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 am an epic fantasy writer by trade, but I cut my teeth on mysteries. My reading teeth that is. When I was 7, I was gifted a complete set of The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner right before summer vacation. The first evening of vacation I decided to open the eponymous novel and found myself sucked into this series of children who solve mysteries. It was the first (of many) series that I binge read—waiting for my Mom to tuck me in and then hiding under the covers with a flashlight, reading long into the night until finally I couldn’t keep my eyes open. (Reader take warning, the next school year a teacher told us an apocryphal story of Kipling reading by candl…
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By dint of yelling and cursing and blasting his horn until his ears rang, he managed to carve a path through a crowd of fifty or so people who’d come running to the scene like flies to shit and were now blocking the entrance to Via Rosolino Pilo to anyone, like him, coming from Via Nino Bixio. The root cause of the blockage was a police car parked across the width of the entrance to the street, with beat cops Inzolia and Verdicchio—known on the force as “the table wines”— presiding over the scene. At the far end of the street, which gave onto Via Tukory, the “wild beasts”—that is, beat cops Lupo and Leone—were also standing guard. The police force’s “chicken coop,” on the…
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We live in age of “genre-bending” books. Every other novel of the shelf seems to offer up some new combination: coming-of-age zombie novel, Western space opera, postmodern horror, Gothic fantasy. And that’s just as it should be. Literature stays vital through the constant recombining, reconfiguring, and reinvention of styles and forms. But out of all these different mixtures, there’s one pair that seems especially potent: science fiction and noir. The mixing of SF with noir and hardboiled fiction dates back to at least Philip K. Dick’s classic 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for the film Blade Runner, which leans even more heavily into the noir…
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In 1969, Sam Melville and an activist group known as “the Crazies” conspired to bomb the Federal Office Building in downtown New York. He was later serving in Attica Prison during the uprisings, when he was shot and killed. His son, Joshua Melville, is the author of the new book, American Time Bomb, Attica, Sam Melville, and a Son’s Search for Answers. The following is an excerpt from that book. ___________________________________ The Sharon Krebs and Pat Swinton I met in mid-1988 looked nothing like the pictures of them I had found in archives at the Donnell Library. The one of Sharon was originally published in an underground newspaper and showed her walking naked; he…
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I have long had a love affair with the Robin Hoods, scapegraces, and well-meaning criminals of the literary world. Given the popularity of western gunslinger and super hero movies, I’d venture to assume I’m not the only one with a fondness for good-hearted, well-meaning characters who are at odds with the laws of the land. Nickle, the main character in my new novel, Other People’s Things, is one of these. She’s quick to admit she has a problem with sticky fingers. But she’d also tell you—even though she’s been labeled as a thief and a kleptomaniac and by the age of thirty has accumulated an alarming rap sheet—that she’s not really a thief. Instead, she runs what she call…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Vera Kurian, Never Saw Me Coming (Park Row) Vera Kurian’s extraordinarily entertaining Never Saw Me Coming is one of a few books in a new trend I’m calling “yoga pants noir,” in which hot girls in athleisure wear are no longer the victims—and they might be the killers. College freshman Chloe has carefully cultivated her nonchalant Cool Girl personality, but she has a secret: she’s a psychopath, hell-bent on getting revenge against a boy from her past who’s also attending the same school. The problem is, she’s not the only psychopath on campus—there are at least six others, all part…
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In the newest novel in Craig Johnson’s Longmire series, Sheriff Walt Longmire is called out to assist Tribal Police in an investigation. A local basketball phenom, Jaya One Moon Long, is receiving death threats. Her sister was one of the many Native women to go missing without a trace, and the fear is she will be the next. Daughter of the Morning Star is one of the most unsettling and deeply moving installments in the long-running series. In the lead-up to the novel’s release, Johnson answered a few questions about the people and events that inspired this story. What inspired you to write Daughter of the Morning Star? I was doing a library event up in Hardin on the Crow…
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Recently while stopped at a red light I pointed out to my wife a man with long white hair, sitting on a recumbent bike, wearing tie-dye, and waiting for the turn arrow so he could pull into the parking lot of Urban Ore, a scrapyard in Berkeley, California that sells household junk for upcycling. “That might be the most Berkeley guy I’ve ever seen,” I said. For Berkeley residents like me, it’s something of a local sport to scan our surroundings in search of people who are “really Berkeley.” Defining who is and is not “really Berkeley” is, of course, a highly subjective exercise, one that ultimately says more about the observer than the observed. At the same time, it’…
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On January 21, 1958 in Belmont, Nebraska, 19-year-old Charlie Starkweather shot and killed 14- year-old Caril Ann Fugate’s mother and stepfather, and stabbed and beat her two-year-old baby sister to death. In the eight days that followed, seven more people would die along the route of Starkweather and Fugate’s sex-fueled teenage crime spree, including two fellow teenagers—Robert Jensen and Carol King—whose murders would eventually land Charlie on death row, and Caril in a Nebraska penitentiary for life. It looked like a 1950s version of Bonnie and Clyde: two young criminals on the run, fed up with the straight and narrow of school and small town jobs, looking to ride int…
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It’s no secret that social media revolutionized the way we see and interact with the world. Literally—the entire world is now at everyone’s fingertips, one login away. For many, this has been a blessing, as they reached stardom with little more than mirror selfies and tweeted shower thoughts. But for others, the ubiquity and addictive nature of social media has unintended consequences. I’ve always been interested in the many ways social media can go wrong, sometimes with deadly results. In my book THE LAST BEAUTIFUL GIRL, the protagonist rises to Internet fame by recreating the glory days of a socialite from a hundred years ago, but danger is lurking in the corners of her…
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Last week, Sara Gran and I had an hour-long conversation on Zoom. We were supposed to be talking about her new publishing company, Dreamland Books, and its first release, Gran’s novel The Book of the Most Precious Substance. Instead, our conversation ended up touching on almost every hot button topic in the genre, from gender politics to publishing issues. Our conversation was also very 2020/1: both of us bragged about washing our hair before the interview (it was, indeed, the first time someone had seen me in days). Sara Gran had recently gotten a real haircut, but assured me that she’d spent much of the pandemic cutting her own hair while smoking weed. (The drawback to …
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You don’t notice her at first, but when you do, she’s peering over the garden hedge or through the lace curtains of a tea shop. She’s just another nosy old lady, absent-minded and a gossip, in hats and gloves when she goes out into the village, clutching her purse to her chest, ready to pester the police with a vaguely crackpot question or warning. When you think of the spinster sleuths of the Golden Age, who comes to mind? Christie’s Jane Marple, of course, followed by Patricia Wentworth’s Maud Silver, a retired governess turned private detective, and Dorothy Sayers’s Miss Climpson, who runs an employment agency funded by Lord Peter Wimsey as a cover for a crew of women…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jonathan Kellerman, Jesse Kellerman, The Burning (Ballantine) “Edison is an interesting protagonist, a good man for whom finding the truth is more important than anything else, including his own safety. He’s gentle and strong, compassionate and ruthless, methodical and impulsive.” Booklist Andrea Camilleri, Riccardino (trans. from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli)(Penguin) “Incisive wit colors this insightful and intriguing farewell. The sad, poetic ending is perfect.” Publishers Weekly Lincoln Michel, The Body Scout (Orbit) “Completely weird and still completely real. Deli…
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I dare to suggest that Detroit has a bit of an image problem these days. But I’m an outsider, so what do I know? Here’s Michigander author Stephen Mack Jones’s character August Snow, a man very dedicated to Detroit, a true son of the Motor City, returning to his hometown after a couple of years of self-imposed exile: ‘So I returned to a city where happiness is usually a matter of finding contentment in an acceptable level of intangible fear, unfocused loathing and unexplainable ennui.’ August Snow is a denizen of Mexicantown, in southwest Detroit, but finds himself trawling throughout the city, the barely inhabited former industrial wastelands to the luxury mansions of …
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As a writer, I’m often asked about where my ideas come from – and it can be a difficult question to answer. In truth, I find my ideas in everything and everywhere. In fact, I can’t stop ideas from popping into my imagination on a continual basis. You see, I’m hard-wired to see the world through the prism of stories. I find inspiration in many places—whether it be from an article in a newspaper, a photograph, a family secret or an overheard conversation. But, if I had to pick one answer to this question, then I would say that my inspiration comes most powerfully from my environment—my home village and the surrounding countryside, in a rural and rather forgotten corner of K…
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“Few suspected women of spying, and certainly no one expected a middle-aged knitter to be surreptitiously gathering intelligence.” -Elizabeth Bentley, A Most Clever Girl While researching topics for my next novel, I stumbled across Elizabeth Bentley’s name and was gobsmacked that I’d never heard of this American spy who once ran the largest Soviet spy ring in America. Because Bentley was a female NKVD-spy-turned-FBI-informer—a combination America wasn’t quite sure what to do with—she was overshadowed both in life and after her death by Joseph McCarthy and Whittaker Chambers. In fact, Whittaker Chambers—whose story is very similar to Bentley’s—received a posthumous Pre…
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The question we have been asked more than any other in our career as pro podders is ‘why are women so obsessed with true crime?’. And the numbers do stack up, we at RedHanded have been in the criminal fixation game for nearly five years, and we still boast an audience heavily swayed in the female direction. Eighty-two percent swayed, to be exact. So, the question is worth asking, but the truth is, true crime and the commercial consumption of it is nothing new. As far back as 1888, Victorian media moguls cottoned on sharpish to how much faster they could sell their papers if they recounted the latest rippings of Britain’s most famous Jack. This business strategy is still …
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“Are you trying to bust my balls?” The speaker is Inspector Salvo Montalbano, head of the fictional municipality of Vigata, Sicily’s, police department, and in the 28 novels and two short story collections written by Andrea Camilleri and published in Italian and English…someone always is. The criminals, from petty to monstrous, who occupy his frustrating days (and sometimes alarming nightmares); the Mafia thugs who spread their tentacles into every Sicilian institution; the corrupt politicians who march hand in hand with them; the witless press that blindly supports whatever government is in charge at the moment; the colleagues who, for all their police skills, can’t h…
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Matthew Arnold suggested the best method of judging the excellence of literature is the amount of time it has survived. There is no greater proof of this touchstone for a novelist than Graham Greene. His books are still selling, often in terms much greater than newly published books that get intense media coverage. His books are read with enthusiasm and taken seriously. It is surprising that many of his contemporaries, many Noble prize winners included, are simply vanishing into the past, while the books of Greene not only endure but thrive. For the modern novelist, these facts demand attention. In practical terms, in the method or craft of producing these novels, just w…
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It’s no secret that cozy mysteries often feature cats. They’re the trusty side-kicks, the comic reliefs, the silent partners with noses dewy for crime. Rarely are they the protagonists though. That role is saved for the sleuthy humans with their dual legs, lavender lattes, and marvelous penchants for snooping. Yet, as much as I love these mysteries with their human protags and perspectives, as an animal lover, I always find myself wanting to know more about the cats. Perhaps it’s because I’ve realized that when they bathe they’re actually doing laundry, or because during food time they all have the vocal ranges of Pavarotti, but I’m curious to experience the world (and th…
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This essay, much like its subject, is imbued with the desire to wake the dead. Pushing Daisies, Bryan Fuller’s strange, polychromatic television show about a shy baker whose touch can bring the dead back to life, has been off the air since it was cancelled after its second season in 2009. There have been whispers of revival hopes (both from fans and the cast itself), but still, it remains kind of quiescent in mainstream culture; a series that many loved and seem to remember fondly, but which has not experienced a public afterlife, even despite the increasing notoriety of its lead, Lee Pace. Perhaps this is because it arrived on a streaming platform (HBO Max) only recently…
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John Vercher’s debut novel Three-Fifths was nominated for nearly every crime-writing award imaginable after it was published in 2019. Three-Fifths has also been added to the curriculum at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. John’s forthcoming book, After The Lights Go Out (June 2022), is a literary novel that focuses on a mixed-martial arts fighter suffering from dementia. Oh, and John also happens to be a brown belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu himself. But don’t let any of that fool you. John isn’t one of those grind-it-out types of writers. In fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth. At times throughout our talk, John’s approach to writing baffled me. I l…
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I love reading a book with an interesting setting. And because I grew up in the Colorado high country, I’m particularly fond of mountainous settings in the western United States. The rugged terrain can’t be beat for creating natural barriers and challenges for characters to overcome. Authors use settings in many creative ways. Often, those of us who write mysteries in the mountains use setting as a character, specifically as another antagonist that tests our protagonists, providing them with conflicts that force them into action that ultimately shapes them and makes them grow. We throw terrible weather conditions, floods, forest fires, wild animals, and all kinds of tri…
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The flashing blue lights were noticeable the minute I turned the corner onto Park Street. My house was just down the block, and I had been at enough crime scenes as a reporter to understand that this meant the police were there. Midnight, after midnight actually, on a Saturday, was not always quiet in Atlanta. But all was usually serene on the street where I lived. I had just finished anchoring the weekend news at the CBS affiliate in Atlanta. Had I, by chance, come across a breaking news story? As I got closer, I realized the swirling blue lights–– and all the police cars attached to them ––were at my house. My house. I screeched into a parking space, leaped out of t…
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Hello again! Here I am with another group of excellent writers: Ivy Pochoda (These Women), Amy Gentry (Bad Habits), Cynthia Pelayo (Children of Chicago), Elisabeth de Mariaffi (The Retreat), and a special appearance by Lisa Taddeo (Animal). Our topic was deliberately broad: women and violence. We talked about that and a whole bushel of related and unrelated topics: horror, Momfluencers, Cottagecore, arrogant women, likeability, the Texas mom cheerleader murder, Medea, bookstagram, ambition and, Ivy’s mic drop revelation about a job she had in proximity to the rich and famous. Don’t steal our ideas, aspiring crime writers. If someone publishes a crime novel in Instagram st…
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