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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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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Hap and Leonard have been with me for so long, I can’t imagine them not existing for real. They seem real to me. Back in the late eighties I wanted to write a novel that would be about crime and suspense, but I wanted to write about the sixties, the generation I grew up in as well. Like the fifties, most representations of the sixties and seventies are silly and have nothing to do with how it really was. By the time I was planning to write SAVAGE SEASON, the world had changed, but the echoes of the past were still there. I decided to write in what was then a contemporary time, and look back on the legacy of the sixties, both good and bad. Take a look at what had happened…
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There is a fascinating thread that runs through literature of transfiguring visual art into written form. There are many reasons why a writer might choose to incorporate an originally visual medium into the language of a short story or novel; perhaps it is the pure challenge of the thing, an act of great imagination and skill; perhaps it is the fact that writing the visual is so viscerally and aesthetically satisfying; perhaps it is that visual artists simply fascinate and awe those writers who choose to undertake the task of transfiguration. I think it may be a little bit of all of the above, but also something more: the ability for visual art to gestate and birth revel…
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There is grim satisfaction in realizing, while sitting safely at your desk in rural Connecticut, that you know more than the Soviet secret police about an event recorded in their own archives. The satisfaction is all the greater when the documents in question concern the identity of a man who planned to strike a powerful blow against the Soviet regime, a man whom the GPU (an earlier avatar of the KGB) saw as one of its most dangerous enemies. In today’s world, punishing a national regime takes a bigger and stronger country, or even an entire alliance, as with the sanctions that the United States and NATO have been imposing on Russia. But there was a time when one determin…
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One lovely dawn in late August, the sun was cresting the tops of the distant hills to pour its golden light over the forest. Gladys Honeysuckle, always an early riser, was already on the wing, more than halfway into her daily journey toward town. She was a hummingbird (as her name implied), and her bright green wings were always in motion, going about a hundred miles an hour. Her tongue seemed no different. Gladys had something of a reputation as the town gossip. Conveniently, she was well employed by the Shady Hollow Herald, the town’s sole newspaper, where she wrote a regular column about town events and goings-on. Not a prestigious post, perhaps, but one suited to her …
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There’s the New York we see. The streets and neighborhoods, townhouses and office buildings, stoops and bodegas. That’s a damn good city, electric and irrepressible, but there’s another place just beyond that surface and it’s populated by our ambitions. A city of nighthawks and hustlers. Around every corner, a new scheme. That’s the heady undergirding of Colson Whitehead’s newest novel, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021). Whitehead is author to ten books and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (twice, for his last two, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys), but Harlem Shuffle marks his first entry into the world of crime fiction. It’s the story of Ray Carney, a…
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When I was putting this list together, one thing became abundantly clear—thrillers (especially psychological thrillers) written in the east are starkly different from thrillers in the west. The west tends to embrace what I like to think of as “page-turners.” The stakes are high, the protagonist is usually on a clock of sorts, and, with a few notable exceptions, the focus is usually on the “who” rather than the “why.” Thrillers coming from South-East Asia are usually paced very differently. Rather than immediately diving into solving the crime, these thrillers take their time—giving the reader a slightly claustrophobic look at the killers themselves, their motivations, an…
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Setting is a key element in all fiction, but in crime, mystery, and suspense, a book’s setting plays a critical role in establishing the flavor of the story. Imagine reading about murders that take place in a dumpster-lined New York City alley…in a family-owned café in an Iowa farming community…in an isolated Alaskan hunting lodge, and you immediately envision three vastly different mysteries. Many years ago, I survived a harrowing whitewater rafting accident, so when I began writing Over the Falls, my starting point was the vision of several specific whitewater kayaking scenes. Once I coupled those scenes with Bryn Collins, a main character who has walled herself off f…
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When I was 17, my mom suggested I join the high school newspaper. “You’re a good writer,” she said. She was right—I’d always gotten A’s in English—but as important as my affinity for the written word was a trait I’d often been chided for: I’m nosy. And being nosy is basically a reporter’s job. By the middle of senior year, I was hooked—but after a few years working magazines and newspapers I realized that I was even nosier than journalism allowed me to be. Let me explain. As a reporter, you can only publish what you get on the record: you have to either witness something, or write what someone else tells you and gives you permission to write. None of that bothered me un…
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I may not remember the specific details of a novel or show—the clue that led to unmasking the murderer, for example—but I always remember how I felt about the characters. How I marveled at Sherlock’s genius and self-destructive eccentricity. How Luther drew me into his darkness and Villanelle mesmerized me with her dazzling psychopathy. What was it about these characters that kept me coming back for more? After a year and a half of pandemic life, I look forward to my fictional friends at the end of the day. But no matter how captivated I am by their spiraling descent, sleuthing adventures, or comical escapades, when the series ends, the plot slips from my mind. I could…
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Italy is commonly perceived as having a long history of crime. So, it might come as a surprise that the country’s homegrown crime writing tradition had a late start. In the early 20th century, detective novels were considered as foreign to Italy. Terms like suspense (in reference to the genre popularized by Hitchcock) were an English import and only introduced in the language in the 1950s. The first detective novel to be published in Italy, S.S. Van Dine’s The Benson Murder Case, was published in 1929 by Mondadori. This novel marked the beginning of a successful crime series, known as gialli—taking its name from the characteristic yellow cover. Two years later, the serie…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday) “Two-time Pulitzer winner Whitehead (The Nickel Boys) returns with a sizzling heist novel set in civil rights–era Harlem.” Publishers Weekly, starred review Julia Dahl, The Darkest Hours (Minotaur Books) “A fast-paced thriller with multiple perspectives.. [Dahl] provides a timely story about an always relevant topic.” Library Journal Tori Eldridge, The Ninja Betrayed (Agora Books) “Eldridge’s series just keeps getting better. While readers can enjoy this book without having read the first two, a series highlight is Lily’s evoluti…
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When I met Zille in 2015, he had been working as a crime reporter for over a decade and dissembling had become second nature. The job required it: he had to maintain good relationships with the police, with gangsters, with his own TV channel. His was dangerous work that involved angering powerful people. When he was reporting on screen, the truth was ostensibly the point. But Zille had also learned to self-censor, to hedge around the subject, to avoid mentioning a specific party name. And off screen, where risks lurked at every corner, he took this further: holding back, contradicting himself, leaving some mystery about his family, his past or even his whereabouts. Perha…
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If you’ve read any self-help before, then you know that most of it reads like a 90-percent redacted NSA document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request—all the most salient details blacked out, unavailable. Exactly how many nannies, for instance, did it take for Sheryl Sandberg to Lean In? If the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy is such a financial genius, how come he shills real-estate seminars? And if Rachel Hollis really knows how to have a successful, sexy marriage, why’d she get divorced? Their books promise answers to life’s biggest questions, only to leave us with bigger questions. Yet why we buy and read such books is no mystery. Shit’s hard. Life can be a r…
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In 1969, a Bob Dylan bootleg LP full of unreleased tracks (nicknamed “Great White Wonder” for its blank white cover) became a massive underground hit. The album was produced by two hippies, soon to be known as Pigman and TMQ, named for the small pig illustration and stamp reading “trademark of quality” appearing on each of their bootleg recording. Pigman and TMQ weren’t particularly bothered by legality, and quickly became the targets of officials trying (and failing) to reinforce copyright protection. Great White Wonder was a shock to everyone in the music business. It was the beginning and the end. It was beginning, in the form of the first unauthorized bootleg album …
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By definition, part of what makes a mystery a “cozy” is that it takes place within limited geographical boundaries. The action rarely takes the characters beyond the scope of a small town or neighborhood, where most of the inhabitants know one another, along with one another’s business, and there are often limited means of leaving, which puts both the suspects and potential victims at greater risk. Think And Then There Were None, or Murder on the Orient Express. In the former, the characters have gathered on a remote island. In the latter, they’re traveling on a train. They can’t simply hop in a car and go. Newport is a small city at the southern end of Aquidneck Island.…
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My love affair with the Gothic novel began at roughly the age of fourteen, which is when I began devouring every book the Brontë sisters had ever written. I became infatuated with the elements of a Gothic setting: tumbling-down towers and ruined ancient abbeys; mysterious mansions with secret passageways leading to ghastly hidden chambers; and graveyards with crumbling tombstones covered in moss. And the Gothic landscape, of course. Isolated. Atmospheric. Both beautiful and ominous; romantic and deeply disturbing. When I first visited Big Sur on the Central California Coast, I was struck by the feeling that this could be a terrific Gothic setting. Not that it was exactl…
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In seventh grade I was bedridden with the flu for two or three days, and my mother bought me some paperbacks to read while I recovered. One of them was Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean. I was hooked from the first page, where a mysterious narrator named Carpenter, a British doctor, is trying to talk his way onto an American nuclear submarine that is preparing for a rescue mission in the Arctic. Drift Ice Station Zebra, a British meteorological outpost, has suffered a catastrophic fire, leaving the survivors with little shelter or food, and this submarine is the only ship that could possibly reach the men before they perish in the savage winter above the Arctic Circle…
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The hot vaxx summer has ended, and the long, cold winter approaches, but in that sweet spot between unbearable heat and brutal cold comes the season of Fall Previews. Yes, the leaves are starting to turn, the horror novels are coming out in force, and the boarding school thrillers and luxe psychologicals continue to expand at roughly the same rate as the economy is shrinking. (Coincidence?!?! I think not!). New laws in Texas have shifted female experience from body horror to straight-up-thriller. High-concept thrillers and scifi noirs speak to our increasing instability in the Future that is Now, while charming whodunnits remind us that no matter the times, people will al…
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I have a clear memory of one of my earliest conversations with another author. It was perhaps nine months or so before the UK publication of my debut novel, then called The Ghosts of Belfast. I was talking with Colin Bateman, writer of the seminal Belfast crime novel, Divorcing Jack. He said to me, quite confidently, “They won’t let you keep that title, you know.” When I asked why, he told me it was because UK retailers wouldn’t stock a book with Belfast on the cover. He was proven correct a few months later when I received a phone call from my editor—himself a Belfast native—telling me the title needed to be changed for exactly the reasons Colin had predicted. After much…
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