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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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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Shop Talk: Steph Cha Writes Yelp Reviews, Works Jigsaw Puzzles, and Always Has a Blanket
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Steph Cha is the author of the Juniper Song crime trilogy, and most recently, Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award. She’s also a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology. What you may not know, however, is that Steph is also an avid dissectologist. So deep is her love for jigsaw puzzles, she actually tackled a 5,000-piece puzzle while under quarantine due to the pandemic. Naturally, that seemed like the perfect place to start our “Shop Talk.” Steph Cha: Oh, yeah. I lo…
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I’ll say upfront that there is nothing quite like the firm economy of Die Hard, a Christmas-set movie about how German terrorists commandeer a fancy Los Angeles high-rise, hold hostage all the people currently attending their office holiday party inside, and are slowly picked off by the one partygoer who had managed to stay hidden during the initial raid: a scrappy NYC cop named John McClane (a Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis). Although it is now thought of as a quintessential action movie, with a big-budget franchise in its wake, I like the first Die Hard for the—when you think about it—tightness of its conceit. The Nakatomi Plaza building is locked-down, and so the movie …
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“A girl dies today at 3 p.m.” —Posted on Facebook, January 14, 2012 at 1:04 p.m. *** Joyce Hau had her whole life ahead of her. Known to everyone as “Winsie,” she had a smile that lit up her face, and she wasn’t afraid to show it. An attractive and outgoing fifteen-year-old, she enjoyed the kinds of things other young people her age enjoyed: hanging out with friends, going to parties, chatting on social media. Winsie also maintained close ties with other young people in the Chinese Dutch community and often attended Asian cultural events. Always into the latest fashions, she sported a piercing beneath her lower lip. She danced and played the piano and was even skilled …
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Once I watched a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and it put a knot in my brain. The director, Franco Zeffirelli, was universally lauded for his naturalistic translations of important works of the western canon into masterpieces of film. Among his early triumphs were both The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet. I was a fan. My expectations were high. The performances were strong, the production values top notch, and the cutting of the play captured the heart of the story. Still, something left me deeply unsatisfied. It felt wrong. From my reading of Hamlet, the tension in the play arises from the young prince of Denmark’s indecision over action versus inac…
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It’s no accident that some of the most iconic detectives in literary history are beer lovers. Beer lubricates the gears and gets the mind humming. Nero Wolfe does some of his best thinking with a delicately poured glass of Remmers, and John Rebus has contemplated many a mystery over countless pints of Deuchars IPA in his favorite pub, the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh. And what would Harry Bosch do without a cold bottle of Fat Tire? Or Robert B. Parker’s Spenser without a Sam Adams, or a Blue Moon, or a Rolling Rock, or tall can of Budweiser? (Spenser may be the most beer obsessed private eye out there.) Robert Crais’ yoga loving gumshoe Elvis Cole even gives beer to his cat. …
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__________________________________________________ Excerpted from the book MEADOWLARK: A COMING-OF-AGE CRIME STORY by Greg Ruth and Ethan Hawke. Copyright © 2021 by Ethan Hawke and Greg Ruth. Illustrations © 2021 by Greg Ruth. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. View the full article
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When a novelist is inspired by a real-world crime, what can you expect from the resulting book? More than who committed the act, more than exactly how it happened, we long for something beyond the basic facts. Because a fiction writer also has to bring the reader into the experience, immerse them in the story, and give them a reason to keep reading. I found inspiration for my thriller You Can Never Tell from the way in which Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were caught when they tried to involve Hindley’s brother-in-law, who spent hours assisting them before returning home, hiding with his wife and baby, then calling the police. I had so many questions—why the murderers felt s…
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In Hollywood’s vision of a serial killer investigation, there comes an inevitable moment when the bodies are piling up and the lead detective somberly intones, “He won’t stop killing until he’s caught.” In reality, plenty of serial murderers stopped cold turkey without killing anyone for years, sometimes even giving up for good, despite a previous track record of many grisly homicides. The reasons they stop range from mysterious to mundane, but in the era of DNA profiling and cold case investigation, they can never rest entirely easy. Here are a few infamous serial predators who, one could argue, almost got away with it. The Love of a Good Woman Gary Ridgway murdered th…
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For a number of years, I taught an intensive, week-long course at the University of Toronto called How To Write A Bestseller. Each year brought a dozen eager, would-be authors to my class, hoping to learn the secrets to writing a book that would make its way to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. Everyone thinks they have a book in them. The truth is that most people don’t. The truth is that even those who do have a book lurking somewhere inside them will not write a book that more than a handful of people will want to read or pay money to buy. And the hardest truth of all is that no one—and I mean no one, not your editor, not the publisher, not the critics—ha…
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I saw my first therapist when I was twenty-six years old and no one knew about that visit but my therapist and my husband. At the time, I was completely nervous, mostly because I had no idea what to expect from it. I was a Black mother of two, born into a family who didn’t believe in therapy at all. At one point, I remember sitting in my car and being tempted to turn back and go home. I felt like I was doing the wrong thing—like I was betraying someone by reaching out for help. But then I realized that if I’d left, I would have only been betraying myself. Something had clearly brought me to that therapist’s office. A little voice inside my head told me to book an appoin…
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Any list of Gothic castles must begin with the origins of the Gothic. The first Gothic novel has been attributed to both Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, so I’ll begin with them. The Castle of Otranto. (1764) by Horace Walpole This strange and atmospheric little novel influenced many Gothic novels to follow. Walpole was fascinated with Gothic architecture, and so the Gothic novel sprang from both the Gothic structure and Walpole’s fertile imagination. One of Walpole’s many archetypes was the mystery of secret passages and chambers: “The lower part of the castle was hollowed into several intricate cloisters; and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find t…
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Poirot beamed approval on her. “Now, first of all, what is your own idea? You are a girl of remarkable intelligence. That can be seen at once! What is your own explanation of Eliza’s disappearance?” Thus encouraged, Annie fairly flowed into excited speech. “White Slavers, sir, I’ve said so all along! Cook was always warning me against them. Don’t you sniff no scent, or eat any sweets—no matter how gentlemanly the fellow! Those were her words to me. And now they’ve got her! I’m sure of it. As likely as not, she’s been shipped to Turkey or one of them Eastern places where I’ve heard they like them fat!” —“The Adventure of …
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Meet Mexico’s first narco. For public enemy number one, José del Moral, was a bit of a disappointment. As the police dragged him out of his house on Calle San Jeronimo in the center of Mexico City on July 20, 1908, he cut a disheveled figure. Grimacing from his toothless mouth, he was in his late fifties, grey-haired, and dressed in a tattered waistcoat and trousers. Of course, the tabloid press of the time didn’t call him a narco. They had yet to come up with such convenient shorthand. Instead, he was “the capital’s poisoner in chief” and “the king of the grifos [stoners].” Del Moral was not royalty, but he was the capital’s biggest marijuana wholesaler. Three days ea…
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After I was raped at knifepoint at thirteen years old, I recall thinking that I could never call the police if I were raped again. No one would believe a two-time loser. I’d had my one bite at the apple when it came to protection from that kind of violence, and it hadn’t been much of an apple. Battered and visibly bruised, I’d endured the rape exam in the hospital; a nurse telling me she “would have scratched the guy’s eyes out”; and multiple police interrogations, epitomized by one cop’s artful question, “Did he stick his thing in you?” The rapist was never caught. And, in my mind, I was beyond the protection of the law. For writers of thrillers other than police proced…
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There’s arguably no question that animates crime fiction more than the question of guilt. Because one of the genre’s central aims is an epistemological one—to discover and understand transgressive events, usually crimes, and uncover who’s responsible and why—it’s often structured around a process of gradual enlightenment. One of the most seductive promises it makes is that by the end of a story, readers will know something new and important: more often than not, it’s who’s guilty and what motivated them. This knowledge, and the comforting certainty it brings (that the world is knowable; that guilt is assignable; that people’s motives are legible), are some of the biggest …
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There’s a reason why media with complex, nonlinear timelines tends to be referred to as “mind-bending.” This was true before we spent 2020 either doomscrolling and Netflixing our brains into mush or squeezing a decade of stressors into a year. But especially now, we can only keep track of so many simultaneous realities at one time without resorting to spreadsheets and diagrams. Of course, some people love making spreadsheets and diagrams, especially about the books and movies they consume for entertainment. (If you don’t believe me, do an image search for Inception timeline infographic.) When I was writing my novel The Other Me, I knew I would need to satisfy those analy…
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The thief of perfume is, in fact, one of the most active of the twenty-first century. In the UK, cosmetics/perfume was the fourth most-shoplifted category in 2019 (after packed meat, razor blades, and whisky/champagne/gin). In the US, perfume is first on the list of products pinched by women, and an AdWeek list of the ten most shoplifted items ranks Chanel No. 5 at No. 9 (a few notches down from Axe body spray). Just ask Mrs. Thyra G. Youngstrom. In a 1959 news article, she’s reported as having discovered her West Hartford, Connecticut, home had been ransacked. It seemed everything was out of place, but nothing was gone: until she noticed she was poorer two bottles of Ch…
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Carol and Charlie were my upstairs neighbors. They were an older couple, sliver-haired and retired, always around on weekdays. I registered them as vaguely eccentric but sweet, complete opposites from one another. Carol was gregarious. She was always smiling, always generous, delivering packages from the lobby to our apartment doors and feeding a feral cat on our block. I met her as I was moving into my now-husband’s place. She seemed delighted to have me in the building, peppering me with personal questions like some cheerfully nosy aunt, welcoming me to the family. Charlie was quieter, inconspicuous. I don’t remember much about him except that he wore hats. Well, one …
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la valle d’abisso dolorosa . . . the valley of the sad abyss . . . —Dante, Inferno You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. Harry Kendall Thaw (the Pittsburgh coal heir who shot Stanford White, the beaux arts architect, on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906), Jean Harris (the Smith College alumna and Madeira School headmistress who murdered the diet guru Dr. Herman Tarnower in 1980), and William Bradford Bishop (the Yale-educated diplomat who bludgeoned his family to death with a sledgehammer in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1976) very nearly exhaust the list of WASPs who killed other than in the service of the state and the intelligence agencies. As for Li…
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I got married in 2012. I remember sitting on the plane en route to our honeymoon staring at my brand new wedding band and thinking: I am somebody’s wife now. A small thrill passed through me at the idea of belonging to someone in this way. Ever since, I have always enjoyed introducing myself to my husband’s coworkers or high school classmates as “Rob Baker’s wife.” Hey, he’s a great guy to be married to! But also, let me be perfectly clear, as much as I love him, ‘til death do us part and whatnot, that sobriquet better not be the thing engraved on my tombstone. And furthermore, if someday I become rich and famous or just really interesting, y’all better not title the ensu…
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__________________________________ “The Text Message” by Luc Brahy is excerpted from FIRST DEGREE: A CRIME ANTHOLOGY. Used with the permission of the publisher, Humanoids. Copyright © 2021 by Luc Brahy. View the full article
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