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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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart Is a Chainsaw (Gallery / Saga Press) “Horror fans [will] be blown away by this audacious extravaganza.” Publishers Weekly (starred review) Dervla McTiernan, The Good Turn (Blackstone) “A simply brilliant writer.” Don Winslow Paula Hawkins, A Slow Fire Burning (Riverhead) “The flaws of each character will surprise and perhaps even enchant you — and only a clairvoyant could anticipate the book’s ending.” The New York Times Book Review Jaye Viner, Jane of Battery Park (Red Hen Press) “A touching love story superimposed on a tale from Americ…
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Portland, Oregon. To outsiders perhaps the “City of Roses” with a penchant for hipsterdom, coffee and food trucks. But, as we’ve seen recently, it’s a city of opposing sides, clashing views, uneasy gentrification and social marginalisation. Fertile ground for crime writers, and Portland has turned out quite a few excellent exponents of the genre. You want the Portlandia image of a hipster Oregon city of coffee shops, crafts, poetry circles and food trucks? Then don’t start your Portland crime reading with Don Carpenter’s 1966 classic novel Hard Rain Falling. Jack Levitt, the orphaned teenage anti-hero of the book, living off his wits in the fleabag hotels and seedy pool…
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CrimeReads asked me to write a post, and as soon as I read the suggested title, I went to the corner drugstore and bought two nine-ounce packages of Coffee Nut M&Ms. I needed inspiration. There are such a lot of ways to eat chocolate. I should know. I was born loving chocolate. And, like every author, I was a reader before I was a writer, and I loved stories before I could read them. My mother used to tell the following one. “When she was around three, JoAnna’s special treat was chocolate milk, which she called ‘choc.’ One afternoon, I was reading, and she came to me and asked for ‘choc.’ And I answered, ‘As soon as I finish my chapter.’ “And she said, ‘When I ask…
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Kristen and Layne chat with Megan Abbott about her deliciously dark (and New York Times bestselling!) ballet thriller THE TURNOUT, the connection between perfectionism and womanhood, and how to write authentic conflict between female characters while avoiding catfight stereotypes. Grab a copy of THE TURNOUT, or any of Megan’s 9(!) other incredible books in the official podcast Bookshop. From the episode: LAYNE: One thing we’re both so fascinated by in your writing in general is how you create this atmosphere of extreme dread and tension. It’s oppressive almost when you’re reading your books, it’s incredible. And with this one especially, the real action comes later in…
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Since my first novel was published in 2012, there is one interview question I have been asked more than any other: how does being a clinical psychologist affect your writing? The answer involves not only the material I’m drawn to but also where my focus lies within the story. As an example, in my upcoming novel, The Night We Burned, the main character—a fact-checker—scrambles to conceal the truth about her connection to a twenty-year-old cult massacre, all while dealing with an unacknowledged eating disorder resulting from the trauma she experienced as part of said cult. I wanted to show an extreme example of the ways we carry our past experiences in our bodies, often wit…
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I first discovered Philip Kerr’s excellent Bernie Gunther series seven years ago. The experience of walking the streets of Nazi-era Berlin to watch Kerr’s good-hearted detective solve a murder mystery while trying to stay true to his moral compass in that snake pit felt exhilarating, challenging, and strange. Reading another of Kerr’s Gunther novels this year, shortly after the Jan. 6 insurrection and an election in which democracy itself seemed at stake, felt altogether more chilling. *** I’ve long been a fan of the sliver of crime fiction that I’ve dubbed totalitarian noir: stories of cops and detectives who try to ply their difficult trade while living within the …
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“I don’t know what London’s coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals.” ― Noël Coward Noel Coward wasn’t a crime writer, but I think he was right. The rise of the great metropolitan city in the twentieth century neatly dovetails with the rise of crime fiction. For me, the city is where crime writing seems most at home. Cities are full of grifters on the make, the downtrodden and the lost, and the sound of easy money. The D.N.A. of crime fiction. Maybe it’s the memory of dark shadows and dangerous streets in American Noir movies, maybe it’s the fact I’ve lived in cities all my life but I can’t separate the two. Not that there aren’t great crime novels…
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CIA officers and investigative journalists. On the one hand, they’re diametrically opposed. The former operates in the shadows and deals with information that must be kept secret at all costs; the latter wants to bring that very information to light. Most Agency employees keep their distance from reporters, to say the least. Get too close, say too much, and the average CIA officer will very likely soon become an ex-CIA officer. In You Can Run, a CIA analyst and a journalist form an uneasy and unlikely alliance. One wants a big story to stay under wraps; her family’s safety depends on it. The other wants it public. But ultimately the two want the same thing: to know the f…
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The name may not ring a bell to those who aren’t criminologists, but Tony Parker greatly contributed to the literature and representation of criminals. In 22 books, this unassuming British gentleman chronicled all sorts of criminals—murderers, sex offenders, con men, and more—as well as underdogs and outsiders, from single mothers (In No Man’s Land) to miners (Red Hill), to people living in housing estates (The People of Providence) and small towns (A Place Called Bird). His method: to step aside and let people speak for themselves. It sounds so simple, but Parker excelled at it. Whenever he talked to someone for a book, they would inevitably relax and tell their life sto…
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You couldn’t have asked for better weather. She was sitting with her tour group, admiring the view of the glacier and rummaging in her daypack for a sandwich, when her gaze happened to fall on a bump in the snow crust. It looked like a human face. It took her a moment to register what she was seeing. Then she was on her feet, screaming her head off, shattering the silence of the ice cap. The German tourists sitting in a huddle around her almost jumped out of their skins. They couldn’t understand what had triggered such a violent reaction in their Icelandic guide, an older woman who up to now had seemed so calm and unflappable. They were coming to the end of their glaci…
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In his eulogy of Caroline Blackwood, Jonathan Raban wrote that more than any optimist he’d ever known, “Caroline the pessimist made the world a happier place to be in because she could make mocking music of its terrors”. Indeed, her books are concise, mordant essays on evil. Similar in a way to Patricia Highsmith’s, but Blackwood has never garnered quite the same attention. Now that I’m familiar with her work, this bewilders me. Why isn’t Caroline Blackwood—rather than being obscurely referenced by Paul Thomas Anderson in an interview once—a household name, right up there with Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith and all the authors Stephen King thanks for “building his…
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Thirty years ago, Helen Mirren stepped into the role of Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, and an icon was born. In the series Prime Suspect (which ran from 1991-2006), Mirren’s Tennison created an indelible archetype of the female investigator: a take-no-crap leader battling the overtly misogynist and often corrupt institution that she nevertheless believed in very deeply. In less talented hands, Tennison could have been a superficial and unconvincing character. With her booze and her chain smoking, her dysfunctional personal relationships and her obsession with her work, she could have been little more than a simple gender-reversal: your typical grizzled male det…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new nonfiction crime books. * Benjamin T. Smith, The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade (Norton) The Dope is an engaging, persuasive new history of the drug trade in Mexico. Smith’s research challenges established narratives on the War on Drugs and shows the long history of the narco trade in the Americas, a fully fluid business relationship between countries with imagined borders and deep, complex ties. Much of modern Mexican history, Smith argues, has been shaped by the demands and intricacies of that relationship. Jonah Lehrer, Mystery: A Seduction (Avid Reader / Simon and Schuster) Lehrer’s fascinat…
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The CrimeReads editors pick the month’s best new books out in paperback. * Lucy Foley, The Guest List (William Morrow) “Lucy Foley has honed her unique brand of reverse-whodunit suspense down to a science—and thank goodness for that. … The Guest List—set at a ritzy wedding-gone-wrong on a remote Scottish isle—starts with a murder, and then plays a game of keep-away with the victim’s identity until the very last pages.” –Harper’s Bazaar Alex Pavesi, The Eighth Detective (Picador) One of the most innovative mysteries in recent memory. –The Wall Street Journal C.J. Box, Dark Sky (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) A suspenseful, action-packed yarn set in the vividly descri…
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Writing suspense is all about building tension. Writing romance is also all about building tension—just a different kind. These rising tensions can be achieved in all sorts of different ways. Please note: my way may be very different than your way. Take my words as suggestions or thought provokers as you discover what works best for you. And if you write suspense without the romance or vice versa, I hope you’ll take away what you find most helpful. The Suspense: Tension in a suspense novel focuses on the ever-ratcheting-upward actions of the Bad Guy (BG). What will he/she do next? Who will get hurt (or even die) because they’re in the BG’s path? A few tips to consider …
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * LaTanya McQueen, When the Reckoning Comes (Harper Perennial) This book details, in full, exactly what I would like to happen to every person who attends a plantation wedding expecting a “quaint” experience. In LaTanya McQueen’s stunning new addition to the growing world of Black horror fiction, a woman heads to her best friend’s plantation wedding, deeply offended by the choice of venue but ready to support her childhood bestie nonetheless. The ghosts of the estate, however, have something other than celebration in mind…As well they should because absolutely no one should ever have…
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Just seeing the words “Wes Anderson movie” will probably make you picture a very specific, highly-stylized aesthetic comprised of, among other things, symmetrical mise-en-scene, bright colors, old-fashioned intertitles, exaggerated acting patterns, quirky children who are more emotionally intelligent than their equally quirky adult counterparts, and probably Owen Wilson. Anderson’s famous cinematic style (created in concert with cinematographer Robert Yeoman, among other artists) has been the subject of art shows, parodies, and even an Instagram account-turned-book called Accidentally Wes Anderson, which assembles photographs of real-life locations that look like they cou…
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As my dad tells it, he was a third-year graduate student in Lubbock, Texas (my birthplace) interviewing a candidate for a faculty position. The candidate: a woman from Pennsylvania. The setting: not Pennsylvania—with Lubbock’s two-dimensional landscape, a blue sky stretched out until it is cellophane thin, and a deep deep dark come a moonless night. Not long into the interview, the woman paused before asking my dad: How are you not afraid to live out here? You can see everything. She’s right—you can see everything in west Texas, just like you can see everything if you stand in the middle of some stark open plain across much of the West. And while I can’t know the source …
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How much of an expert do you have to be to write a Sherlock Holmes novel? It’s a question that has occupied my mind for the last year or so. When I was asked to suggest plots for Holmes novels that would be faithful to the canon, my initial response was one of horror at being woefully unqualified. But my mind began to turn over, mysteries bloomed out of seeds of ideas, rough synopses became more intricate with every pass. All writers experience imposter syndrome, but in my case it’s usually been relegated to after completion of a novel, at the point when I’m required to coerce others into reading it. On this occasion, once my synopsis had been approved I found myself par…
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12 August 1961 – Rügen Island, East Germany Joachim pulls his foot back from the water. It’s cold, even in August. His friends are splashing in the sea, teasing him, calling him to come in, but he hates cold water and they know he won’t. He thinks back to last night. Workers beer. Sweat. Bodies tightly packed in against each other. Fumbling and kissing in the corner. He’s never had a holiday like this, not once in his twenty-two years and he doesn’t want it to end. Bright green forest covers the chalk cliffs behind him, white-tailed eagles wheel overhead and the sea is so clear he can see tiny fish flitting through the water. Just one week left, then it’s back to East…
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I’m called a writer, or often more specifically, a mystery writer. But the truth is that I think of myself primarily as a storyteller. And as a storyteller, I believe I have a sacred duty, a sacred promise to fulfill. Homer states it beautifully in his epic Odyssey: “Sing in me muse, and through me tell the story.” I believe the best stories come from a place deeper than our conscience thought, and as storytellers, we’re simply the vessels for the telling, channels for the greater truths. When I was a child, I was blessed with parents who read to me. I never went down for a nap or to bed at night without hearing a story from a book. I grew up thinking of the world in ter…
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Back in 2011, I was perusing the shelves of my local library when I came across a book called Little Faces by Sophie Hannah. She was an unknown author to me at the time, but I’ve always been a fan of mysteries, and the synopsis sounded right up my alley. The story is about a woman who returns home from a night out to find that her two-week old infant has been swapped with another baby. The mind-bending, psychological aspects of the book blew me away. I flew through the story, having never read anything like it, and I was immediately hooked. After turning the last page, I raced out and bought the next three books in this series—The Truth Teller’s Lie, The Wrong Mother, an…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * William Kent Krueger, Lightning Strike (Atria Books) “This sensitive, moving prequel introduces and draws readers into the series. Krueger has written another perceptive coming-of-age novel, the poignant story of a father and son trying to understand each other.” –Library Journal (starred review) Peter Heller, The Guide (Knopf) “Heller is an expert at building suspense, and he’s a first-rate nature writer, lending authenticity to the wealth of wilderness details he provides… The Guide is a glorious getaway in every sense, a wild wilderness trip as well as a suspenseful journey to…
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Colombo—a city of five and a half million people and the largest city by far on the island of Sri Lanka. The city is also a port and a harbour, an ancient sea trade crossing in South Asia, an integral part of what is now known as the old Maritime Silk Road, and, after 1815 (following the island being under both Portuguese and later Dutch control) to independence, a part of the British Empire and the administrative capital of Ceylon. The country’s recent history has been marked by insurrections and civil war since independence as well as the devastating tsunami of 2004. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand people died in a quarter century of civil war that ended in 2009. …
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Pick up a copy of any book in my Cajun Country Mystery series and you’ll see a basset hound on the cover—sometimes crafty, sometimes woebegone, but always there. In the series, the Crozat family pet is a male hound named Gopher. In real life, she was our beloved Lucy, who we adopted through the Basset Hound Rescue of Southern California. Lucy crossed the rainbow bridge in 2010 but will live forever on bookshelves, thanks to the talents of my wonderful series’ cover artist, Stephen Gardner. I’m not the only mystery writer whose four-legged friend has served as a cover girl or boy. Here, seven cozy authors share the artistic inspiration they derived from their beloved fu…
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