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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This started as a normal piece for CrimeReads. You know the one: the author, dutifully shilling their newly released title, assembles a lively roundup of books that are sorta-kinda like theirs, with a headline that involves a number and some click-baiting tease (Eight Thrillers That Will Help You Pick Out Better Drapes, or Twelve Cozies You Can’t Bring Home to Mother, or whatever). This is usually achieved with a minimum of fuss. At the end of it, the author’s publicist is happy for the extra exposure, the author sells a few books, and CrimeReads gets some free content. Everybody wins. That’s all I was looking to accomplish for my latest thriller, Unthinkable. The book…
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Ain’t that America home of the free, yeah Little pink houses for you and me – John Cougar Mellencamp What I thought I knew was that by building a house, I had attained The American Dream. And by “building a house” I do not mean that I felled a small forest of trees and constructed my own dwelling, not in the least. I mean to say that I paid a crew of hard-working and weary men to build the house for me. Funny now, as I write these sentences to think that my own American Dream was only actualized by, what was, in the end, an expensive financial transaction. That my Dream was purchased. Growing up middle-class in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, so many aspects of the larger Am…
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Being an author requires building worlds and characters for others to see in their mind. It takes incredible skill to hone the details, pick the right setting, and to tell just enough without going overboard. You want to paint a picture—for some authors that picture is vivid, while for others it’s a sketch for the reader to fill in themselves. But for me it’s a bit different, I have to craft my stories all while I see nothing in my own mind. I have aphantasia, which means I have no inner eye or mind’s eye and cannot voluntarily create a mental picture in my mind. Think of it this way, if you tell me to imagine a banana, my mind is blank. I can’t even picture the face of …
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Writing Romantic Suspense is a delicate dance of balancing the thrills and chills of suspense with the heightened backdrop of blossoming love. It’s like being a juggler keeping the various balls in the air. Some writers of romantic suspense do this best when using a formula where certain events have to happen at certain times in the manuscript. For me it’s more of an intuitive thing, probably absorbed by osmosis from having read romantic suspense for decades before attempting to write my own. Every now and then, I confess, I will occasionally glance at the charts or graphs to make sure I’m on track, but mostly it’s a gut feeling that guides me as to when to raise the tens…
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While many of our favorite mysteries have humor in them (thank you Agatha Christie, Craig Johnson, Nevada Barr…I could go on for hours here), sometimes we need a little more humor to get us through the day. To let what hair we have left down. To tear up with laughter, preferably with a furry friend nearby. Or a glass of wine. Either way. Here are some stories where laugh-out-loud humor is a must, yet they still manage to deliver that soul-filling mystery we all crave like a carb addict craves pasta. Louisiana Longshot by Jana Deleon There’s a reason Jana’s books are beloved by thousands. Her character, CIA assassin Fortune Redding, is hilarious. The first book in the …
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Greg Buchanan, Sixteen Horses (Flatiron) In a small coastal town in England, a local detective and a veterinary forensics expert are confronted with the disturbing, seemingly ritualistic killing of sixteen horses. When a pathogen is found in the soil where the horses were buried and people who came into contact with it fall ill, chaos and suspicion spread through the town like a virus. This is the gripping premise of Greg Buchanan’s brooding, searching debut, of the season’s most powerful novels. Buchanan has a swift, impactful storytelling style and Sixteen Horses looks to be the …
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In the fall of 2014, a seismic event crippled an entertainment giant and tantalized Hollywood gossip voyeurs everywhere. A group identifying itself as “Guardians of Peace” stole massive amounts of data from Sony Pictures Entertainment in a brazen cyberattack that was elevated all the way to the Oval Office. Thanks to carefully orchestrated leaks, phrases like “a minimally talented spoilt brat” (poor Angelina…) and “the masturbatory call is a wank I have no time for” were pulled from executives’ private emails and splashed all over newspapers and gossip sites. Careers were stymied, movie releases were cancelled, and a horrific new fear was born: What if the entire contents…
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As a writer of thrillers, but more importantly, as a reader of thrillers, I’ve begun to imagine the ingredients that would go into making the perfect hardboiled detective novel—a classic of the genre that would seduce anyone who happened to open the cover on a whim and read the first few paragraphs. And having seduced that everyman or everywoman, would hold them captive until the last word and then haunt them as readers forever. What ingredients and how combined? How stirred, folded, melted, blended? How heated to perfection, rare or well-done? What is the recipe, and is it written in blood? In contemplating the prescription for the perfect crime novel, I decided that w…
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Quite a few eyebrows were raised when I told people that my next novel, Rovers, would be a vampire revenge thriller set in the American Southwest in 1976. My first three novels (This Wicked World, Angel Baby, and The Smack) fell fairly comfortably into the “crime” category and were marketed that way, and I’m sure my agent and publisher were expecting (hoping for?) something similar for my fourth effort, but I was ready to try something different. My swerve into the supernatural shouldn’t have been such a surprise. My first book, Dead Boys, was a collection of “literary” short stories, and I returned to that form for my fourth book, Sweet Nothing, after writing two crime…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Dea Poirier, After You Died (Agora Books) “Nicely written…The engrossing narrative switches between Asher’s reality and the fantasy world of his increasingly disturbing dreams, until the two realms seem to merge.” –Publishers Weekly Glen Erik Hamilton, Island of Thieves (William Morrow) “The island of thieves is poised for a reenactment of Lord of the Flies. As ever, Van proves to be a wry, reliable guide through the relentless action of Hamilton’s always thrilling series.” –BookPage Miranda Beverly-Whitmore, Fierce Little Thing (Flatiron) “Written in beautiful prose…Captiva…
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This summer is going to be tough. Travel is totally out, or at least highly restricted. And so many of us will be able only to reminisce or dream of the Greek Islands. So for this column Crime and the City is going full service—we’re travelling to the Greek Islands through crime literature and throwing in some ideas for hors d’oeuvres and a decent tipple to accompany the good food and good reading. There are over 160 islands in total but not all are inhabited and many are very small. You know the main ones—Crete, Lesbos, Rhodes, Corfu, Kos, Kefalonia. My apologies if I missed out your favourite. Unfortunately, as the humble writer of a crime novels column I can’t do muc…
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No one, with the possible exception of John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, is so identified with a culinary tradition as Anna, Duchess of Bedford. In the year 1840, Anna, who was a friend and lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, felt a mite peckish late in the afternoon. Her dinner, the main meal of the day, would usually have been served around eight o’clock, and she needed something to see her through. I think we all can relate to that. The hungry Anna instructed her butler to bring tea and some bread and butter, perhaps a slice of cake or pastry, to her around four o’clock. Hardly an earth-shaking act, you would think. But it was. Anna decided she enjoyed this …
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Toxic masculinity is a staple of modern psychological suspense. This concept has been embodied in the villains of bestsellers like Big Little Lies, The Last Mrs. Parrish, and You Should Have Known (adapted for television in HBO’s The Undoing), all of which include the surprise reveal that an apparently dreamy husband is wickedly abusive, both emotionally and physically. Toxic masculinity, though, is more than men committing domestic violence, sexual assault, or murder. According to Oxford Languages it’s “a set of attitudes and ways of behaving stereotypically associated with or expected of men, regarded as having a negative impact on men and on society as a whole.” Boys …
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Russians, double agents, secret police, and assassinations may all sound like elements of a Cold War novel, but they’re also part of a much earlier era—Imperial Russia. As a writer of historical mystery, I’m always tempted to include real people in my novels. When I learned that in November 1899, Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich Romanov paid a visit to London—the setting for my series, I couldn’t resist. I knew enough about the Russian Imperial family to know they’d make for interesting research—all those elements noted above and royalty. Perfect for crime fiction. But incorporating real people into fiction is tricky. The situation is fictitious, but the people have to st…
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If I had a map, I would have known we were in a southern region of the Appalachian Mountains. But all I had to orient myself was an endless stretch of identical dirt and trees, dappled in the afternoon light. Miles went by without any sign of human habitation before we finally reached a double-wide trailer plopped down right in the middle of nowhere. My captors led me straight inside, where a middle-aged woman had clearly been waiting for my arrival. A plaque on a small desk spelled out an unremarkable name, Jill or Ann or Jan. She ran her icy eyes up and down before landing on my face. “Elizabeth, I assume?” “Don’t bother,” the male escort said. “She doesn’t talk.” …
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We were up in Calgary doing final re-writes on our first movie and staying in a fancy hotel and just doing that screenwriters getting their first movie made/showbiz thing, which feels real nice when it comes along. Now when I say “us,” I mean me and “Golds” aka Michael Goldberg my old writing partner. Golds was a sweet Philly kid with a strange mathematical gift for how stories work. He also had a wild, open face and this red-brown ponytail that made him look like the Jewish Thomas Jefferson. So, as I said, we were up in Calgary on our first movie, and these were exciting times. But our success, though we enjoyed it, had a little shadow over it because I was a heroin add…
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When it comes to classic and traditional mysteries, the old manor house in a remote part of England is a classic of the genre: isolated, often impoverished, and filled with suspicious characters. It’s easy to picture Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot unmasking a murderer in the parlor, surrounded by suspects. In fact, English manors, villages, cities, and boarding schools are fodder for many a modern mystery, with present-day British authors having just as much with the settings as their historical counterparts. But British authors aren’t the only ones who love a creepy moor or crumbling manor house. Authors writing whodunits from the United States seem just as likely t…
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My introduction to the concept of a hitman was in 1972 when I sat in my local New York City grindhouse, The Tapia, and watched The Mechanic starring Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent. Directed by Michael Winner, the film introduced Arthur Bishop, a cold loner who enjoyed classical music, fine art and expensive wines. If it wasn’t for the killing part, he could’ve been just another tasteful bachelor from the Playboy era hanging out in his beautiful home and playing vinyl records on his state-of-the-art system. Over the years, I’ve seen and read more than a few hitman (and hitwoman) movies and novels, but I never thought about writing my own until editor Andy Raus…
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I’ve been reading thrillers and mysteries for as long as I can remember. I’ve made a list of books that have stayed with me, and they’re roughly in the order I read them. These novels not only entertained me, they taught me how to write. I didn’t know that at the time, at least not consciously, but now I can look back and say these are all books that influenced my style, plot, and the dark humor I love so much. The Partner by John Grisham I’ve read a number of Grisham books, but this is the one I’ve reread countless times. Patrick is a lawyer who has stolen a lot of money from a client and now lives in hiding in South America. At the beginning of the book, he’s found.…
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Crime fiction, which we might also call “homicide fiction,” has been popular since the 19th century, with the US and my native Britain dominating the genre. The trend continued even as violent crime rates generally declined and intentionally taking a life became an ever more unusual way for people to break the criminal law. In recent years, alongside invented mysteries and thrillers, we’ve seen the rise and rise of the true crime genre on streaming services and in audio podcasts. It appears everyone wants to know more about the minds of murderers. As it happens, this is my day job; I’ve spent the last 30 years working with violent offenders as a forensic psychiatrist and…
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Non-human animals are among the most vulnerable members of society. Even their inclusion in this term – ‘society’ – is not without controversy, and perhaps unsurprisingly so. We slaughter thousands of them every day to provide food and other products, routinely ignoring the often barbaric conditions they are kept in prior to their deaths. Arbitrary divisions are made between the behaviour of animals deemed consumable or those placed in the category of ‘pet’, while pets themselves – whether beloved or mistreated – are considered mere legal property. Some of the most popular breeds on the planet are created in such a way that limits their ability to breathe. It is interes…
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When crime fiction features multiple members of a family, the protagonist soon learns that to mess with one of them is to mess with more of them than bargained for. This is definitely the case for Lucy Lancaster—my genealogist main character in Fatal Family Ties, the third book in my Ancestry Detective Series—after Lucy is hired by one of her former co-workers and ends up entangled in three branches of her client’s family. Whether the family members in question are in a lighthearted cozy, a dark-and twisty thriller, or within a historical mystery, the more relatives that crop up, the more the action ramps up. The stakes are higher, as is the tension. The lengths to which…
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This summer will mark the 30th anniversary of the discovery of the most gruesome crimes in Milwaukee’s history. No doubt this grim anniversary will spark some reflections on the crimes and will inevitably renew interest in the man responsible for them. But I hope this year will also provide opportunities for us to think about how and why it is that 30 years on, Jeffrey Dahmer remains a household name—a kind of American celebrity, even—when few Americans could tell you the name of just one of the men he murdered. The media made this man famous, but we’ve not done much, if anything, to discourage them. Upon reflection, it’s obvious the case belongs in the long, disturbing t…
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1. We are the Bolan sisters. Calliope, Lorelei, and Serafina. If our names sound like they were plucked from a fairy tale, it’s because they were. Momma wanted, above all things, to live in a fairy tale. We have pale, freckly skin and dark auburn hair, which we refuse to cut. It falls in long jumbles down our backs—thick and wavy for Lorelei and me; wispy curls for Serafina. We are tall for our ages, respectively. We are clumsy. We have mammoth feet and delicate wrists. We see the world with perfect vision. Lorelei and I have green eyes. Serafina’s eyes are brown. When we are together, we collect stares we’d rather return. See? It’s the Bolan girls. The ones who surviv…
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Whenever I receive the tried-and-true question—“Where do you get your ideas?”—I answer honestly: “A lot of the time I steal them from myself.” By this I mean, as a veteran journalist (a decade in newspapers and more than twenty years now with The Associated Press), I have plenty of material at my fingertips. For sure, I often study up on plotlines and scenarios for my mysteries about Andy Hayes, a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator in Columbus, Ohio. But more often than not, I’ve already done much of the preliminary research through my reporting. In my first novel, for example, one of the characters works at a shady healthcare financi…
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