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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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Lorenzo Carcaterra, Nonna Maria and the Case of the Stolen Necklace (Bantam) “A streetwise Italian Miss Marple is a shrewd amateur sleuth in this atmospheric series installment.” –Library Journal Anders de la Motte, The Mountain King (Atria/Emily Bestler) “Superb…De la Motte nimbly juggles a substantial cast as his plot grows increasingly intricate, ratcheting suspense to near-unbearable heights. This crackerjack page-turner will keep readers up late. –Publishers Weekly Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone On This Train Is a Suspect (Mariner) “Stevenson’s brilliant and creative sec…
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Galveston, Texas – named after an 18th-century Spanish military leader, port of the one-time Texas Navy, an entry point for African slaves and European immigrants. Known as the “Queen City of the Gulf” until 1900 when a hurricane all but destroyed the entire place, one of the deadliest storms in US history. Galveston recovered and rebuilt. In 1910, The Galveston Daily News also reported that Galveston was known throughout the world as “The Oleander City”. It was also known for its speakeasies, illegal casinos and rum-runners during Prohibition. So, of course, there’s some good crime writing from and about Galveston and the Gulf Coast. Back to that hurricane. Matt Bondur…
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Nature can be a harsh partner for the novelist. Trying to integrate it into a passage or entire plot is a daunting effort that doesn’t always succeed. I don’t refer to snapshots of snow-capped mountains or purple sunsets tacked onto a scene for casual color, but rather the more ambitious weaving of the land and nature into a tale to drive plot, develop character or convey underlying themes. Inviting the power and beauty of nature into a novel can be a humbling task, complicated by the many ways people experience it. “Nature and books,” Emerson aptly observed, “belong to the eyes that see them.” The cry of a loon may be a haunting summons for some, but just background nois…
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After the greed of studio bosses led to what The Simpsons would call a “scary couple of hours,” crime and mystery TV is back this year in a big way, from a chilly new season of True Detective to Clive Owen as a retired Sam Spade to Sofia Vergara as legendary cocaine queenpin Griselda Blanco. Amid the embarrassment of riches, however, one of the decade’s most underrated crime yarns quietly gears up for its third and final season, the perfect time to catch up. In an era where most premium cable makes at least some stabs at awards bait, Starz has stayed solidly populist, for good and for ill, with its biggest cash cow the pulpy 50 Cent-produced “Power” universe of shows or …
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Once a place of movie-making fantasy, a decaying movie set became the starting point for vengeance on Hollywood. Known as “Spahn Ranch,” this crumbling and deserted Western soundstage was the ramshackle home and headquarters for what eventually became known as “The Family.” The moniker represented the delinquent and motley crew of outcasts who abandoned their suburban and city lives to follow the scripture according to Charles Manson. There, living away from society and hidden away in the San Bernadino Valley, Manson and his Family came to commit the unthinkable in the summer of 1969. The carnage started on August 8 when the clan brutally killed pregnant actress Sharon …
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In the world of crime fiction (and fact) Adam Plantinga is an authority figure. A twenty-two-year veteran of law enforcement, he began his career with the Milwaukee Police Department in 2001 and has spent the last fifteen years with the San Francisco PD, where he is a sergeant assigned to street patrol. Drawing on that specialized knowledge, he authored two non-fiction books on policing and procedure—400 Things Cops Know and Police Craft; the former won a 2015 Silver Falchion award, was nominated for an Agatha, and has been called a bible for crime writers. This month, Plantinga made his debut as a novelist with The Ascent (January 2, 2024; Grand Central Publishing). Wh…
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The publication date for my debut novel, The Devil’s Daughter is days away. In a sense it’s the apotheosis of my writing career. I’ve spent decades as a working Hollywood screenwriter, which turns out to be something of a mixed blessing. The money is good. The creative experience, not so much. After years of being critiqued by studio and network executives, The Devil’s Daughter was finally my chance to write exactly what I wanted to write. The noir hero, Jack Coffey, lives in 1950s New York, a city of great jazz clubs, glamorous women, big city corruption and mob violence. It’s written in a style very much my own, but influenced by the time I spent working with Michael Ma…
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You can tell me anything. When you’re in this room, and we’re sitting across from each other, and your mind is reeling with all the bad things you’ve done to people, and all the bad things they’ve done to you, you can let it all out into the air between us. All the weird sex stuff, the compulsive jerking off, the period blood staining the gym shorts when you were thirteen, the infidelities, the regret about having kids or not having kids. You can tell me about the time you did mushrooms and made out with a window for three hours, or that time with your dad’s friend, that time you felt a stranger’s boner press against you on the subway, how you wish your mother would just…
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When I was writing The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, a novel of haunting love and loss set in an Indian community on the east coast of South Africa, it didn’t immediately occur to me that it was a gothic novel. Looking back, it seems obvious—it had all the conventional genre tropes—the haunted house on the hill, the wild landscape, odd characters, ghostly elements and the disjointed rhythm of unease. It didn’t occur to me because these were simply features from my life growing up in my South African Indian home. It was only when I started to pick at the origins of the genre that I realized how much of the gothic existed not only in my life, but also far beyond the western …
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People sometimes ask me why I write cozy mysteries. It’s not a hard question to answer. At least I didn’t think so the first time I was asked. My response was I wrote cozies because that’s what I read. Yet that’s only partially true. I also read other types of crime fiction. But in the end, I always return to cozies. In writing cozies, whether historical or contemporary, I want the reader to be able to leave the real world behind. In Deadly to the Core (January 16, 2024), I take the reader into the world of Orchardville, Pennsylvania. Apple orchards, a café, a candle shop, a tea shop, and the somewhat mysterious, handsome owner of a neighboring orchard—who wouldn’t want …
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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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