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,
3,451 topics in this forum
-
- 0 replies
- 372 views
I am a person who has to travel. It’s in my blood. So the last year of isolation was especially hard for me. Fortunately I have books by brilliant writers who can take me to exotic places from the comfort of my arm chair. This is exactly what I try to do when I write my own books: allow the reader to travel vicariously. It’s especially true of my new novel The Venice Sketchbook. Venice is one of my favorite places on Earth and I’ve been re-reading my own book just to imagine myself back there again. But here are some of my favorite books that transport the reader and immerse him or her in another culture. I hope you enjoy this tour around the world until we can all trav…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 349 views
She limped a little as she went down the hall. It seemed heartless not even to look at her rooms. She was a big woman; heavy bones showed through her sagging flesh, but from the back she looked very old, her head hunched forward so that her black crepe shoulders rose above her neck. She limped straight down the hall, stopping at the blackened double doors at the end, lifted a key from the casing, threw the doors open, and stood there in the opening, nodding, smiling, beckoning, in some odd way furtive. The hall, as I went toward her, didn’t improve. The walls were hung with thick red paper. Red? It was again the red-black of the walls outside. Against the left wall stoo…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
__________________________________ From Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith. Used with the permission of the publisher, Fantagraphics Books. Copyright © 2020 by Barry Windsor-Smith. View the full article
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 435 views
After a very, very long year, the Edgar Awards are once again upon us. 2021 marks the 75th year that Mystery Writers of America will celebrate the best crime and mystery writing, and while 2020 was an abysmal year by any other metric, it was a stellar year for great new books. In what’s become a tradition here at CrimeReads, our editors partnered with MWA to organize a giant roundtable discussion between the Edgar nominees, and we received responses from over 30 authors, each with their own fascinating take on our beloved genre. The Edgar Awards Ceremony begins at 1 PM EST on Thursday, the 29th, via Zoom. You can read the second part of this discussion, focused on the cha…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
All of my forty-eight published novels have been historicals, which naturally require a lot of research. I have one rule when I do research: I read and read until I come across something that makes me say, “Wow, I didn’t know that!” Then I build the book around that amazing fact, because I figure if I didn’t know it, neither did the vast majority of my fans. If it made me say “Wow!”, it will make you say “Wow!” too. One of these Wow moments resulted in my entire Counterfeit Lady Series. It all started about ten years ago, with a conversation I had with my then-editor, the great Ginjer Buchanan. Ginjer had been my editor for about ten of my Gaslight Mysteries at that po…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 381 views
I love my brother—and—my brother killed our mother. This pair, this impossible simultaneous truth, is what I learned to hold. There are many more of these pairs, pairs not specific to my family’s story. The vast majority of people with serious mental illnesses are not violent—and—some people with untreated psychotic disorders can be. Stigma around serious mental illness is based in exaggerated fears of violence—and—stigma around serious mental illness multiplies if we don’t discuss the rare cases of violence in the clearest terms possible. To be as clear as possible, I want to dissect what I mean when I look at this question: Is there a link between untreated serious…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 404 views
Show don’t tell. Avoid flashbacks like the plague. Don’t info-dump backstory. Get rid of your prologues. There is no shortage of advice and rules out there for the burgeoning writer. However, as long as each of the above reveals something about your main character in a vivid and interesting way, I would argue those rules can be seen as—in the immortal words of Captain Barbossa—“more what you’d call ‘guidelines.’” As a reader, one of my favorite ways authors break these rules is by playing with form and incorporating epistolary or other non-prose elements in their fiction. I adore prose, but nothing makes me more interested in a book than seeing snippets of diary entrie…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 367 views
Alaska. A single bone—or even a bone shard—wouldn’t just slow work down. It would stop everything. Dead. The snort and belch of the backhoe rattling along the mountain made Merculief feel less isolated than he actually was. There were thirty-seven men working at this mine, including the guy driving the backhoe and the laborer leaning on a shovel next to Merculief. That was way too many witnesses for anything sketchy to happen—other than having to endure a few elbows and junior high-level taunts in the chow trailer. They wouldn’t have hired him if they didn’t want him around. Would they? Merculief turned up the volume on his phone, letting “No One Knows” by Queens of …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 387 views
Santi is lost. He stands in the middle of a busy shopping street, a stone in a river of staring people. He knows what a year of rough sleeping has done to him: the haunted eyes, the tremor, the nervous tension that makes people keep their distance. But he knows that’s not why they’re looking. Being the center of the world is exhausting. He wishes, sometimes, that they would just stop. Look at someone else, he wants to say, but the problem is that everyone else is perfectly transparent: even if they all lined up in front of him, it would be as useless as trying to hide in clear water. He’s not sleeping rough these days. He has a place in the hostel now. That’s where he w…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 354 views
In September 1846, the famous poet Elizabeth Barrett had her beloved dog, a spaniel named Flush, stolen while walking down a street in London. The city was full of professional dognapping rings who targeted wealthy pet-owners and ransomed their animals back to them—and because of a legal loophole, were not doing anything illegal by doing so. When Flush had been stolen for the third time, just before the cloistered and sickly Elizabeth plan to run away to marry the poet Robert Browning, she decided to break her domestic imprisonment and fight back. Read the complete story at Truly*Adventurous. * Elizabeth Barrett only looked away from the busy London street for a …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 347 views
So, you crack your knuckles and sit down at the keyboard to write a thriller. You’re eager to create a gripping story in which the protagonist tries to stop something dreadful from happening. You want to cause delicious anxiety and apprehension that keeps readers on the edge of their seats, turning the pages in dread and exhilaration. How do you create work that lives up to the name and thrills? ___________________________________ Nine Things a Thriller Needs ___________________________________ 1. Minimal Weight Thrillers must read lean and mean. Fluff and padding dull their impact. Cut needless words, scenes, and characters. (By way of example: I originally titled…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 467 views
The Los Angeles Police Department has long defined its mission in its motto: “To protect and to serve.” Now LAPD, like departments across the county, faces a new level of scrutiny about how it fulfills that responsibility, particularly to Black citizens and other citizens of color. The fall-out from the death of George Floyd at the hands—or, rather, the foot—of a Minneapolis police officer and the response of police departments, including LAPD, to the demonstrations triggered by his death has raised awareness of police abuses even among Americans ordinarily unaffected by them. There is, however, another long-standing form of police misconduct that has not generated the s…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
As the Cayuses struggled for their very survival, Henry Spalding despaired of his new life among American settlers in the Willamette Valley. Despite having spent the first three decades of his life in the uniformly white small towns of upstate New York, he wrote that he “never felt at home among the whites.” Short of money and with four young children to provide for, he jumped from job to job in the 1850s, working as a teacher, farmer, school commissioner, postmaster, roving minister, justice of the peace, Indian agent for the federal government, and pontificator in local and East Coast newspapers. All the while, he ached to return to Nez Perce country, where he wanted to…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 364 views
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Nicci French, The Other Side of the Door (William Morrow) “A pitch-perfect thriller . . . French takes the time to tease out individual characters to a degree seldom seen in crime fiction, saving the final plot twist for the last page.” –Publishers Weekly Dominique Barberis, A Sunday in the Ville-d’Avray (Other Press) “Provocative…A study of desire and contentment, time and expectation, this slim novel raises alluring questions about paths not taken…fans of Patrick Modiano will appreciate this.” –Publishers Weekly Sarah Blau, The Others (Mulholland) “A compelling and often…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 328 views
I’m back, and this time we have a power panel of psychological suspense writers: sisters Lynne and Valerie Constantine, whose high-toned suspense novels have a splash of Judith Krantz (collectively they’re known by the pen name Liv Constantine); debut novelist Susie Yang; the delightfully creepy Liz Nugent (to clarify: the books, not Liz, are delightfully creepy); rising star Samantha Downing; and the juggernaut Ruth Ware, who is just as funny and quick as you’d want her to be (remember this when you read about how Agatha Christie wrote 12 novels during WWII without mentioning war once). I assembled the roundtable to talk about how we are going to talk about domestic su…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 512 views
A beautiful woman with a glorious voice, dressed in well-fitted breeches dueling the villain between arias. It sounds like a Gilded Age gentleman’s opera fantasy, but it’s really a dream come true for a mystery writer looking for a unique idea. Best of all, it’s based on reality. Not just the reality of trouser roles, but the reality of Gilded Age New York—and its people. Let’s start on the stage. In the early days of opera, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were a good number of castrati singers, men with artificially high voices for exactly the reason the name suggests. Amazingly enough, that wasn’t a popular career choice for long. By the end of the eig…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 330 views
It’s that time of year again! The nominees for the Anthony Awards have been announced. The winners will be declared at Bouchercon, scheduled to take place in New Orleans from Tuesday, August 24th to Saturday August 28th. This year’s gathering will be themed “Blood on the Bayou,” and it will be a celebration you don’t want to miss. Congratulations to the nominees! ___________________________________ BEST HARDCOVER NOVEL ___________________________________ What You Don’t See, by Tracy Clark (Kensington) Blacktop Wasteland, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron Books) Little Secrets, by Jennifer Hillier (Minotaur Books) And Now She’s Gone, by Rachel Howzell Hall (Forge Books) The …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 396 views
Americans love the freedom of the open road, or so the public-relations campaigns would have you believe. Endless advertisements feature the latest automobiles roaring along a sun-dappled highway, often to a popular rock song of yesteryear. Countless movies, books, and television shows celebrate the automobile-centric milestones that supposedly define American life—the gift of the first hand-me-down junker, the wise choice of that minivan that can fit your growing family, and, finally, the acquisition of the ultra-expensive car (“You’ve made it. You deserve that Mustang.”). There’s a grittier side to all of that, of course. In American noir and crime fiction, the car is …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 479 views
“‘I have never liked fog,’ said Miss Marple.” ——At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie The history of mysteries and detective fiction includes several instances of authors and characters falling victim to dementia. If the intersection of detective fiction and dementia is so striking, it’s because they’re like a matched set of mirror opposites. This essay looks at four examples. In the classic sense, a mystery begins with a puzzle or number of unexplained circumstances. Typically, at the outset, someone is killed. The killer and the motive for the murder are unknown, and the circumstances for the crime are shrouded in mystery. As the story unfolds, a detective sorts t…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 611 views
Because we were all stuck inside for most of last year, it feels easy to suggest that television took on new meaning for us—most simply, as something to actually do (inside). I don’t know, though, if this is especially different from how television normally functions for many of us; we have always looked forward to episodes, counted down until premieres, and we certainly have been binge-watching whole-series for years. But, yes, in 2020, television may have felt more soothing to many of us, for breaking the pervasive monotony or calming our nerves or distracting us. Or informing us! This year, we watched strange-community-fostering shows like Tiger King, and streaming-se…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 1.1k views
While the site of the infamous Borden murders has long been available to visit for those interested in the darker side of Americana, it’s now up for sale with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own one of the most well-known murder scenes in history (We assume the blood’s been cleaned up since). Lizzie Borden’s sensational trial and never-determined culpability will live on the American imagination no matter what physical artifacts remain of her life, but it’s always nice to know that historic structures are getting preserved. According to the house’s listing, “This is an unbelivable[sic] opportunity to own and operate one of New England’s top tourist attractions. Enter…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 503 views
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jessica Fellowes, The Mitford Trial (Minotaur) “Inspired by the larger-than-life Mitford family and a real-life murder, Fellowes delivers a ripping-good read.” –Booklist Allie Reynolds, Shiver (Putnam) “Deep in the breathtaking winter bleakness of the French Alps, revenge—and perhaps even murder—is most definitely afoot…This suspenseful debut thriller by a former freestyle snowboarder contains both style and substance.” –Kirkus Reviews Lisa Gardner, Before She Disappeared (Dutton) “Fans of this incredible author, police procedurals, timely immigrant stories, strong determin…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 454 views
Patricia Highsmith first met Kathryn Hamill Cohen at a party hosted by Rosalind Constable in New York. Kathryn, an ex-Ziegfeld girl, was twenty-four, beautiful and from a moneyed family. Her husband, Dennis, founded the Cresset Press (later an imprint of Bantam Books) which would eventually publish UK editions of Strangers on a Train, The Blunderer and The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Kathryn had an impressive professional life of her own. Following her early years as an actress, she read medicine at Newnham College, Cambridge, and, before being employed as a hospital physician, she worked as a personal assistant to Aneurin Bevan, the British Minister of Health who was instru…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 458 views
Even though literature had, for centuries, brimmed with clever problem-solvers, from tricksters to reformed thieves to wise men to police prefects, Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” still awed the literary world when it appeared in 1841. A gruesome double-murder has taken place in a home along the Rue Morgue (a fictional street in Paris). Several witnesses heard several voices, but no one can agree on what language one of the speakers may have been using. Several clues linger about, each more baffling than the next. The police are stumped. But C. Auguste Dupin, a chevalier and rare book aficionado, solves the mystery at home after reading…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
When Allison tells people she is a forensic scientist, “they don’t really understand. Everyone’s watched CSI, and they think they know every- thing about it. I try to tell them it is not as glamorous, and it doesn’t happen in fifteen minutes. Because a lot of people have the misconception that a crime occurs, and within two days they find the suspects and within a week and a half they are convicted and in jail. And it just doesn’t happen that quickly or easily.” Contrary to the popular image, forensic science is not a glamorous job. Despite the crimes involved, the work resembles that of bench scientists or laboratory technicians. When dusting the whorls of a finger- p…
Last reply by Admin_99,