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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From the beginning of my writing journey in 2000, I have always written sleuths with moxie and plenty of spunk. As Misty Simon I started with Ivy Morris, who was working hard to not be a door mat. Then I moved on to Mel Hargrove, who was corralling a junkyard full of ghosts while making sense of her life. Next came my big break at Kensington with Tallie Graver, who was looking for a second chance while making amends for her past. Moving back into paranormal, I wrote The Magically Suspicious Mysteries, where we ride along with Verla Faeth and her friends at a Renn Faire. Now, as Gabby Allan, I’m writing Whitney Dagner, who is finally where she belongs, solving nautically t…
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So, you got locked up? No wonder you look like shit,” said Paul. “I better fix that,” said Bimbo. “Don’t want folks thinking I’m related to you.” The crew was back together, and so was the banter. We were sitting under some red paper lights and an AC vent that had been collecting dust for a decade. El Paraíso Asia was Bimbo’s favorite restaurant. A Chinese joint that was somehow the best place for Chinese food and also the best place if you were in the mood for Puerto Rican fare like tostones al ajillo. The joint had been in business for generations, and everything they made was great. I was digging in to my plate of fried chicken with fried rice and a side of tostone…
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Hercule Poirot hasn’t been brought to the screen as many times as Sherlock Holmes has, but he’s certainly had his fair share of portrayals, throughout the years. He’s been everywhere, from radio to the big screen to the small screen to the stage. The rules: as usual, with these things, I can only rank performances that I can actually watch. So, no radio (VERY sorry not to include a Poirot adaptation with Orson Welles in multiple parts), no theater, no video games. But that’s okay. That leaves us with 20 performances to assess. It wasn’t an easy job. I relied on most of my little gray cells to pull it off. Now, normally, when making these lists, I have to put together th…
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A look at the month’s best debuts in crime fiction, mystery, and thriller. * Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made (S&S/Marysue Ricci Books) In one of the best espionage novels I’ve ever come across, a bored Malaya housewife lets a Japanese spy charm her into giving up the secrets necessary for her nation to be invaded; later, as the war continues, her guilt grows monstrous as her children suffer. –MO Nishita Parekh, The Night of the Storm (Dutton) Houston during a hurricane is the setting for this thriller featuring a South Asian family trapped in a fancy suburban home with a dead body and a lot of petty resentments. Along with various other storm-set novels com…
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Most people know that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a result of trauma, but unless you’ve lived with it, it’s hard to really understand what it’s like. Everyday experiences and objects become terrifying. Having PTSD is like living in a haunted house, but the ghosts are your trauma and they follow you everywhere. The house I grew up in was haunted. There were strange noises, like creaking and footsteps. There were occasional cold spots or feelings of being watched, especially from the woods behind my house. While I loved that forest during the day, I wouldn’t go anywhere near it once the sun went down. I just knew something bad would happen if I went there at n…
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For a character whose screen adventures always end with, “James Bond will return,” it’s interesting how much of a struggle it has been to try to make the literary character undertake a new adventure on the page. In many ways, the fact that Bond ever graced the page again after the death of creator Ian Fleming in 1964 is surprising. Fleming’s widow, Ann Fleming, was more than happy to let Bond die with his creator. But, of course, fans were loathe to do such a thing. Literary star Kingsley Amis was the first to pick up the golden pen, penning two books that were more celebration of Bond than continuation. (1965’s James Bond Dossier, under mis’s own name and The Book of Bo…
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It was the summer I left rehab. I was officially six weeks “clean” of alcohol and was taking my first baby steps back into the real world, when I looked down at my phone to see 11 missed calls. My heart sank. The number listed was an ex-addict from my former rehab—a brilliant young doctor named Liz* who had checked in for alcohol and cocaine addiction. This couldn’t be good. Dread pooling in my stomach, I called her back. She answered on the first ring. “I’ve relapsed,” Liz sobbed. “I’m devastated.” I listened sympathetically, as she outlined her shame and despair. In a society where children are taught to pass or fail, Liz’s take-home was clear. She had failed at recov…
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In 2015 I decided to write a magical realism western despite knowing nothing about magical realism or westerns. I wanted to fictionalize the story of my great-grandfather, Antonio Gonzalez, who was a bandido in the late 1800s, was shot in the face by the Texas Rangers and left for dead, but lived and was henceforth known as “El Tragabalas,” or, “The Bullet Swallower.” The date and setting of my great-grandfather’s story dictated that I write a western; I decided to make it magical because that sounded cool. (Budding writers are generally steered away from making major authorial choices on the basis of “it sounds cool.” And yet I think a lot of us get into writing becaus…
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Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not – or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague – want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client. –Dashiell Hammett, 1934 One of the few parts of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Fal…
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In June of 2022, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law known as The Sullivan Act which made it a felony to carry a concealed weapon without a license. Sullivan, ruled the court, violated the Second Amendment by making it “virtually impossible for most New Yorkers” to possess firearms unless they could demonstrate a specific need to own a gun. Writing the majority opinion for New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas insisted that going forward, gun regulation must be “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition.” Never mind that the law had been in place for more than a century. The end of Sullivan might not have s…
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‘Laughter is poison to fear,’ said George R. R. Martin in A Game of Thrones. ‘To laugh is to dispel the darkness,’ agreed Isobelle Carmody in The Gathering. Both insightful quotes that speak to a universal truth. Fear is allayed the instant we laugh at the source of it, and what better way to cope with the inevitable horrors of life? Unfortunately, if you’re a writer of mystery thrillers and you like to blend a dark, creeping sense of terror with humor, the fact a single laugh can cancel out the tense anticipation you’ve built up over thousands of words, is one huge bummer. This dilemma stalked me while I wrote my latest novel The Mysterious Case of The Alperton Angels.…
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As it does for many, my obsession with Agatha Christie started young. I was ten or so when I picked up my first Christie, fresh off a self-prescribed course of Greek mythology. Had someone asked me then to explain why reading a murder mystery from the heart of the twentieth century felt like a natural transition from the world of gods and monsters, I’d have been at a loss. Now, I can recognize that Christie has the rare ability to write “large,” making use of stock characters who interact in grownup ways amid life-or-death stakes—and rarer still, to do so by way of accessible prose. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s this “adult fairytale”-like quality that first drew me t…
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The dark months call for dark stories. There’s nothing more delicious than to curl up under a blanket with a hot cocoa (or hot toddy!) and read a fast-paced thriller, twisty mystery, or creepy psychological thriller. If this Queer Crime Writers* round-up is any indicator, 2024 is looking to be a banner year for great LGBTQIA+ crime fiction. We’re highlighting the return of beloved characters, like Greg Herren’s Scotty Bradley, Marshall Thornton’s Henry Milch, and Joseph DeMarco’s Marco Fontana, the second installment of newly beloved characters like Margot Douaihy’s Sister Holiday and Rob Osler’s Hayden McCall, not to mention new characters like Nicholas George’s Rick “Ch…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Janice Hallett, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels (Atria) “[M]any-layered, highly complex, and imaginative… Hallett shocks readers with satisfying twists and a dark, unpredictable ending… True crime tackles angels and demons in this devilishly good tale.” –Kirkus Reviews Elizabeth Gonzalez, The Bullet Swallower (Simon and Schuster) “Gonzalez laces magical realism into her vivid epic of the Texas-Mexico border and the violence that shapes a family for generations. . .The novel’s striking centerpiece follows Antonio and fellow desperado Peter Ainsley as they cut a swath ac…
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In 1973, a paperback thriller was published by Pyramid Press, written by an aspiring writer from Southern California. The book opened with an antiquated World War I German Albatross biplane strafing Brady Air Force Base on the Greek island of Thásos, destroying its fleet of F-105 jet fighters. The attack is disrupted by the arrival of a lumbering PBY Catalina flying boat, whose pilot engages in an unlikely dogfight with the Albatross and somehow prevails. The Mediterranean Caper was the debut novel by my father Clive Cussler, and introduced the indomitable character of Dirk Pitt at the controls of the Catalina, along with his fictional employer, the National Underwater an…
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The characters boarding the SS Varuna, the location of the opulent locked-room mystery universe conjured in Death and Other Details by writers, executive producers, and showrunners Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss, have a lot of baggage—literal, figurative and emotional—to unpack. In their kit bags (and steamer trunks) are lifetimes of secrets, lies, sex and, yes, some video footage. Someone on board the celebratory cruise—organized and paid for by Lawrence Collier, who is retiring from his eponymous company—is going to be murdered. And, as Rufus Cotesworth, the “World’s Greatest Detective,” played by Mandy Patinkin, intones after the body is discovered, “The murderer …
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When I began this series for CrimeReads, I imagined myself reading a lot of Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, and Chester Himes. That was fine with me; other than a brief Agatha Christie phase in middle school, I’d never spent much time on the classics of crime fiction, and I looked forward to hearing what writers I admired had to say about them. What I didn’t anticipate is that I’d also be introduced to novels from the past five or ten years that I’d somehow missed or overlooked. Descent by Tim Johnston—a tense, complex, and beautifully written literary thriller—is one of these. And who could be a better guide to the classics of the modern day than Megan Miranda, auth…
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This month’s best psychological thrillers have a wide variety of settings and a focus on characterization. There’s also several on this list concerned with upending and evolving tropes in the genre, a valuable goal as the psychological thriller’s heyday continues. Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits 100 Years (Viking) Shubnum Khan has written a lush, romantic gothic novel set in a crumbling seaside estate in South Africa. A century before, the house bloomed with an doomed romance; now, a young girl wanders its halls, finding ways to bring new joy to the strange residents, and getting closer to discovering the secrets that first shattered the home’s happiness and led to its…
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Tracy Clark is the two-time Sue Grafton Memorial Award-winning author of the highly acclaimed Chicago Mystery Series featuring ex-homicide cop turned PI Cassandra Raines. The protagonist is a hard-driving, Black private investigator who works the streets of the Windy City while dodging cops, cons, and killers. Gregg Hurwitz is the New York Times, #1 internationally bestselling author of 24 thrillers, including the Orphan X series, and two award-winning thriller novels for teens. Currently, Gregg is actively working against polarization in politics and culture. To that end, he’s produced several hundred commercials which got over a hundred million views on digital TV plat…
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The Mystery Writers of America has announced the nominees for the 2024 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2023. The 78th Annual Edgar® Awards, which also celebrates the 215th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, will be celebrated on May 1, 2024. ___________________________________ BEST NOVEL ___________________________________ Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Monthly Press) All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron Books) The Madwomen of Paris by Jennifer Cody Epstein (Penguin Random House – Ballantine Books) Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll…
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Science fiction and fantasy are often full of epic space battles and sprawling quests. But to me, they’re best at their most intimate and personal. Even with mystical abilities or cybernetic enhancements, people are still messy and complex and deeply flawed. Fantastical elements can often even intensify those aspects of human nature. Our relationships, our failures, and of course, our crimes. I love a great whodunnit, and one with sorcery or sentient spaceships is even better. In my debut novel, The Longest Autumn, priestess Tirne must solve just such a mystery. As one of four seasonal Heralds, it is her job to escort the deity Autumn between the human and godly realms e…
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If I had to describe The Nice Guys (2016) in one word, it would be “underrated.” Though it achieved instant critical acclaim, its modest performance at the box office prevented it from achieving both a mass audience and fulfilling its potential as a franchise. But the concept of being “underrated,” of having people and the world around you think less of what you really are, was baked into this film’s identity even before its somewhat disappointing release. This adjective permeates almost everything about it, from its story to its sense of humor and even its commentary on life itself. This idea of being “underrated” is best embodied in the performance given by Ryan Gosling…
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I grew up in Philadelphia, where winters could be brutal. David Goodis said it best on the opening page of Black Friday: “January cold came in from two rivers, formed four walls around Hart and closed in on him… He was shivering and he could feel the cold eating into his chest and tearing away at his spine…The cold was even worse on Broad Street. From the east it brough an icy flavor from the Delaware. From the west it carried a mean grey frost from the Schuylkill.” Temps that low can make a human being long to be somewhere else. Somewhere warm and sunny… like Los Angeles, California. But when you’re cold and can’t afford a winter vacation, you do the next best thing: y…
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Here are the undisputed facts. On March 15, 1968, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker ordered Captain Ernest Medina to lead his company of about 100 men in an attack on the village of My Lai (4) in Quang Ngai province, South Vietnam. At 8:00 am of March 16, 1968, Medina’s company assaulted the village. In a little over an hour, the Americans killed somewhere between 100 and 500 Vietnamese civilians and committed several rapes. There is simply no doubt that this was a “war crime” under any definition. Why did it occur? The American military did not order the massacre. Quite the contrary, the US Army in Vietnam was very concerned with avoiding civilian causalities (and remains…
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Growing up in a middle-class family in Mumbai, I wasn’t surrounded by luxuries, but there was one thing our home was never short of – books. My love of mysteries began with the first Famous Five novel my dad brought home and immediately, I was hooked. As an adult, thrillers and mysteries continue to be my favorite genre, but I wish there were more novels written with main characters who looked like me. When I started writing my own novel, following the advice, ‘write what you know’, I centered my locked room novel on a multigenerational South Asian family. The main character is Jia, an Indian single mom who is invited by her married sister, Seema to take shelter in her …
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