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’m going to warn you right now. If you’re Stephen Miller or someone who agrees with that kind of hardline, nativist bullshit, you’re going to hate this piece and all the movies on my list, as they’re all empathetic to the immigrants they portray. Like the best war movies tend to be anti-war movies, the best immigration movies are usually critical of the treatment of those people that are desperate to better their situation. Always remember that when powerful people are trying to convince you that powerless people are the threat, they’re lying to you. There’s going to be someone out there saying to themselves, “Aren’t all movies about unauthorized immigrants crime fil…
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In a genre that has historically been dominated by heterosexual white men, spy fiction is finally becoming home to a range of new intersectional feminist voices. I was in my 20s when I began working on my latest book, A Spy in the Struggle, and at the time, there were no politically charged spy novels by women, let alone women of color. Prior to my book coming out in 2020, Jamie Canavés of BookRiot said the following about it: “Add this to the list of fantastic mold-breaking spy novels like American Spy and the Vera Kelly series.” A Spy in the Struggle is about a young Black woman attorney working for the FBI who develops divided loyalty when she is unexpectedly sent to…
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Picture us, reader, taking a walk in the park. We have masks in our pockets and variants on the brain. If we had been on this walk two years ago and I said, “I worry that the world is going to face a sustained health crisis the likes of which had never been seen before.” Reader, you would have muttered politely that I had a vivid imagination. I would have known you were trying to get me to stop talking about herd immunity and the worst-case scenario and how the hell is [your favorite unfortunate part of the world] going to make it? I would have sighed and answered, “I know, I should lighten up. It’s August. Nothing happens in August. And the books are always good becau…
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My children are growing up. It shouldn’t be a surprise—it’s what they’re meant to do, after all—but still, sometimes, it is. My youngest can now reach the glasses on the high shelf, and my eldest can wear his father’s trainers (and frequently does, to much irritation). My children do their growing both overtly and covertly: sometimes, I see an incremental difference from one day to the next, and yet at other times, they suddenly lurch into a much larger version of themselves, leaving me blinking bemusedly at the change. How can I have missed it? I wonder, whilst marveling at this new form that I must now come to terms with. What else might I miss if I’m not more careful?…
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Monday. Nineteen hours in the dark. The dead man lived up the hill. We could have walked, if the world wasn’t ending and we didn’t have to bring him back. But it was and we did, so Harkless and I suited up and went out to the parking lot. As we exited the building a stunning fist of heat descended on us. The nearest wildfire was thirty miles away. Gritty sky and roaring air gave the illusion it was right over the ridge, climbing fast. The apocalypse smells like a campfire and glimmers gold. Through fierce raking wind we hurried to the body van, got in, and slammed the doors. Above his respirator mask Harkless kept blinking. “God.” He pulled the mask down over his ch…
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Sascha Rothchild has worked on some of our favorite shows in the (now virtual) office, including GLOW and The Bold Type, so it’s no surprise that when I was given an advanced reading copy of her debut thriller, Blood Sugar, I devoured it (despite the book’s rather effective message of self-care and restraint). Sascha Rothchild was kind enough to answer a few questions about the book and its absurdly charming killer. Scroll down to see an exclusive cover reveal. Blood Sugar will be published in April of 2022. MOLLY ODINTZ: So, one of my coworkers is a type 1 diabetic, and I was recommending this to her as “diabetes noir”—can you talk about the use of diabetes in the stor…
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My latest novel, Velvet Was the Night, is a noir set in the Mexico City of the 1970s. This is a changing world, beset by political and social turmoil, and a space where different forces are violently clashing. To me, it seemed like the perfect decade for a noir, but when I told people what I was working on, they tended to be surprised I was writing a book set in 1971. Most of them associated the word ‘noir’ with the 1950s. Noir has always had a close relationship with film and it is no wonder that when we think of noir, we tend to harken back to iconic images inspired by Golden Age Hollywood rather than more modern proposals. But noir did not vanish once people traded…
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The Rue Morgue In the spring of 1841, at the age of thirty-two, Edgar Allan Poe decided to write a new kind of short story. At the time, Poe was best known for a magazine column on cryptography in which he dared readers to send him a code he couldn’t crack. He received nearly a hundred secret messages from all over the country. Poe solved them all, except for one. And that coded message he proved to be “an imposition,” a jumble of “random characters having no meaning whatever.” Unfortunately for Poe, his column only paid a few dollars a page. As his editor observed, “The character of Poe’s mind was of such an order, as not to be very widely in demand.” Poe’s desperate…
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There was the time I was in the hospital and my dad called to tell me that he’d just spoken with the sheriff of Desolation Valley; unbeknownst to us, my sister was missing—one of several backpackers who’d gotten waylaid by a snow storm in the Sierra Nevada. There was the time my family went backpacking in the Grand Canyon and for a period of hours we were each alone in the dark; my sister and I spent the night together, clueless as to where our parents were. There was the time my sister and I went camping in the Finger Lakes at the tail end of hurricane Ike; we laugh about it now, but it was a harrowing night in a tiny tent with constant ferocious winds. There was the …
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Married couples are a staple of the crime-fiction world, where husbands and wives are forever realizing that the person they thought they knew best is effectively a stranger they didn’t know at all. In many an opening chapter, cracks are starting to show in a hitherto happy union. Dark secrets simmer beneath a delicate surface tension, threatening to boil over and break through. At least one half of the couple knows something is terribly wrong, but doesn’t know quite what it is yet. The fun for the reader is in finding out not only what the thing is, but how it could have been hidden from the one person with whom you’re supposed to share the most. I’m thinking of everythi…
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Sometimes, when I walk my neighborhood at night, I glance at the lit-up windows, watch dark silhouettes move behind curtains, wonder at the words spoken, the secrets shared or hidden, the dynamics at play behind those closed doors. More often than not, my mind will craft an unsettling narrative for the people inside—not because I wish them harm or unhappiness, but because in my own life, I am constantly writing about deeply dysfunctional families. Take my latest thriller, The Family Plot, which features the Lighthouses, a true crime obsessed family who gathers to bury their patriarch only to find the remains of their long-missing brother already in his grave. The Lightho…
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She hailed me on East 62nd Street, not far from Bloomingdale’s. She was an attractive girl, wearing big-lensed sunglasses against the June glare, and carrying two plaid suitcases, one of which she waggled at me as I rolled down the street. “Say ‘Kennedy,’ ” I whispered, and eased the cab to a stop. Opening the rear door, she shoved the suitcases in first, then followed, slammed the door, shoved the sunglasses up on top of her head, and said, “Kennedy.” “You got it,” I said, and started the meter with a smile. Not only is the long expensive run from Manhattan out to John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens one of the joys of a cabby’s life, but there’s no pleasant…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Velvet Was the Night (Del Rey) “It’s hard to describe how much fun this novel is—Moreno-Garcia, whose Mexican Gothic (2020) gripped readers last year, proves to be just as good at noir as she is at horror. The novel features memorable characters, taut pacing, an intricate plot, and antiheroes you can’t help but root for. A noir masterpiece.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Jonathan Santlofer, The Last Mona Lisa (Sourcebooks) “The Last Mona Lisa brings together past and present, seasons it with intriguing characters, and brushes it with plot twists that you d…
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James Lee Burke occupies a small room in the world of American literature. Joined by only a few contemporaries and predecessors, he writes books that provide entertainment and suspense, but also possess the rare capacity to alter the reader’s perception of art, history, and the most intractable mysteries of life itself. As the author of more than 40 books, he is astoundingly prolific. Readers around the world have fallen in love with his tales of detective Dave Robicheaux, who solves homicides in New Iberia, Louisiana. Far more than mere police procedurals, Robicheaux’s cases, in large part due to the Milton-esque poetic prose of Burke, have a grand philosophical and the…
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A housewife moonlighting as a hitwoman for hire. Baking cakes in the morning, ending lives in the dark of night. Trading the spatula for the shotgun. That was what I wanted the protagonist in my new historical fiction book, A Woman of Intelligence to do. I didn’t want to write her this way because I’ve made a career writing shoot ‘em up thrillers. I wanted murder because I was dealing with post-partum anger and I needed her to be violent for me. I had two children eighteen months apart, and while I’d been career/kid juggling for a few years, the delusion that I was doing okay was disappearing. I felt like the old me had burst into flames and I was not a fan of the new m…
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“Often in literary criticism, writers are told that a character isn’t likable, as if a character’s likability is directly proportional to the quality of a novel’s writing.” ― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist If there’s anything I’ve learned from my experience as both a lawyer and a human (while the two are not mutually exclusive, I am unwilling to say that they’re completely overlapping Venn circles) even truly decent people tend not to act their best under extreme duress. Good and kind folks can be selfish, defensive, and lash out when pushed too far. That doesn’t prove them bad as much as it shows them to be, well, people, albeit perhaps unlikeable in that moment. Someone …
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The telephone rang, waking Captain Marianne Augresse with a start. For a brief instant, her eyes remained fixed on her cold, naked skin, then she removed her arm from the bath where she had been dozing for the past hour and picked up the phone. Her forearm knocked the little tray of toys balanced on the laundry basket and plastic boats, wind-up dolphins and small fluorescent fish scattered over the surface of the water. “Shit!” Number unknown. “Shit!” the captain repeated. She had been hoping it was one of her lieutenants: JB, Papy, or one of the other duty cops at Le Havre police station. She had been waiting for a call since the previous day, when Timo Soler was spo…
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Recently Naomi Hirahara and I, fully vaccinated, met up at a local soda fountain. In between discussion of pandemic tragedies and the bright spot of MariNaomi’s stop AAPI hate mural, the first AAPI public artwork in the San Gabriel Valley, we found we were co-contributors to the upcoming Akashic Noir South Central edited by Gary Phillips. We chatted about her stunningly prolific life as a writer, and her groundbreaking novel, Clark and Division. Set in 1944 Chicago, her latest novel tackles Japanese American life post incarceration in US concentration camps. This interview has been condensed for clarity and space. Désirée Zamorano: I always want to know, when an author w…
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These were lean years for National Socialism. The party would poll just 2.6 percent of the vote in the elections of May 1928. Hitler spent much of his time reorganizing the movement, growing the membership, expanding the ranks of the paramilitaries, and establishing absolute control. Under the Führerprinzip (leadership principle), he was the physical embodiment of National Socialism, its demigod and supreme commander. His personality hadn’t much changed since the Vienna days—Kubizek would have recognized the “coffee-house tirades,” “distaste for systematic work,” and “paranoid outbursts of hatred” Putzi Hanfstaengl described in these years—but his following had. His word …
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The absence of a goodwill communiqué from America to the All African People’s Conference in Accra had been noted with regret by the delegates. Then, just before the final session, a message arrived from Vice President Nixon. He had been advised of the bad impression created by America’s silence and was seeking to put this right. Even so, one of the American delegates described the telegram as ‘a lukewarm statement quite out of keeping with the spirit of the conference’. In any case, his telegram arrived too late: the hardworking committees did not have time to read it out. However, the US had, in fact, been well represented throughout the conference— in covert and unfores…
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Every once in a while, a story appears in the media about a “time capsule” in the form of the contents of an apartment, unchanged in all the years a recently departed tenant lived there, or a house left vacant while ownership has been tied up on the courts, sometimes for decades, that has finally been awarded to an heir. Many an old house is sold with some of the original owner’s possessions still stored in the attic—a treasure trove for the inquisitive buyer to explore. My own time capsule story, Murder, She Edited, grew out of a fascination with such tales, combined with the traditional question writers ask themselves: “What if . . . ?” My senior sleuth, Mikki Lincoln…
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Eric Powell—the legendary creator of comics like The Goon and Hillbilly—and Harold Schechter—the author of true crime classics including Deviant and The Serial Killer Files—are collaborating on an ambitious new graphic novel about one of the most notoriously deranged murderers in American history, Ed Gein. Powell and Schechter are co-writing Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?, an all new, 200-page, original graphic novel illustrated by Powell that delves into the twisted history of the Gein family and the notorious violence that inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Painstakingly researched and illustrated, Schechter and Powell’s tru…
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Long before I became a writer of foodie mysteries, I fell in love with reading them. It started with Diane Mott Davidson’s series about a Boulder-based caterer who couldn’t help solving mysteries on the side. Davidson didn’t merely dump descriptions of meal preparation onto the pages, food was woven into her story. As the reader, I wanted to be friends with caterer Goldy, sitting in her kitchen, tasting her food. When Goldy finally remarried—this time to a cop, many crimes were dissected in their kitchen as they cooked. Readers knew that Goldy’s husband Tom was a good guy, because he cooked incredible comfort food for her. And made amazing coffee. Food can do more than p…
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It was a Monday morning in September, on the beach, when it all began. It is called the beach, for want of a better term, even though nobody can swim there on account of the reefs and the tide, nor relax on it because it is made up of rough, sharp volcanic shingle. The Old Woman walked there every day. The Old Woman was the former teacher. Everyone on the island had passed through her class. She knows all the families. She was born here and she will die here. No one has ever seen her smile. They scarcely know her age. Probably not very far off eighty. Five years previously, she had been obliged to give up the class. From then on she took her daily walk early in the morni…
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BEATRIZ Septiembre 1823 Two months earlier The carriage door creaked as Rodolfo opened it. I blinked, adjusting to the light that spilled across my skirts and face, and took the hand Rodolfo offered me as gracefully as I could. Hours of imprisonment in the carriage over rough country roads left me wanting to claw my way out of that stuffy box and suck in a lungful of fresh air, but I restrained myself. I knew my role as delicate, docile wife. Playing that role had already swept me away from the capital, far from the torment of my uncle’s house, into the valley of Apan. It brought me here and left me standing before a high dark wooden door set deep in white stucco wall…
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