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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Cozy mysteries are a popular genre. But there are many sub-genres that capture the attention of amateur sleuth-lovers. One of those niches is the magical cozy mystery, a strange mix of murder mystery mixed with fantasy, paranormal or supernatural elements. I think my mystery series, the Enchanted Bay Mysteries, must on paper read like one of the most bizarre of the sub-genre. Mermaids. Murder. Mystery. But I think (I hope) it works because I write the series as realistically as possible. Does that seem contradictory? It might but if you create the world of your series based on reality that just happens to have magic in it… maybe not. For example, in A Hex For Danger, t…
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I’ve been a fan of Jordan Harper’s ever since I first read She Rides Shotgun, his Edgar Award Winning debut novel published back in 2017. I was so taken with that book, I even tweeted out a barrage of my favorite lines as I was reading it. Lines like: “She wore a loser’s slumped shoulders and hid her face with her hair, but the girl had gunfighter eyes.” There were more lines. Way more lines. All from Jordan Harper, this white-knuckle author who dropped double adjectives like atom bombs and wrote sentences sharp enough to cut. Needless to say, I was impressed. So much so I ended up reading She Rides Shotgun a total of four times, trying to suck as much magic as I c…
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There’s no place like a diner, nowhere at all like a diner. A separate piece, a more focused essay, would simply muse on the ontology of “the diner,” trace the history of the diner, evaluate the American-ness of the diner. This piece is not that, but I would like to write it anyway, because diners are my favorite things, but besides that, they also have a particular, elusive mystique. What is it about the diner that is so appealing, so satisfying? Is it the cheapness, the accessibility of the diner? The local-ness, the nostalgia? That so many of the diners we encounter today are actually relics of earlier times and different aesthetics: roadhouses along interstates, break…
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The dizzy spells should have been the first warning. A year after launching my debut novel, I was vaccinated, caffeinated and hard at work on my second book. By age thirty, I’d achieved almost every goal I’d set for myself in my teens: I was self-employed, lived alone, had cash in the bank. Hollywood was (literally) calling. I worked out five days a week. I ate organic. I was doing everything right. Yet every few weeks I found myself muddled with bouts of dizziness that took minutes, then hours, to clear. More troubling, they were soon joined by bouts of confusion and brain fog that made routine tasks like emptying the dishwasher or folding laundry into endless, laby…
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Before Jack the Ripper, before The Devil in the White City’s H.H. Holmes, the world’s deadliest serial killer was the Canadian Doctor Thomas Neill Cream. The graduate of McGill Medical School murdered as many as ten people in Canada, the United States, and Britain between 1877 and 1892, escaping suspicion and even a life sentence in prison to kill, again and again. In this excerpt from The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer, published by Algonquin Books, author Dean Jobb follows Cream from the gates of an American prison to the streets of England, where the ruthless poisoner is about to unleash his wrath on the women of London. Jo…
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The lull of waves lapping to shore. The scent of salty breezes, suntan lotion, and saltwater taffy. Flip-flop warm summer days with no agenda. This is the hidden promise when I find a cozy mystery with a waterfront cover. Instantly, I sense respite and escape, with a sprinkle of intrigue tucked inside. The waterfront setting. I desire it, in both reality, and fiction, and I know I’m not alone. We readers want this. Don’t we? We long for it. What is it about those cozy mysteries with the waterfront covers that lures us in? Doesn’t matter if it’s a sandy beach, a rocky cove, or a lake hidden within the pines. Doesn’t matter if it’s saltwater, fresh water, or a rambling rive…
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My writing career began with seventeen standalone crime fiction novels, including Oblivion, End of Story, A Perfect Crime, Lights Out, Hard Rain, and Nerve Damage. You’ve probably guessed already these are not cozies, in fact, are shifted to the dark end of the spectrum. Correct! Bad things happen to the good and the bad, and when justice is served the meal is on the haphazard side, messy and sometimes indiscriminate. But the plots all makes sense, I hope, since a story with a plot that doesn’t make sense is ruined for me, no matter how admirable its other qualities. Back to darkness. In End of Story, where aspiring writer Ivy lands a gig teaching writing in a men’s pris…
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I’ve taken countless writing classes and joined many groups, but for me, the best writing education comes from reading. I love it when I’m reading a book and the author makes a choice—a plot point, a character trait, a scene or line of dialogue—that takes my breath away, that provides a lesson in craft that I can’t help but try to apply to my own writing. Here are seven books that taught me how to be a better criminal (writer). Jane Harper – The Dry This is an easy one. It was the first book I read in the genre nicknamed “outback noir,” and in addition to its appealing protagonist and well-plotted mystery, it’s a fascinating example of how to use the setting of your s…
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“Crime writers are the nicest people.” I’d heard this for years, and it puzzled me. Really? How is that possible? People who spend their time dreaming up the grisliest, most ghoulish acts of human barbary. If they’re such nice people, what on earth drives them to write such ghastly things? Now suddenly I was one. And still asking the same question. Hey, I’d spent more than a decade of my life writing nice, quiet nonfiction books about agreeable things. Leadership. Motivation. Personal development. Some memoirs, mostly of business leaders overcoming hardships to carve out careers making quiet contributions to society. Hell, I’d coauthored the sequel to Who Moved My Chees…
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One of the bright spots of the past year has been the ability to travel virtually via the books that we read. So what a joy it was to travel from the comfort of my own couch to the world of diplomats (and their local associates) in Embassy Wife by Katie Crouch. I became obsessed with Katie’s focus on parenting and relationships and how they are complicated by being in a wildly new setting. How children become surly, how spouses become resentful, how new friendships are made. All of these things are happening in such hilarious relief in Embassy Wife. I was dying to catch up with Katie—we worked together many years ago—about so many things that we now have in common—being n…
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I love reading (and writing) books with small towns, and houses set in the woods, and a setting that feels like a character. I’m a huge fan of atmosphere, and I find myself repeatedly drawn to themes of the past, and hidden secrets lurking under the surface of a picturesque façade. So maybe that’s why reading gothic fiction always transports me—particularly that tone, where the setting feels alive, and the secrets and the past feel alive as well. In my latest book, Such A Quiet Place, I wanted to pull the boundaries of a small town setting even tighter, make it feel inescapable, even though there are roads leading in and out. I was thinking about all those same elements …
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As a child of the ‘80s, I consumed my fair share of poltergeist pop culture. Although I wasn’t a horror fan, I took a casual interest in the movies and books about fantastically troubled adolescent girls. Years later, while doing research for a supernatural novel, I found myself once again drawn in by the poltergeist phenomenon. Only this time it wasn’t the fictionalized stories that interested me, but the confounding real life accounts. For any poltergeist case, the first question is always: What was the actual cause? Ghost or supernatural force? An adolescent’s emotional turbulence? A fake? As I spent more time with these cases, however, I became less interested in the…
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Among the many challenges facing Brigadier Hinde that spring was to purge the British sector of all remaining Nazis. Denazification was a cornerstone policy of the four occupying powers, and every German over the age of eighteen was required to fill in a Fragebogen, or “questionnaire,” answering 130 questions about his or her previous employment, income, and education. “What political party did you vote for in the November election of 1932? What did you vote for in March 1933?” Some questions were as obscure as they were bizarre. “What titles of nobility were ever held by you or your wife or by the parents or grandparents of either of you?” Hinde’s specialists assessed th…
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The books below offer reality with a twist: Something about the world is not quite normal. But you may not notice at first, because they’re all about people. At heart, they’re human dramas, which want to show you fully lived-in characters confronted with situations that challenge them in personal ways. There’s not a robot in sight, and we’re still on good old Earth, usually in contemporary times. But this is science-fiction at its best, because lurking in the background is a conceit that changes everything—that permits (or forces!) the characters to expose their true natures. And while the conceit may be out of this world, the concerns and choices it reveals can feel eer…
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Like many cozy mystery authors, I love adding animals to my stories. The more the merrier. This is a trend used by many other authors, too. There’s nothing better than reading a cozy mystery and discovering there is an entire series by the same author. Wait, there is something better—when the series includes a lovable pet (or two) that assist in solving the crime! Many cozy mystery authors include pets in their stories because, let’s be honest, life is more interesting and enjoyable with our furry friends coming along for the ride. Pets are great characters, every dog I’ve owned has had his or her unique personality. Not to mention, pets are smarter than we give them cr…
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September 1905 Hampshire, England Unable to bear the stench of bananas, horse dung, smoke, and salty air, Jesse James Prescott pulled the red bandanna up over his nose. He stretched his shoulder blades, sore from leaning so long against the clapboards, and shot a glare up at the bunches of yellow fruit dangling above his head. Nasty things. Made him choke the one time he’d tried one. What had he been thinking, suggesting Snook’s as the rendezvous point? Sure, in the chaos and bustle of the ship’s arrival, the fruit merchant nearest the wharf, with its flashy displays of exotic produce enveloping the entire storefront, was an eye-catching landmark no one could mistake. B…
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Sweden has a proud tradition as a country of exports. American homes are not only decorated with furniture from IKEA— their bookshelves are bursting with suspense novels from a morbid country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean with a disproportionate number of crime writers per capita. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö paved the way with detective Martin Beck in their socially critical novels, published back in the sixties. Hennig Mankell walked the same path a couple of decades later, and then, in the beginning of the 21st century, Stieg Larsson took the sensation of Swedish crime to a completely new level. His Lisbeth Salander novels have sold close to 100 million copies…
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The woman born Julia Clara Catherine Maria Dolores Robins wrote dozens of novels under four names: the pseudonyms D. B. Olsen, Dolan Birkley, Noel Burke, and, of course, her second married name, Dolores Hitchens. She was a prolific writer with the kind of range that might necessitate multiple pen names, traipsing around the genre with agility and bravado throughout a career that spanned decades—from the 1938 publication of The Clue in the Clay to her death in 1973. Her Rachel Murdock series, which featured a spinster detective with a feline sidekick, was an early example of the cat mystery subgenre, now firmly associated with cozy mysteries. Her two James Sader books, Sle…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Megan Miranda, Such a Quiet Place (Simon and Schuster) “Miranda, who makes the setting, where everyone knows one another and ends up fearing one another, all the more chilling for its seeming normality, is a master of misdirection and sudden plot twists, leading up to a wallop of an ending. A powerful, paranoid thriller.” –Booklist Ace Atkins, The Heathens (Putnam) “Exceptional. . . Atkins artfully alternates between that pursuit and Colson’s search for the people he believes slaughtered Byrd. The diverse cast of characters and their intricate relationships elevate this above mos…
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There’s more than a little blurring of lines between movies and TV (including streaming) these days. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the division between what we watched on TV and what we paid to see in theaters was as solid as the Berlin wall. Despite the division, network TV executives really, really wanted you to think that what you watched on TV was as good as theatrical movies, with big-name casts … or at least a couple of big names. And plenty of thrills. So the networks poured some money and effort and a boatload of marketing into made-for-TV movies, and in the 1970s, many of the best of them were mysteries and thrillers with a touch—or sometimes more than a touch—…
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Books adapted from movies don’t have a sterling reputation. They’re often viewed as slapdash cash-grabs by writers-for-hire, despite some notable examples to the contrary—for example, Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (written concurrently with the screenplay) and Alan Dean Foster’s “Alien.” Now Quentin Tarantino is providing his own twist on this odd genre with the novelization of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the 2019 movie he wrote and directed. The story follows fading Western-movie star Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie) and his stuntman/assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) as they navigate Hollywood in 1969, drinking and talking and lur…
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Everyone, gather round! Sadly, this list marks the end of our Summertime Crime Movies series. But we’re ending it on a very cozy note: campfires, s’mores, looking up at the stars through a lush canopy of evergreens, being hunted by deranged hillbillies… The thing about summery crime movies set in the woods is that they’re almost always horror movies. This is fine, but it’s kind of not what this series is about. (They are often also westerns or war films, which again is fine, but not the target, here.) I’ve tried to keep them as non-horror as possible, but forgive me if some tropes worm their way in. This is why there aren’t many… if I could build a list from Straw Dogs t…
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“I’ve never played a hero in the cinema.” – Orson Welles in a Cahiers du Cinema interview Did anyone ever play a villain as well as Orson Welles? He was perfect as the charming black marketeer Harry Lime in The Third Man, the clock-obsessed Nazi fugitive Franz Kindler in The Stranger and the corrupt border-town detective Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil. But have you seen his performance as the strangest villain of all, the title character in the 1955 crime film Mr. Arkadin? Most people have not, and until recently that unenlightened group included me. Then, during a one-month trial of a popular streaming service, I spotted Mr. Arkadin among their selections so I q…
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In a scene from the Apple TV+ series The Mosquito Coast, the mysterious American fugitive Allie Fox (Justin Theroux) is held at gunpoint. His assailant is a Mexican coyote named Chuy (Scotty Tovar), who in a previous episode ironically smuggled Fox and his family from the U.S. into Mexico. “You want to run away from America, but you’ll never be able to,” Chuy admonishes Fox, adding, “Because of the way you are. The way you think you can buy people; the way you think you can buy anything you want. You are America, asshole, and you’ll never get away from it.” The moment strikes at the heart of the series’ themes of American entitlement and hubris, which are also key aspect…
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“Democracy! That’s what it means, Slim! Everybody equal. Like tonight! All them big shots, listening to little shots like me, and being friendly!” —Sergeant Brooklyn Nolan, in the film Hollywood Canteen, 1944 In The Hollywood Spy, Maggie Hope travels from London to Los Angeles during the summer of 1943, with the United States at war. Maggie’s there to solve a murder, of course, staying as a guest of her friend Sarah, a ballerina starring in the Gold Brothers’ Star-Spangled Canteen—a fictionalized version of the actual Warner Bros. film, Hollywood Canteen. So what was the Hollywood Canteen? Well, the real Canteen was a social club for Allied servicemen, founded by John …
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