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 are no positive gay characters in this work.” – a reader on Bath Haus From 1998 to 2006, NBC flooded households with accessible, fictional gays every Thursday night. Edgy queer jokes pushed boundaries. Outlandish characters led impossibly glamorous lives. Shenanigans packed with sharp observations scored huge ratings. For fans, Will & Grace pointedly clarified the world like only comedy can. For this closeted kid in small town South Carolina—where coming out can be both hard and dangerous—Will kissing men on primetime did something else: it sussed out safety and identified potential allies. A straight, high school buddy erupting in laughter at a zinger from Ja…
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On a cold day after Christmas 1944, Joe Teiji Koide stepped forward and placed his hand over the Bible as others looked on. He pledged his solemn oath of office, as had so many others as part of their induction into the United States’ first centralized intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). His words echoed through the room in more ways than one: “I do further solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose …
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At signings and book club events, the question that comes up most often is, “What made you decide to write this novel?” The inspiration for The Godmothers didn’t come from a single source; it was more like the spokes of a wheel coming together in one pivotal spot. And as I was researching and writing this “New York” novel, I found my “center of the wheel” when I stumbled across a quote from Mario Puzo who revealed the true inspiration for his novel, The Godfather. He said: “Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth, in my own mind I heard the voice of my mother. I heard her wisdom, her ruthlessness, and her unconquerable love for her family and for life itself, qualitie…
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As soon as I started writing The Body Double, I seemed to discover doubles everywhere—in literature, movies, and even the tangled world of internet conspiracies, where they believe your favorite celebrities might not be who they seem to be. The appeal of the double self as a narrative force is clear—a second self to whom we can pin the worst of our behavior, or who, conversely, might be living our dream lives. Here are some of my favorite doubles in the twisted world of mystery fiction and (slightly) beyond! The Double, by Fyodor Dostoyevski Dostoyevski’s classic tale of a man pursued by his own likeness was one of the first books I remember encountering with a double…
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I’m not sure we’ll ever get a consensus on what it means to be a New Yorker—ten years in a rent-controlled apartment? birth? a certain swagger down the shady side of Broadway?—but there’s something undeniable about a great New York novel, a novel that balances the vastness of its ambition with the particularity of its moments, a story that takes place on street corners and stoops and peers through the occasional open window while admitting to the eternal appeal and hopelessness of the city’s voyeurism, how other people are around us all the time, on display and unknowable. The new novel, The Great Mistake, by Jonathan Lee, takes as its subject one of those lives, an extr…
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In the time I spent writing A Past that Breathes, I went from the frustrations of the private criminal law practice that inspired the novel to a public service desk job with the State of California. I had begun to question whether certain passages in the book were unduly harsh, insensitive, and unnecessary. But watching Derek Chauvin kneel on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, as an African who came to America at seventeen, I reflected on how it could have easily been me Officer Chauvin was kneeling on. A passage in my novel describes a visit to the Los Angeles County Central jail house by the defense counsel, Kenneth Brown, an African America…
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Chicago newspaperman Ben Hecht was about to embark on a new career as a playwright and Academy Award-winning scriptwriter when he first met the infamous Joseph Weil. In fact, the encounter took place amid the chaos and clutter of a press room that would inspire the setting for The Front Page, the hit play Hecht co-wrote in 1928 with colleague Charles MacArthur. As usual, Weil—most people knew him only by his nickname, the “Yellow Kid”—looked like a wealthy, respectable citizen. “Our town’s most brilliant confidence man…always dressed like a matinee idol,” Hecht recalled in his 1963 memoir, Gaily, Gaily, “down to his pearl-gray spats.” The mustache of his neatly trimmed, …
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As a child growing up in the middle of the Daniel Boone National Forest I spent an inordinate amount of time alone. Most of those hours I wandered the woods. Half of what I know, I learned there alone. Most of the rest I learned from reading. A bookmobile trundled up the dirt road of my home hill once a week. On those slanted shelves I discovered my love of crime fiction by falling in love with Nancy Drew. Next I read the Hardy Boys, the Dana Girls, and the Three Investigators. The nearest town established a public library where I made the big jump to Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe. There was a four-book limit per person. I circumvented that—an act of minor crime—b…
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You should go back to Venice. I was in Dubai, when my friend, a fellow academic at the university where I was teaching, leaned over and offered this piece of advice. We were sitting outside, in between our classes, sipping hot Earl Grey tea under the even hotter Middle Eastern sun, the humidity quickly creeping upwards so that my clothes had already begun to stick to my back, my glasses still frosted as a result of the move from the air-conditioned indoors to the outside. My friend wore a sweater, unfazed by the heat. She continued: You should go in the winter, when it’s cold and dark and rainy. And Gothic. I had been to Venice once before—at the height of summer, along…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake (Knopf) “An exceptional work of historical fiction about one of the key figures in the development of 19th-century New York City…A highly satisfying mix of mystery and character portrait, revealing the constrained heart beneath the public carapace.” –Kirkus Reviews Leonardo Padura, The Transparency of Time (FSG) “Dressed in the grungy trappings of a crime drama, this literary tour-de-force from Padura offers a colorful cultural history of Cuba and the island’s historical contact with Europe that helped to shape its people’s religious belief…
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A silver-haired man in a black jacket prowls the arid streets of Los Angeles, shouting in indecipherable cockney, brandishing a large silver pistol at anyone who gives him grief. His name is Wilson, and he’s a British ex-con with a reputation for serious violence. He wants to kill whoever murdered his daughter, Jenny. He thinks a record producer named Terry Valentine is responsible. If you’ve never seen Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey” (1999), you might read that barest description of its plot and assume it follows the usual framework of a revenge flick: the protagonist, wronged, murders or ruins the source of their anguish. It’s a story as old as the Bible, extended to …
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“What makes a killer plot twist?” A well-executed plot twist is all about the careful delivery of information. When twists fail to work as intended, the most common criticism is that they are “predictable.” And while you should always take care to misdirect readers away from anticipating your surprise beats, it’s also far from the only thing you’ll have to consider. In my view, here’s what makes a killer plot twist. It should feel inevitable. As surprising as a good plot twist is in the moment, when viewed in retrospect, it should also be foreshadowed. It must emerge organically from what came before, and that means that all the clues should have been there. That’s the …
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An investigator, a judge and a reporter walk into a bar. They’re all promoting their latest true crime books. There’s a lot of truth to that variation on the old joke. For decades, many of the best-known books recounting real-life murders, kidnappings and “trials of the century” sprang from the minds of cops, prosecutors, judges and the reporters who covered the biggest and most shocking and sordid cases. Who are the writers of true crime and what draws them to write about some of life’s darkest moments? All of us are ultimately writers, of course, but increasingly the writers have a background that is very different from criminal justice or journalism. And the good new…
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Welcome to June! I will tell you more than once that this summer is incredibly rich, a function of pandemic printing shutdowns that work in the reader’s favor. I have a very respectable list of runners-up, like Christine Mangan’s follow-up to Tangerine, Palace of the Drowned, Nekesa Afia‘s buzzy Dead Dead Girls, and Riley Sager’s Survive the Night. The books below are my picks in a month where someone else could easily have selected five different high-quality books: I can’t recall another month when I could have made that declaration. But enough about runners-up: let’s look at the medalists. Lisa Taddeo, Animal (Avid Reader/S&S) I am a huge fan of Taddeo’s Thr…
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Kellye Garrett is the acclaimed author of Hollywood Homicide, which won the Agatha, Anthony, Lefty and Independent Publisher “IPPY” awards for best first novel and was named one of BookBub’s Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, as well as Hollywood Ending, which was featured on the Today show’s Best Summer Reads of 2019 and was nominated for both Anthony and Lefty awards. Prior to writing novels, Kellye spent eight years working in Hollywood, including a stint writing for Cold Case. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Sisters in Crime and is a co-founder of Crime Writers of Color. Her new novel, Like a Sister, will be released by Mulholland Books early next y…
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Let me just get this out of the way up front. The Truth About Charlie, the 2002 remake of Charade that you probably don’t remember, isn’t a great movie, per se. Mark Wahlberg is in the Cary Grant role, so that’s your first tip-off, but then again Wahlberg was just coming off Boogie Nights when he was offered the part (based on Paul Thomas Anderson’s strong recommendation), so let’s give everyone involved a bit more credit and accept that the casting wasn’t quite so lunatic as it now sounds. (Plus, let’s be honest, Wahlberg has stolen his fair share of movies over the years, hasn’t he?) A few of the movie’s faults include: mixed-up plotting, overwrought directing, a libera…
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Like a lot of people (or a lot of writers, anyway) I’ve been fascinated by serial killers since I was a child. Whether pilfering my cousin’s true crime magazines or trying to sneak out of the library those non-fiction books with a section of grisly black and white photos in the centre, I was compelled to find out more about them. Despite being what my family charitably termed “a sensitive kid,” I was very much drawn towards horror and dark things, and I’ve never grown out of that. I loved horror movies too, even though half the time I was much too scared to actually watch them, and I would especially crave those that seemed to have one foot in the real world. Freddy Krueg…
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Many of my fans seem surprised to learn that before I was a published author I was a solicitor for the Legal Aid Commission. For the benefit of my not-quite-so-learned friends, perhaps I should explain that it is nothing like anything you see on TV or in films. I see lawyers onscreen and they only seem to have one, or at most two, cases. And we all ask ourselves the obvious question. What on earth do these people DO all day? Perhaps you may have seen a chess master giving a simultaneous display. There is an entire room filled with people sitting at chess-boards. In the middle, the master walks around from board to board; their opponent makes a move; the master stares at …
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A subtle, single theme emerges across almost all genres, including crime fiction—an exploration of the meaning of life. As authors, we take on the “meaning of life” question by not just telling the reader something happened, but digging into the reasons behind what happened. We then enfold those reasons into a much larger story. Asked whether crime fiction is an appropriate vehicle for imparting life lessons and profound truths, I’ll admit the question gave me pause. I believe it does but does it, and why? Here is my opinion. As authors, in colorful detail, we describe our version of the world. Created out of our childhood upbringing, our morals of either right or wrong …
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Hey, crime friends! Happy Pride Month! It’s been a long year, and we all deserve to enjoy ourselves this summer—happiness can itself be an act of resistance—so why not stretch out in your hammock, drink a nice cold glass of lemonade, and enjoy one of these many, many queer mysteries? This list features something for everyone, whether that be thrillers, chillers, mysteries, or historicals. There’s also plenty of cross-overs that prove genre is as much of a spectrum as gender or sexuality, and just as shaped by the battle between conventional mores and the playful subversion thereof. There isn’t enough space in this article (or, indeed, a rather long history book) to expl…
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New York Times bestselling author Ace Atkins gave me the title for this column five years ago. My family and I were on a trip down to Pensacola Beach. I’d just gotten out of coaching and started writing seriously. The only author I “knew” was Ace. We’d met back in 2010 at the Yoknapatawpha Writers’ Workshop in Oxford, Mississippi. Ace and I were former college football players. We hit it off instantly. Once the conference was over, however, we didn’t keep up much. I was coaching high school football and Ace was publishing two novels a year (along with his Quinn Colson series, Ace has also carried on Robert B. Parker’s iconic Spenser character for the last decade). Fast…
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Ahoy there. As I write this, I am sitting in my apartment, with the AC cranked up all the way. It is a sweltering, blindingly-sunny day in New York City. After taking my dog outside for the most unpleasantly hot dog walk we’ve had in a while, I find myself I keep gazing out my window squinting to look at the sliver of some apartment complex’s pool (yes, a pool) visible in the distance. Is it a mirage? I’m not quite sure. IS THAT A BEACH UMBRELLA I SEE BEFORE ME? O, to have a swimming pool in New York City. Or, really, to be somewhere else other than New York City where swimming is more easily accomplished—in a pool, on the beach, wherever. The South of France! Tuscany! Th…
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It’s a full slate of authors from across genres. Crime writer David Swinson and his new coming-of-age tale, City on the Edge. Best selling horror writer Josh Malerman (BIrdbox) with his new novel, Goblin. Joani Elliott and her humorous novel, The Audacity of Sara Grayson. Eli Cranor and his upcoming novel, Don’t Know Tough. And Stephen Mack Jones with his latest August Snow novel, Dead of Winter. From the episode: JOSH MALERMAN: Goblin is the book that back when I had written 9 or so books, and I wasn’t looking for an agent or a publishing house or anything, I was just writing. A friend of mine from high school called and told me that he knew a lawyer that represents…
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You could call this “Emily Gerard and Count Dracula,” or “The Anthropological Musings of a Vampire,” or “Nosferatu and the Scotswoman,” or….. You know Dracula, right? The book that spawned an entire industry of knickknacks, tourist attractions, bad jokes, films (almost as many as Sherlock Holmes), and pastiches? Do you ever wonder if anyone asked Bram Stoker that most basic of questions aimed at writers, namely, Where do you get your ideas? The truth is, writers don’t always know for sure. Writers have magpie minds, always picking up shiny or odd-shaped bits—a castle, a historical figure, an interesting tidbit of folklore—and seeing how they might fit together. Sometime…
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The crimefighter known as the Shadow was a pop-culture sensation who arrived on the detective fiction scene before Perry Mason, Nero Wolfe, and Philip Marlowe, and whose extravagant war on evildoers predated those of Superman, Batman, the Lone Ranger, and Doc Savage. Americans during the Great Depression got regular doses of the Shadow via the radio and pulp magazines, and his adventures continue to this day in comic book form. Oddly, the character was never a big hit with movie audiences, despite decades of films that create an occasionally compelling but ultimately confusing portrait of the clever, menacing protagonist. Amazon Prime subscribers can check out some of the…
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