Rohan to the quay where the tour boats waited. She bought her ticket for the Batorama boat scheduled to depart at noon. Passengers were already waiting, four…
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Don’t you just want to hate a successful novelist who never took a creative writing class? None. Not one. Not even an English course in college? Well, there was that one class in Shakespeare, if that counts. Yet the world loves Harlan Coben, with more than 30 novels published along with television, movies and multimedia deals under his belt. And for all those writers who have struggled to find an agent or publisher, there’s yet another reason to hate him. Coben never set out to become a novelist. He was a poli sci major who played basketball at Amherst, a liberal arts college in its truest sense where students pick their curriculum and where prerequisites are an after…
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“Girl Drowned; Escort Missing.” This headline, on the front page of The Syracuse Herald’s July 13, 1906 edition, launched a crime story that still reverberates in popular American culture. The body of Grace Brown, a twenty-year-old factory worker from upstate New York, was recovered from the waters of Big Moose Lake, a fashionable boating spot in the Adirondacks. The cause of death was drowning, but cuts and bruises were found oIn 1908n her face and head, indicating she’d been beaten before falling into the lake. During the post-mortem examination, the county coroner discovered something else: Grace Brown was four months pregnant. So began a murder case that would come …
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Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahmer. Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez. These men, all united by their horrific acts, are household names in America. But how many of us have heard of Yang Xinhai, “the Monster Killer,” whose body count was double that of Bundy’s? Or Huang Yong, who murdered as many as 25 teenage boys because he had fantasies of being an assassin? What about Wang Qiang, who murdered 45 people and raped many of his female victims post-mortem? My guess is, not many. This is partly because they committed their crimes far away, in the People’s Republic of China. And partly because the Chinese government would prefer us not to know about them. But to begin closer to …
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There is a particular joy to imagining a story set in the world of your childhood. For me, childhood means the ‘70s and ‘80s. And sure, the world and all the details in it are imaginary, but that doesn’t dampen the joy of building a scene rich with Rubix cubes, Cabbage Patch Dolls, He-Man action figures, and Care Bears. A Wonder Woman doll that looks absolutely nothing like Lynda Carter and a Snoopy Sno-Cone machine that would require a bodybuilder to actually turn the crank. As I’m writing, I can still hear the squawk of a shaky pair of tweezers in Operation. My memories of those decades are all tied up in toys. I am only slightly ashamed to admit that I had a three-sto…
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Qiao Hongmei stood before the mirror, posing the way he’d described her, with her weight on one leg. She tried desperately to remember who’d been in the restaurant the night before, but not a single face remained in her mind. Yet he existed. A stranger’s existence, gradually taking on form and substance, a hint of bodily warmth, in their sixteenth-floor apartment with her unwitting husband in the next room. Hongmei walked out of her study and into the kitchen, clutching her empty mug. She looked up suddenly to see Glen in a tracksuit. He was going for a jog, he said, and they could have breakfast together when he got back. “All right,” she said. “Enjoy your run.” His d…
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Irish women have been known as many things around the world; feisty, tough, kind to name just a few of their well-known traits. All “Irish Mammies” at heart—“Cup of tea? You will, you will, you will …” But let’s not forget that Ireland has been making a name for itself in recent years as the home of world-class thriller writers. So knowing Irish women as you do, it should come as no surprise that they’re blazing a trail, with murder on their minds. On the off-chance that you haven’t been paying attention, let me introduce you to just a few of them. Liz Nugent, Little Cruelties “All three Drumm brothers were at the funeral, although one of us was in the coffin.” If t…
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I started trying to write professionally—seriously, methodically, a copy of Writer’s Market in one hand and a stack of self-addressed stamped envelopes in the other—at age twelve. (You can imagine how well that ended for me.) Behind me was a decade of bookworminess, yes, but also a deep and abiding love of movies and video games, the faster-paced and more action-packed the better. It’s here I developed a lifelong admiration of a writing choice you see often in visual media but very seldom in books: pitching the viewer (and, occasionally, the reader) directly into the deep end from the first moments of the first scene and paying out just enough line for them to grab onto. …
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Stephen Mack Jones, Dead of Winter (Soho) Stephen Mack Jones’s August Snow series has been a true revelation for detective fiction, and in this, the third installment, the world just keeps getting richer and more nuanced and the writing more incisive. Here, Snow is approached by the head of a local institution, Authentico Foods, who is being strong-armed by an anonymous antagonist. Snow decides to help, and the investigation soon takes in a shadowy real estate operation and the attempted gentrification of Detroit’s Mexicantown. This is a crime n…
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The Emmanuel Baptist Church of Capp Street was cursed from the start. In 1878, the church moved from a rented hall on 22nd and Folsom to more permanent digs at 22nd and Capp. A short time later, the church’s first pastor, Reverend Charles Hughes, slashed his own throat with a straight razor. His replacement chose a more common method of suicide and shot himself in the head. Two ministers. Two suicides. You’d think that Mission residents would’ve burned the place to the ground after that and called it a day, but the church kept going. The third pastor, Isaac Milton “I.M.” Kalloch, was young and politically connected. His father, Isaac Smith “I.S.” Kalloch, a minister hims…
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New Haven, CT As an adult, Miles had always lived alone. Not only had he never married, he’d never had a live-in girlfriend. Sure, plenty of women had slept over through the years, but rarely more than two nights in a row. Miles didn’t encourage that kind of thing. Never give a woman the chance to get comfortable under this roof. He valued his privacy. He liked things just so. Living a solitary existence, at least on the home front, was not a problem. But since the diagnosis, something in him had changed. Not physically, but emotionally. He was lonely. Miles found himself having conversations, out loud, with him- self, if only to hear someone’s voice. Not when the ho…
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As she was approaching Skálar, fog rolled in without warning, blotting out the landscape and merging sea with sky. It felt like driving into an Impressionist painting, in which her destination kept receding as fast as she approached it; like entering a void in which time had ceased to have any meaning. Maybe, in a sense, this was true: maybe time was less important there; it mattered less what day it was, what hour it was, out here where people lived at one with nature. When she finally reached it, the tiny hamlet of Skálar was wreathed in dense cloud. And now the feeling was more like being in a folk tale, an ominous, supernatural tale, set in a vague, shifting world. Th…
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Aidan Truhen is the author of Seven Demons, the sequel to The Price You Pay. Here, he talks to Nick Harkaway (Gnomon, The Gone-Away World) about writing, identity and the world. Nick Harkaway: You described the first Jack Price book as “morally disimproving”. Do you feel a moral duty as a writer? Aidan Truhen: Bam. No small talk. Just like that. NH: I don’t picture you as someone who likes small talk. AT: That’s fair. NH: So… morally disimproving. AT: Yeah, if we say that books in general matter—which we do—and we say that they uplift and they create empathy and they teach… if books can affect the self, then it follows that some books could also be bad for you. Th…
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A man walks unsteadily into an impressive art deco building. There are police officers inside, milling about. He asks a question we don’t hear as an anxious score fills our ears. He turns left down a long hallway. Now, he’s outside the Homicide Division—room 44—and enters. There are a half-dozen men sitting around, doing nothing much. Not many homicides in this town, I guess. He asks for the man in charge. He’s shown into an interior office and says he wants to report a murder. He’s invited to sit down and is asked where it occurred. “San Francisco, last night.” “Who was murdered?” “I was.” The Captain looks less shocked than you’d think given the declaration the …
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Warning: potential triggers ahead. How about that? A warning at the beginning of this piece; I’ve never done that before. I’ve killed off a decent amount of folks in my thrillers—hell, even crucified a few of them—yet none of my books contains a trigger warning. I added one here because I saw a review on Goodreads for my new book, The Dead Husband, that stated, “There are a couple instances of animal torture/death, which deducted half a star from my final rating.” (To be fair, there was only one instance (that I remember) and the death was quick and off-camera. I say give me my half-star back!) The reviewer went on to mostly praise the book but warn of potential triggers…
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What’s a mystery all about? The ending? Well, of course, you say—the denouement, the unraveling of the clues, the big reveal. If it’s too easy to guess the ending before that very moment, or if the ending doesn’t seem to mesh with the clues provided by the author you’re disappointed with it. It’s a lousy mystery, right? Really? Ever re-read a mystery? Even though you know the solution? (If you’re like me, of course, you can re-read it a year later because you’ve forgotten the solution, but that’s another matter.) But what’s the pleasure in re-reading if the entire pleasure is in the solution dangled like a carrot before you? Tom Stoppard, the great British playwright, op…
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I’ve been in the business of killing people for some time now. It started out in medical school: the patient I couldn’t save; the mistakes I made that kept me lying awake at night, staring into the darkness. The art of saving lives isn’t perfect. Complications develop. The body can be fragile and unforgiving. In the quest to cure we sometimes make things worse. Healing and destruction are two sides of the same coin. They don’t tell you this on your first day in the hospital. They slap a white coat on you and tell you to go make a difference. They train you and test you and eventually let you practice on your own. But the outcomes in medicine are rarely certain. Sooner or…
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If it was once possible to claim (as Cyril Connolly sneeringly did) that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of bad art than the pram in the hall’, what does that make your iPhone? It’s easy to think of ways in which it—and the apps you’ve downloaded—make it harder to write than ever, what with the incessant temptation to doomscroll (thank you, 2021) and the ever-present lure of a quick endorphin hit from a Like or a Retweet. At a slightly more serious level, any major sea-change in the way we all communicate also compels contemporary writers to think carefully about the way we tell stories—and about the kinds of stories that we choose to tell. This can happen in subtle ways …
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What Writing About the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre Taught Me About the Madness of Crowds
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I was reading a great interview on CrimeReads.com the other day—Paraic O’Donnell talking to Lee Child, genius author of the Jack Reacher novels—and they has this wonderful debate about the unreality of fiction. When I say it out loud, it sounds obvious, but it came up twice. And Lee said: ‘The only two real people in the transaction are the author and the reader.’ It’s absolutely true. Even if I put the Queen of England in the heart of my action—like in the ‘The Crown’ on TV—it isn’t actually her. It’s a fictional appearance by a ghost of a real person. If I put the 16th century Catherine de’ Medici on the page, a woman who history pretty much assures us was an embodimen…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephen Mack Jones, Dead of Winter (Soho) “Like Walter Mosley and Joe Ide, Jones builds a raucous and endearing cast of characters from his inner-city setting, fusing neighborhood camaraderie with streetwise know-how and head-banging action. This is a fine thriller in the grand hard-boiled tradition, but it’s also a sensitive, multifaceted portrait of race in America.” –Booklist Linwood Barclay Find You First (William Morrow) “Barclay melds a solid, winning plot with in-depth character studies, including his supporting characters. . . The tense Find You First gains its suspense fro…
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As a child I remember being told not to judge a book by its cover. How we should always judge a person by their deeds and not be seduced by words, and something about a person showing their true colors. I’m sure there are other phrases but they’ve all blurred into an indistinguishable blob of the advice I absorbed as a child without question. Then I grew up and realised adults don’t follow their own advice, ever. All that good logical instruction slips away until it seems only applicable to children and it’s widely accepted that some adults especially seem to be able to get away with behaving badly. At the same time, we expect bad people to come with devil horns and a ha…
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Spring in New Hampshire is slow to arrive, with warm stretches rudely interrupted by a return to winter complete with snow flurries and blustery winds. How do we survive six slow and endless months of frigid weather, you might ask, each and every year? One answer is that we turn our focus to interior pursuits, to the pleasures of life at home. Last spring, the entire nation joined us as people sought comfort, meaning, and face it, the need for something to do during their own forced isolation. Looking for ideas to while away the hours? The cozy mysteries I discuss below have you covered. Besides savoring the puzzling plots, mystery fans enjoy learning more about a subjec…
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I’m a 4th Degree Black Belt and Certified Instructor of Taekwondo. I trained and taught as a career for over 20 years. I also write suspense novels, and it drives me a little nuts whenever I read a fight scene that isn’t realistic. It’s probably hard to write a fight scene if you’ve never trained or never been in a fight. A lot of people fall into that category, so here are a few tips on mistakes to avoid. 1. You think movies are accurate. In a lot of ways, they are not. We all love watching those movies that are all about the tough guy/girl who kicks butt over and over. Sometimes, those scenes will go on for 30 minutes. The problem? Who has that kind of stamina? No on…
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