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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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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Last year, I took part in a London festival’s panel discussion of the work of Agatha Christie. On the panel with me were four other writers, all passionate Agatha fans. One by one, we described what we loved about her work and talked about how much she meant to us. Then it was time for the Q&A, and the questions we were asked by the audience were, by and large, the same ones I’ve been answering on Agatha-themed panels since around 2011: why is she still the no. 1 bestselling novelist of all time? Is her work dated now or is she still relevant? Even though she’s widely and rightfully regarded as a plotting genius, wouldn’t the panel all agree that she’s not actually a …
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August brings an almost overwhelming bounty of great crime novels, both from promising newcomers and established voices alike. The variety of subject matter is almost as astonishing as the vast number of releases, and below, you’ll find such disparate settings as a ballet school, an apartment in lockdown, 1970s Mexico, and 1940s Chicago and Paris, just to mention some. Whether your tastes are traditional or twisted, you’ll be sure to be pleased with August’s selections. Stay tuned for more recommendations. Megan Abbott, The Turnout (Putnam) Megan Abbott has already written about the high-stakes (and highly dangerous) sports of cheerleading and gymnastics, and now she…
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In the area surrounding the Green Banks Observatory in West Virginia, devices emanating radio frequencies are banned. The region has come to be known as The Quiet Zone, due to the absence of cellular service, wifi, and other modern technology. Thousands live in The Quiet Zone. The following is excerpted from Stephen Kurczy’s new book, The Quiet Zone, an exploration of the area and its residents. ___________________________________ Still in his pajamas, Bob Sheets turned on his kitchen griddle and whisked up a bowl of blueberry pancake batter. I had come to debrief. The Sheetses were becoming my guides to better understanding the Quiet Zone, and my head was spinning. I h…
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I didn’t always love surfing. Or surf culture. Or surf books for that matter. I never really thought that much about any of it. But today, my love for the genre of surf noir borders on obsession. I’m always looking to discover new books in the surf or beach noir genre. Or even just good books on surfing. The only problem is there isn’t a ton out there. There are some staples, sure, and there are a few new ones here and there. And there are some oldies that people might forget about. But the simple truth is, I could use a lot more. We can all use a lot more. My interest in surf noir started four years ago in a poetry class I was taking at UC Riverside-Palm Desert. In t…
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He opens the tray table and sets his water bottle down, then opens a packet of chocolates and pops one in his mouth. The train leaves Ueno and returns to the world above. A few clouds float in the sky, but mostly it’s just clear blue. The sky’s as sunny as I am, he thinks. He sees a driving range, with its backstop like a giant green mosquito net. It f lows off to the left and a school slides into view, a string of concrete rectangles, uniformed students hanging around the windows. He can’t tell if they’re his age or a little older, and Satoshi ‘The Prince’ Oji spends a moment trying to figure it out, but almost immediately decides that it doesn’t matter. They’re all the …
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Every writer has a bag of tricks to conjure the muse or to, as David Lynch puts it, “catch the big fish.” For some, it’s a simple ritual, such as “morning pages” or imposing a daily word count. For others, it may be a complicated mélange of caffeine, nicotine, booming opera music and a rigorous pass through the day’s tabloid reportage. Carson McCullers purportedly required a beer to start the writing day, then moved onto a sherry-tea concoction before turning to bourbon as her closer. I know at least one writer who has a standing desk/treadmill situation so he can constantly be moving as he writes—all while he has two TV screens rigged to soundlessly play movies on consta…
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I’ll start with the basics: Craig Rice was a woman, and her name wasn’t exactly a nom de plume. Shortly after Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig was born, her artist parents absconded to Europe, leaving her in the care of her paternal aunt (or half-aunt). The aunt, whose married name was Rice, adopted her niece, tacking on yet another name. The future comedic crime author eventually boiled her moniker down to two of its shorter parts, a wise edit for book-signings. All this happened a long time ago. Rice was born in 1908. Her first novel, Eight Faces at Three—this one—was published in 1939. She’s been dead for more than sixty years. As I’ve wrangled with what my job is here…
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In 2018 the Staunch Book Prize launched, recognizing thrillers in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered. It’s a noble cause; in domestic and psychological suspense (the cloistered, relationship-driven genres I myself write in), the victims of violence tend to be female. I understand the impulse to center books that don’t leverage gratuitous female pain as a plot point. (Picture the central dead body in the heralded Mare of Eastown: a nubile young women woman stripped naked and splayed over the rocks, orbited by a wolfpack of potential male killers.) But there’s a reason none of my thrillers qualify. In reality, women are more likely t…
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I’ve always avoided writing a book with multiple characters, as I worried about keeping up with the various personalities and timelines it would incur. In fact, I initially pitched The Guilt Trip as a holiday gone wrong between two couples. To which my publishers said, ‘We love it, but how about throwing in a few more people to really mix it up?’ The mere thought induced a cold sweat, yet as soon as I started writing, I quickly realized that the additional cast members gave me more freedom and flexibility within the plot, moving the story forward at a pace that may not have happened with just my original ensemble. Even more surprising was that my six characters naturally…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here (Ballantine) “Bartz takes the idea of a ‘frenemy’ to new heights. . . . Yet another expert vivisection of female modes of communication and competition.” –Los Angeles Times Megan Abbott, The Turnout (Putnam) “Abbott’s novels are often described as crime fiction, and, while indeed she works with mystery and suspense and draws on noir and Gothic tropes, her goal seems less to construct intricate, double-crossing plot problems than to explore the dark side of femininity….In other words, Megan Abbott is a mood.” –The New York Times Book Review Nao…
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Quite how Ian Fleming got to Portugal in June 1940 is unclear. To have gone overland would have been extremely unlikely, and as his objective was to get to Madrid if going overland, why go to Portugal? He could have gone by sea, but he would have had to obtain a visa from the Portuguese Consul in Bordeaux. These were freely obtainable, thousands being issued by the consul, Aristides de Sousa Mendes. However, most people traveled by land and the influx was so great that it led to the Spanish closing the border with France, and an increase in tension between Lisbon and Madrid. Sousa Mendes paid for this humanitarian act with his career and the ruin of his family by a furiou…
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—Translated by Daniel Hahn Frustration and liberation. These two extraordinarily strong feelings were what prompted me to write Two Spies in Caracas, my first novel. The frustration stems from my conviction that I was not telling my readers the complete story, the real story of what was happening in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. I have been writing newspaper columns, academic articles, books about Venezuela and about President Chávez for more than two decades. About his Bolivarian revolution, his 21st century socialism and about his executions both inside and outside Venezuela. All these were analytical works in which I used the best techniques I could find in social sc…
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We had books, radios and cars. What we didn’t have was the internet, cell phones or GPS. It was 1976, the bicentennial year, and I was a young private investigator, employed by a small detective agency operating just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC and everyday brought a new adventure. Information is the private detective’s stock in trade. Our business focused on matrimonial problems, insurance fraud, criminal law and locating people who didn’t want to be found, and each problem usually came down to uncovering information someone wanted to keep secret. Much has changed since the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter; perhaps nothing more than our acce…
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What do you call twenty-five skydiving lawyers? SKEET! If you haven’t heard this one, I bet you’ve heard another or have a good lawyer joke that you love to tell. Have you heard the one about the lawyer that… the list is endless, and no one loves to tell lawyer jokes more than lawyers! Before I began writing legal thrillers, I asked myself why we love the law and what brought about our fascination with lawyers, civil conflict stories, and those involving people in trouble with authority. I went in search of the origins of the genre and found a rich history of chills and thrills. I also discovered something particularly interesting about how people view lawyers through th…
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I think we all can agree that the twin peaks—so to speak—of film noir came in the 1940s and 1980s. What’s that? How can I ignore the 1950s, which gave us gritty crime classics like “The Phenix City Story” and others? How can I pass over the classic noir of the 1970s? “Chinatown,” after all? Well, if you’re already outraged, I’ll outrage you further. When I began to research this article, I preferred the noir of the 1980s to the films of the then-new genre in the 1940s. Maybe—just maybe—I still do. If you haven’t already thrown your phone out the window or tipped your laptop off your lap, come along for my argument. After all: “Blood Simple.” “Body Heat.” “Thief.” “Bla…
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The Indian Runner is a movie of profound ambition. It seeks to dramatize nothing less than the history of violence within the United States, and how that violence infects spirit after spirit, like a powerful and contagious disease. It is also the screenwriting and directorial debut of one of the world’s greatest actors, Sean Penn. The two-time Academy Award winning actor would go on to direct four more films, and at one point openly discuss the possibility of retiring from acting to become a full-time filmmaker. The Indian Runner demonstrates why Penn’s cinematic style is important and under-appreciated. In 1982, Sean Penn began dating photographer Pamela Springsteen, le…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. S.A. Cosby, Razorblade Tears (Flatiron) Cosby’s drive to expand the chorus of voices representing the South is on full display in his follow-up, Razorblade Tears … The novel’s DNA may seem familiar to readers of Blacktop Wasteland or Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series, but its composition feels utterly unique, as if the elements of one’s waking life were scrambled in a dream … Cosby has an unnerving ability to describe what fists, knives, guns and assorted garden implements can do to the human body, which may make the violence more vivid than some readers can abide. Riding shotgun wit…
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The CrimeReads editors pick the month’s best new books out in paperback. * John Fram, The Bright Lands (Hanover Square Press) “John Fram delivers with his mix of Southern Texas humidity, mystery and dread — along with police corruption and toxic masculinity…[The Bright Lands] gives us the queer thriller in the age of Grindr we’ve been waiting for.” —Rolling Stone Lisa Lutz, The Swallows (Ballantine Books) “With a memorable cast of characters and more than a few secrets, Lutz’s latest is a turbocharged tale for our times.”—Newsweek Stuart Turton, The Devil and the Dark Water (Sourcebooks Landmark) “The locked room murder meets a Michael Bay movie, by way o…
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