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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Hello chums. This is a very short post whose sole intention is to provide you with access to the following hysterical sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look, the British sketch show featuring the comedy duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb. In this skit, Mitchell and Webb play two famous actors (Michael and Alec) whose egos get the better of them while acting as Holmes and Watson. And then there’s some bonus footage where Mitchell and Webb play themselves, off-camera, while waiting to film the Holmes and Watson sketch. (Mitchell and Webb have other, sadder, Holmes/Watson content, but that is for another post on another day.) For what it’s worth, I laughed so long and ha…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Abigail Dean, Girl A (Viking) I know it’s only February, but Girl A already looks to be one of biggest books of the year. In this powerful story of trauma, abuse, and long-delayed reckonings, the survivors of horrific family abuse must reconnect after the death of their mother. The siblings are still fractured by the alliances and betrayals of their childhood, and each is damaged—and attempting to heal—in their own way. A bleak and powerful tour-de-force that raises complex questions of responsibility and truth, Girl A is not to be missed. –…
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I can’t remember when I first heard of Mike Hodges’s seminal 1971 British gangster film, Get Carter, but it was long before I finally managed to see it late one night on cable television in a hotel in Prague in the late 1990s. And it was several more years until I was able to track down a copy of the then relatively rare source novel of the film, Ted Lewis’s Jack’s Return Home, published in 1970. Until the last half decade or so, Get Carter as the book would subsequently be retitled and how it will be referred to it in this piece, along with Lewis’s eight other novels, were all out of print and little known. This is despite the praise heaped on them by luminaries such …
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The front cover of the 1997 edition of Lolita, the one I’ve dog-eared and underlined, features a black-and-white photograph of the lower half of an adolescent girl wearing bobby socks, saddle shoes, and a very short skirt, one leg self-consciously—or coyly—bent. The accompanying blurb, from Vanity Fair, proclaims that this novel is “the only convincing love story of our century.” The publisher’s ad copy on the back describes it as “a meditation on love.” The description on the book’s Amazon page calls the relationship between Humbert Humbert, in his late thirties, and twelve-year-old Lolita “a love affair,” “a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows,…
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Stephen King, the master of horror, is also a big crime reader… * ARIEL S. WINTER First-novelist Winter stunned readers with his mammoth 180,000-word debut, The Twenty-Year Death, which tells the story of a disintegrating marriage as told, successively, in the manner of Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson. Stephen King called it “bold, innovative, and thrilling,” writing “The Twenty-Year Death crackles with suspense and will keep you up late.” DONALD E. WESTLAKE “A book by this guy is a cause for happiness,” King wrote about the man who, under the pseudonym “Richard Stark,” wrote the dark-as-dark-gets Parker novels and inspired the name of the mur…
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Ever wondered if you could be tempted by a cult? If the current viewing and reading choices are anything to go by, probably. From strictly religious, to New Age and downright bizarre, cults represent that fascinatingly dark side of devotion. And we never tire of wondering: what causes seemingly ordinary people to give up their wealth, their bodies, and sometimes even their lives to group of strangers? With life being more isolating than ever, it is perhaps not surprising we’re more drawn than ever to peeking inside extreme groups, promising a simpler, decision-free life. My own interest is strictly professional, of course. Researching my book, Black Widows, cast me deep …
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True Crime is a genre that has priors—a rap sheet a mile long—and dark secrets dating all the way bac to its very first hit, Truman Capote’s seminal 1966 smash, In Cold Blood. A master stylist’s attempt to write the world’s first non-fiction novel, it’s a heart-stirring read, telling the tragic story of a family slaying in small town Kansas. Indeed, the story is so assured and deeply-felt that at times it seems almost too perfect, too good to be true, and many of those interviewed by Capote as part of the project later questioned the veracity of his narrative, claiming that he had misquoted some, misrepresented others, and in several cases, conjured whole scenes out of t…
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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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Once upon a time. In a deep, dark wood. In a kingdom far away. These fairy tale beginnings and so much more speak to a place and time very long ago. How many of us ever wonder if these places and those stories were real? Were there inklings of nonfiction embedded into the words of fairy tales we have come to know so dearly? The last lines in “Cinderella” are not “And they lived happily ever after.” The last lines in “Cinderella” are: “And thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness all their days.” This punishment was of course applied to the wicked sisters, and shortly before the tale ended we learned that “pigeons pecked out one eye fr…
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Today the Mystery Writers of America announced the nominations for the 2021 Edgar Awards, one of the mystery world’s premier honors. The winners will be announced on April 29, 2021. This year marks the 75th annual presentation of the awards. For more on the nominees and special award winners, check in with the Mystery Writers of America throughout the season. ___________________________________ BEST NOVEL ___________________________________ Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (Penguin Random House – Random House) Before She Was Helen by Caroline B. Cooney (Poisoned Pen Press) Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Penguin Random House – Pamela Dorman Bo…
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Vienna was giving Norah the cold shoulder. When she’d visited with Alex in the summer, she’d been enchanted; it had seemed to her a city with a mind of its own, unlike anywhere she’d been before. That felt like light years ago. Everything seemed so bleak—a Munchian vision of a city; a dark, urban forest, warped and menacing. The gloom pervaded Norah’s empty at and the dingy streets. Passers-by stared grimly at their phones; melancholy coated everything like a film of grease. And it was fucking freezing. Norah bought an Austrian paper, a German paper and a packet of cigarettes in the newsagent’s across the road, and sat down with them in the corner bistro. By the time sh…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Alison Wisdom, We Can Only Save Ourselves (Harper Perennial) “Eerie and powerful. . . . the hypnotic storytelling and exploration of Alice’s character—and the character of Alice’s entire town—will draw readers in.” –Booklist Tod Goldberg, The Low Desert (Counterpoint) “These are stories Elmore Leonard would love—not just because the razor-sharp Goldberg wastes no words in cutting to the heart of his stories, but also because he highlights the humanity and inner lives of even his most bent characters . . . A thoroughly enjoyable collection by a bona fide original.” –Kirkus Reviews…
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tk ___________________________________ The Soothsayer: Rose Marks ___________________________________ There were so many sad women in Manhattan. They were educated and successful and desperate. They had MBAs and books on the New York Times Best Seller list and jobs in international finance; they had abusive husbands and drug-addled sons and mothers who were dying. Their daughters were depressed and their boyfriends were leaving them and their bodies were riddled with cancer. What could they do? These women had grown up believing that there was something more out there, something to cling to. And now, as they dragged their aching hearts through the city, something appe…
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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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Many years ago, as a freestyle snowboarder competing at halfpipe, I spent five winters in the mountains of France, Switzerland, Austria and Canada. I was obsessed with the icy white world at the top of a mountain and always dreamt of setting a novel there. Beautiful yet deadly, with their cliffs, crevasses and avalanches, the high mountains seemed a perfect setting for a thriller. Year later, as I sat down to try to write one, a news headline caught my eye. Climbers in Saas Fee, Switzerland, had spotted a hand and two shoes protruding from a glacier. Rescue teams were called in and uncovered the body of a man who’d gone missing thirty years earlier. This sort of grues…
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When you think ‘Boston Noir,’ you probably think of The Departed or The Town or, David Ortiz help us, Boondock Saints. The best of Boston noir is a different shade of darkness than the more traditional film noir. (And that’s pretty damn dark.) Add on extra layers of guilt and a strong religious presence, and you’ve got something unique. While filming in Massachusetts has become more prevalent in recent years, for decades there wasn’t much of film production in the state. All the films listed below were made in these darker days, when seeing the streets of Boston on screen was a rarer occurrence. These roots of film noir run deep and include some early examples of on-loc…
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The SHOT Show held annually in Las Vegas is a multicolored, multifaceted, overwhelming, ballistic, gargantuan, flamboyant, and slightly surreal look at the U.S. firearms industry. The biggest gun trade show on the planet fills the sprawling Sands Expo and Convention Center, boasting more than 700,000 square feet of exhibition space. Closed to the public, it attracts over sixty thousand people from the industry, including gun makers, gun importers, gun dealers, gun repairers, gun specialist lawyers, gun trainers, gun lobbyists, and gun anything else you can think of. Representatives from armies and police forces around the world attend, sealing bulk orders in meetings in g…
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Imposters play a role in many contemporary novels, including Stephen King’s The Outsider, Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and others. Imposters are part of our literary tradition, appearing as con men in crime fiction, as double agents in spy fiction, and in a variety of other guises in literary fiction. The imposter takes on another person’s identity, or makes up a false identity, and the usual motive is to gain the trust of others in order to exploit it. Deception can be an artful way to seduce, steal, enable the double agent to betray, and for some there is the allure of slipping into another life si…
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The New Yorker editor reached Randy Wayne White at his historic waterfront home high atop a historic Indian mound on Pine Island on Florida’s Gulf Coast. “We’d like you to write a story about the Everglades for us,” she told him over the phone. Randy was in a foul mood. The Outside magazine columnist was also a fishing guide working out of Tarpon Bay Marina on Sanibel Island, just across the bay and salt flats from his home, and it was the height of fishing season. “I’d been fishing something like 48 days straight,” he says. “So much has been written about the Everglades, I don’t know of anything else to write.” He told her thanks, but no thanks. He went on with his…
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The third lake felt inhabited. Or like it once was. Or maybe it was just that whoever used the service drive came here often enough to leave some energy behind. “Deliverance,” Amelia said. But that was silly. They weren’t in the backwoods of Tennessee. And besides, that’s what everybody said when they were in a canoe and felt a little weird about their surroundings. There shoreline was crowded with tall pines that rose from dark-green shrubs. The water was murky, as if the mud from the lake floor had come up to see who had cleared the tunnel. “I can’t believe my uncle never told me about this,” James said. But Amelia thought she understood. Given the grandeur and bea…
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My first novel gave me my breakthrough in Germany as an author of psychological thrillers. It was also a type of self-therapy, and all without my knowing it. When I gave my good friend Thomas the first draft to read, his eyes opened wide at me and he said, “You’re essentially describing exactly what we experienced with Paul.” That experience I had with my best friend and mentor back then was probably the decisive factor in my becoming interested in the mysteries of the human soul. I wouldn’t be an author today without it. Due to our big age difference, Paul was like a second father to me. Unfortunately, Paul was very sick. It wasn’t like cancer eating away at you on the …
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“More diversity? No. Enough already. Just let me write my book about a dude in a hat shooting another dude in a hat.” I can already hear the screaming, and it sounds like a painter asking to have colors removed from their palette. Fine, do charcoal if that’s what hikes your kilt, but no whining if you discover you’re writing boring books. “Roll it back, what is this ‘neurodiversity’ you want me to sign onto?” Okay, I’ll pretend you don’t have Google. In 1998, Australian sociologist Judy Singer came up with the term as a new way to look at what had once been seen as neurodevelopmental disorders. Instead of pathology, she saw diversity in the way brains work, and that it…
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“‘I have never liked fog,’ said Miss Marple.” ——At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie The history of mysteries and detective fiction includes several instances of authors and characters falling victim to dementia. If the intersection of detective fiction and dementia is so striking, it’s because they’re like a matched set of mirror opposites. This essay looks at four examples. In the classic sense, a mystery begins with a puzzle or number of unexplained circumstances. Typically, at the outset, someone is killed. The killer and the motive for the murder are unknown, and the circumstances for the crime are shrouded in mystery. As the story unfolds, a detective sorts t…
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As the marshals’ search for the Commander sputtered during the first months of 2012, there was no way for them to know that the key to solving this mystery sat in a drawer of a metal filing cabinet at the New Mexico State Library in Santa Fe. Had Bill Boldin and his team known where to look, they could have found, alongside back issues of the Ruidoso News, the Carlsbad Current-Argus, and the Bernalillo Times, a blue-and-white box containing microfilmed issues of the Gallup Independent from July and August 1997. As it had for more than three decades, the masthead on the August 8 edition of the local newspaper proclaimed that, inside, readers would find “The Truth Well Tol…
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Shawn “S.A.” Cosby is a writer who needs no introduction. He’s everywhere. His latest novel, Razorblade Tears, was an instant New York Times bestseller. Before that, Blacktop Wasteland garnered nearly every accolade imaginable: Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner, New York Times Notable Book, NPR’s Best Books of 2020, and more. Needless to say, I was thrilled to have the chance to sit down and talk “shop” with such a successful author. A dude from the South. Gloucester, Virginia to be exact. I was so excited, I logged into our Zoom meeting ten minutes early. Over an hour later, I was still waiting, staring at my own bald head on the computer screen instead of Shawn’s, w…
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