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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There are many events and books that inspired I Am Not Who You Think I Am, from Dennis Lehane’s tragedy Mystic River and his psychological thriller Shutter Island, to my watching a barn burn to the ground one dark night as a kid. But for the deep gothic atmosphere and the unrelenting psychological disturbance that permeates my new novel, I found the greatest inspiration right outside my kitchen window, a view of a mountain known for its unsolved disappearances and a legendary ghost town—Glastenbury Mountain, or what I call Shirley Jackson and Donna Tartt Country. It is this mountain where Jackson and Tartt, two of the world’s greatest gothic writers, drew much of their …
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Writing a novel is a series of decisions—millions of them, from big ones like whodunnit and where to begin all the way down to a character’s eye colour and footwear. One of the most important choices a writer can make is the main character’s profession, which has implications far beyond the practical concern of whether you know enough about a specific job to write about it. The profession of your main character might affect the entire tone and character of the book you write: in fiction, perspective is everything. At the beginning of the Golden Age of crime fiction, the amateur detective was a key figure, from Agatha Christie’s little old lady Miss Marple to Dorothy L. S…
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Publishing Is a Nightmare: 31 Horror Films about Writing, Reading, and the Book Business
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The business of writing and reading pops up all the time in horror films. Maybe it’s that screenwriters understand better than anyone the terror of creation. Maybe it’s that long, late hours spent alone in an office juxtaposes nicely on screen against glamorous events hosted by the literati. Or perhaps we’ve all just had a traumatic childhood experience in a library. Either way, here are 31 films guaranteed to give you an October that’s equal parts eerie and erudite. We’re taking a broad understanding of both the horror genre and of the book biz, with films featuring authors, agents, screenwriters, journalists, and just straight up evil books. Whether or not you’re a har…
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CrimeReads editors select the best new crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers coming out in October. * James Han Mattson, Reprieve (William Morrow and Custom House) It’s hard to do justice to how awesome this book is without giving much away, so I’ll just tell you the set-up: in the mid-90s, in a small university town in the middle of nowhere, there is a haunted house. Not just any haunted house, but a full-contact mansion of horrors, where the well-heeled cliental can go in smiling and emerge screaming, and a few daring souls each year attempt to win a cash prize by completing an exceptionally disturbing challenge. Reprieve is a self-aware and furious deconstructio…
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Many years ago, my uncle, Clinton Barbra, looked out his front window and saw a police car idling at the end of his driveway. The car sat there for a moment, and then pulled away. My uncle ran out the back door of his house, went into the trees, and started pulling apart his still. The squad car was driven by a friend of his at the station. That little pause by the driveway was the tip-off: the cops were on their way. My uncle hid what he could in his attic. He couldn’t hide the barrels of mash, however. The police arrested Clinton and poured kerosene over the barrels. When his wife bailed him out, he went back home, dipped out the kerosene, reassembled the still, and ra…
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Since I was a boy, I desired only two things in my life. Not money or fame. No, I’ve always had too healthy an ego to crave that. What I wanted was to be a writer, and I longed to return to Italy, the country of my parents’ birth. No one in my family was a writer and there weren’t many books in my home. To a set of parents from the war-torn and the poverty-stricken mezzogiorno—only one of whom made it out of grammar school—a book was a luxury, unless it was a textbook. Yet I became a journalist and author. Perhaps unlike most writers, for me the desire to scribble stories on a page came at a precise moment: It happened in Mrs. Hogan’s (I hope you are still out there.) 7…
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Fear doesn’t have to make sense to the character. What matters is the effect the emotion has on the character. The sensation triggers the body’s natural reaction to threats of harm, and it’s intuitive and vital to survival. Determining how a character reacts and responds to fear is critical to the story line and the character arc. Motivation plays the most critical role. Respecting the outcome of a specific fear, either real or imagined, doesn’t make a hero or heroine any less a person. The emotion isn’t a sign of cowardice but often compels a character to pursue coping or survival skills. The anxiety and pressure can trap a sufferer, causing them to do whatever is neces…
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It’s always hard to decide on the best James Bond movie (as those squabbling nerds from late-season Buffy can testify). These films are so hard to compare with one another, especially because their production has spanned six decades and many technological (and, ahem, social) innovations have arisen during that time. They swing from hardcore action to camp to downright parody. They play fast and loose with their source material, the novels and stories by Ian Fleming. It’s not an easy job, ranking them. But we’re going to do our level best, today. There have been seven actors to play 007 so far, and they’ve all got their unique takes on the role. Sean Connery is bemused an…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday) “… dazzling … the language here is wiseguy crisp, zinging with street vernacular … Whitehead flexes his literary muscles further, extending the boundaries and expectations of crime writing … The book is also a social drama interrogating the nature of prejudice and how an environment limits ambition. The nuances of Manhattan’s topography drive much of the action … Part of the book’s pleasure is that it keeps you guessing. By the end, I felt, as Ray does of Harlem: ‘Its effect was unmeasurable until it was gone.'” –Colin Grant (The Guardian) J…
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Few people emerge into the world as monsters, fully formed. It seems to be a gradual journey, step by step, into monsterhood. You might not realize what direction you’re headed in until you turn around and see how far you’ve come along that dark road. Perhaps the most monstrous of the monsters don’t ever recognize themselves as such. This has always been one of my greatest fears—that I may, unknowingly, have become a monster. It’s a fear I put in all my books. Writing monsters can be difficult. It’s a problem I struggled with during the early stages of The Last House on Needless Street. How do you conjure deeds and actions that are unthinkable, let alone unwritable? Writ…
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Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s question in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial is the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history. Prosecuting Penguin Books for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s novel three decades after the author’s death, Griffith-Jones asked the jury how they would feel having the novel lying around at home: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” Griffith-Jones was used to cutting an intimidating figure in court. He had prosecuted Nazis at Nuremburg. But when he asked this question jurors laughed. Griffith-Jones had talked past the three women in the jury box, and by 1960 very few British families employed live-in se…
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I have always been sort of obsessed with the idea that a house can be a character. Judging from the number of people who watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, I’m far from alone. I remember reading Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and becoming entranced with the idea of Manderley, the foggy moor, the gray sea beyond the estate’s gates. The idea that a house can embody the mood of a whole novel, how large it looms in the background, influenced much of my writing. In Shirley Jackson’s original version of The Haunting of Hill House, the house itself was both sentient and positively insane. Having spent the last decade living in a 200 year old home, this concept was—and i…
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With technology changing so quickly, have you ever wondered how cyber investigators keep up? And what about the fiction authors who write about them? “All crime is cyber crime,” an FBI agent once told me. We were standing beside a cubicle lined with mug shots of people wanted for online crimes ranging from child pornography to sextortion. I was doing research for a book featuring an online predator and had just asked him how his cyber crimes unit managed to keep pace with the ever-increasing case load. The agent may have been exaggerating that all crime is cyber crime, but there can be no doubt that the majority of investigations these days involve some sort of online …
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Terry Tice liked killing people. It was as simple as that. Maybe “liked” wasn’t the right word. Nowadays he was paid to do it, and well paid. But money was never the motive, not really. Then what was? He had given a lot of thought to this question, on and off, over the years. He wasn’t a looney, and it wasn’t a sex thing, or anything sick like that—he was no psycho. The best answer he could come up with was that it was a matter of making things tidy, of putting things in their right place. The people he was hired to kill had got in the way of something, some project or other, and had to be removed in order for business to proceed smoothly. Either that, or they were super…
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In the summer of 1939, Father Charles Edward Coughlin, famed “Radio Priest” of Detroit, Michigan, called for the creation of a Christian Front. He hoped the group would act as a counterpoise to the Popular Front, adopted by the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in 1935 and ostensibly aimed at reconciling revolutionary objectives with a commitment to democracy. As far as Coughlin was concerned, this was merely sleight of hand—a “nefarious . . . endeavor to Sovietize America” wearing “the false mask of liberalism.” In his broadcasts and his publications, Coughlin pushed his millions of followers to reject atheistic Communism in the name of Christ and cou…
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The following is an excerpt from Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War, in which Joseph Weisberg, former CIA officer and the creator of the hit TV series The Americans, makes the case that America’s policy towards Russia is failing—and we’ll never fix it until we rethink our relationship. ___________________________________ Cherkashin In 2004, a former KGB officer named Victor Cherkashin published a memoir called Spy Handler. Cherkashin had run two of the most devastating moles in the history of U.S. intelligence, CIA officer Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen. It wasn’t the stories in the book about Ames and Hanssen that grabbed me, thoug…
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Home is supposed to be our refuge: the one place we can retreat when the outside world becomes overwhelming. But what happens when our home is no longer a safe place? Where can we go when the very walls we sleep inside twist against us? These eight books explore just that: from external threats beating at your door to the very building itself becoming corrupted, there’s no place of safety inside these stories. A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay Merry recounts her childhood where, infamously, her sister became the subject of a documentary on a possible possession. When teenage Marjorie claims to hear voices and conventional medical treatment fails to help, her p…
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One of my favorite activities in a library is roaming through the stacks and finding a book I didn’t know I needed in my life. Such happy accidents! There are great reads waiting to be discovered around virtually every corner. Look! Here’s a nonfiction book about badly behaving women in history that I haven’t seen before. I love those books. And I didn’t realize that a certain bestselling author had a new book out. And that’s just a short summary from my last trip to the library. I always bring a large tote bag with me to the library to fill with books. Browsing bookshelves at a library or a bookstore is one of my best ways of discovering new reads. However, our public…
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Max Allan Collins, a three-time winner of the PWA “Shamus” Award, writes the Nathan Heller historical thrillers. His graphic novel Road to Perdition became an Academy Award-winning Tom Hanks film. His produced screenplays include Mommy and The Last Lullaby, based on his Quarry novels, also the basis of a recent Cinemax series. He has developed a dozen Mike Hammer novels from Mickey Spillane’s files and (with wife Barbara Collins) writes the award-winning Antiques mystery series. He has scripted the Dick Tracy comic strip, Batman, and co-created Ms. Tree and Wild Dog. His New York Times and USA Today bestsellers include Saving Private Ryan, American Gangster, Air Force One…
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There it was, the looming shadow of the mountains. A petrol station flashed by out of the corner of his eye, followed by yet more trees. He’d needed to pee for over two hundred kilometers by then. He pulled off onto a side road and stumbled out of the car, through the wildflowers on the verge. Turned towards the forest and relieved himself. There was something about the scents. The flowers along the edge of the ditch. The dew in the grass and the haze in the evening air, the buttercups and fireweed and cow parsley, standing a meter tall. Or maybe it was timothy grass, what did he know. He just recognized the smell. The tarmac was bumpy with frost damage, and soon gave o…
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The future is bleak, whether you’re at the bottom of an underwater sea-scraper, in a spaceship headed to a distant galaxy, or just searching for plastic in the polluted rivers of Scrappalachia. More tech leads to more debt, and AI is as likely to compete with humans as to help them. The denizens of the future are buried in the trash of today, and doomed by the politics of yesterday and tomorrow. And yet, as is the surprisingly hopeful message behind any dystopian novel, life continues. Life will always continue. And sometimes, life even finds a way to thrive. Greg McKinney, Midnight, Water City (Soho) Greg McKinney takes the future underwater in this Hawaiian noir, w…
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The first time anyone referred to me as a spy was 1986. I was living in the Middle East and meeting a host government official whom I had been cultivating for several months. “Bilal” had invited me to his house late in the evening, as he liked to do, when the streets were quiet, the household staff gone, and his family busied themselves in their part of the large house. As was our custom, we sat on his veranda, sipping the Johnnie Walker Black I regularly gifted him, eating nuts, and looking at the stars. Bilal liked to talk. And the first thing you noticed was his ear to ear smile while relating stories, telling jokes, or simply cracking wise at your expense. Playful …
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In late October 1965, Mehdi Ben Barka, an exiled Moroccan politician, was hustled into a Peugeot by two French vice cops outside the Brasserie Lipp in Paris. He had no reason to mistrust the French police. These police were off the clock, however. He was never seen again, alive or dead. At the time of his abduction, Ben Barka was organizing the Tricontinental Conference of newly decolonized nations, scheduled for January 1966 in Havana. He was a key figure in the Non-Aligned Movement, a colleague of Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Amílcar Cabral. In Morocco he had been sentenced to death in absentia, with eleven other politicians, for his putative role in a plot against Kin…
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The CrimeReads editors pick the month’s best new books out in paperback. * Roberto Saviano, Savage Kiss Translated by Anthony Shugaar (Picador) There’s not an ounce of Mario Puzo’s romanticism in this grimly riveting tale of crime and punishment. –Kirkus Reviews Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Scorpion’s Tail (Grand Central) “Preston and Child have designed an intricate thriller that takes several twists and turns, but never totally diverts from the crux of the story. This is a series that demands attention.” –New York Journal of Books Sophie Hannah, The Killings at Kingfisher Hill: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (William Morrow) “Yet again, the d…
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There are always shoes. No matter what the event—earthquake, flood, accident, fire, or bombing—the shoes are everywhere. Sometimes, they contain a foot—or part of a foot—because the dead are often separated not just from their clothes, but from their own extremities. There are always treasures, too. In the case of Swissair Flight 111, insurers searched the bottom of the Atlantic for literal treasure: more than ten pounds of diamonds, rubies, and other precious stones that had been lying in the cargo hold alongside an original Picasso and fifty kilos of paper money. But the treasures I look for are far more valuable. They are the personal treasures: wedding rings, heirl…
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