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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Secrets long buried, old flames rekindled, grudges resurfacing—there’s endless dramatic potential in a homecoming. Especially when murder is involved. There’s something elemental in the way that place and memory become intertwined. Anyone who has returned to their family home and discovered themselves reverting to old habits and falling into old arguments can attest to the power our physical context has to shape our behavior. Returning to the coffee shop around the corner of your old apartment brings back the memory of old friendships, break-ups, the ache in your feet of a long shift at a terrible job. The ghosts of sensation and emotion stir—there’s a reason we call our…
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If – like me – you love a comedy murder mystery or thriller, but have been judged by someone for it, I’m here to tell you that it’s ok because of science. That’s right, there is actually science behind your enjoyment of silly murders. One of the things that we humans find funny is incongruity (again this is according to science, not me, and I’d like to stress this is almost the only bit of science I know). We recognise two things as being wildly different and that the act of putting them together seems ridiculous. Thus, laughter ensues. Obviously, it’s more complex than this but a) I’m not that smart and b) there’s a word count here. The main thing is that the reason we f…
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“Louise Penny,” was, at first, the sum total of what I blurted out yesterday to the interviewer wanting to know what might have influenced my new novel A Bend of Light. So many more names I’d meant to list right away in a long, lyrical response that would show both my gratitude to some favorite writers and maybe also make me sound deeply wise and well read. I’d planned to be eloquent and intellectually dazzling, of course, as one always plans, in addition to charming and funny and at least marginally coherent. I’d meant to speak compellingly about my novel’s setting, a fictional village on the coast of Maine—much like the small towns of Penny or William Kent Krueger—and …
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The holidays are over and now the real drudge of winter is upon us. At least for those of us living in the northern climates. For me, a native Wisconsinite, I look forward to having a stack of great books to help keep me occupied during the long winter months. There’s nothing better than curling up near the fire with a great mystery while the snow piles up outside. But where to start when there are so many great books to choose from? As all mystery readers know, there are many diverse categories of cozy mysteries. I thought I would pick one book from each of my favorite genres to share with you today. These are all great stories that are sure to entertain the most voraci…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephen Spotswood, Secrets Typed in Blood (Doubleday) “This mystery, the third in a series, is as winning as its predecessors. Here, the famous P.I. Lillian Pentecost and her spiky junior partner, Willowjean ‘Will’ Parker, immerse themselves in the seedy milieu of pulp magazines, circa 1947. The novel reads as easy as fine whiskey goes down.” –The New York Times Book Review Amber Garza, A Mother Would Know (MIRA) “[P]ropulsive….Combining high drama with issues—aging, sibling rivalry, the shadow of past mistakes—to which most readers can relate, Garza keeps the fast-paced plot twi…
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When I was nine years old, I learned what it meant to be adopted. My mother had been adopted as an infant, and always spoke about what a gift it was to be raised by her parents, my grandparents. That fact being wholly undisputed, I also recall turning to my mother one day and asking, “But what about our medical history? Do you know anything about that?” She shook her head, and a burning curiosity for answers was born in me. Decades later, I was working on my debut novel when I learned that Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. was identified as the elusive Golden State Killer. Having grown up in Sacramento, California, the area that DeAngelo first began attacking his victims, I was …
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Cozies are my favorite books. I write them. I read them. I wished I lived in them sometimes. Well, I wish I lived in the charming towns and shops where they are set. I have no interest in finding a dead body or solving a murder. However, there is nothing better than to escape into a cozy when the real world seems a bit all too much. When I really want an escape, I like to read a paranormal cozy. These are cozies with a little bit of magic to help or hinder the sleuth find the killer. They can have everything from witches to fairies to ghosts to mystics. Each is unique in how it treats the magical side of things in the stories, and that’s what makes paranormal cozies so mu…
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Greetings from the Great White North, where days are Hobbesian: nasty, brutish and short. The tides have turned as isolation continues and instead of seeing a bunch of writers complaining on social media about not being able to read, I’ve seen anecdotal evidence that people are reading more than they did in the before times. This does make your local book critic smile on the inside. I’m here to help you on your quest for escape and/or entertainment that doesn’t involve bingeing (a word I am coming to loathe) or a YouTube tutorial—actually, tutorials, since who stops at just one? I am hooked on bullet journal videos, which are fascinating glimpses into how people think ab…
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Hello, thriller fans, and welcome to deep winter. There is lots to choose from, and I do hope that one of my favorites becomes your next read. If none of these suit you, fear not—the new installment in Stephanie Barren’s Jane Austen series, The Year Without a Summer, was a witty read. If you liked Lola on Fire, Rio Youers is back with No Second Chances. Anna Pitoniak’s Our American Friend is a clever espionage tale, and Japanese crime writer Fuminori Nakamura’s My Annihilation is a stream-of-consciousness novel featuring the thoughts of chickens at a Purdue plant (no it isn’t, but I might read that). Anyway, these five rose to the top: I present your psychological thrille…
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Welcome to 2023, thriller lovers! January is here and I have the problem I like: there are easily ten books that could have made this column. I will mention in passing the two books I am most impressed by, and I know I’m not alone: Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (Mariner) and Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows (Mulholland) are the kind of books that might stick with me until December and my 2023 list. I can also vouch for solid January books by writers you probably know by now: Jane Harper’s Exiles (Flatiron) and Mary Kubica’s Just the Nicest Couple (Park Row). So what’s left? Five books that have impressive premises, and/or exceptional writing…
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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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May, they tell me, is the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spring in Toronto (please, someone tell me so I don’t miss it). The books are flowing a lot more freely and the summer is jam-packed with every writer you wish had a new book (Hint: Kubica, Constantine, Abbott, Hawkins, Gaylin, Dahl, Paris, Vernon, Harding, Stevens, Downing, et al.). In the meantime, we have a very respectable May list for you. Nancy Tucker, The First Day of Spring (Riverhead) Okay, so maybe I’m preoccupied with endless winter: our first book is called The First Day of Spring, and it’s a whopper. It’s a Bad Seed-esque story narrated by the Bad Seed, Chrissie. Chrissie is eight years old. Chrissie k…
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Hello, readers, and hello, April. We are starting to see glimmers of the big psychological thrillers of the summer, from such fan favorites as Megan Abbott, Paula Hawkins, and Robyn Harding. In the meantime, April has plenty to offer us. Let’s take a book into the nascent sun and try and get some vitamin D and some sense of normalcy. It’s going to happen, right? We’re going to be normal again, aren’t we? Caroline Kepnes, You Love Me (Random House) Long before Kepnes’s brilliantly sick series of books, she worked at Entertainment Weekly (also the former workplace of crime writer Julia Dahl, regular CrimeReads contributor Daneet Steffens, and me). Reading Kepnes is l…
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Ah, February, when the Hallmark stores, train station florists, mass produced chocolate makers, and jewelers everywhere rake it in. But what about the books? They have V-Day well covered too. From mothers to daughters and sisters to disloyal friends and lousy house guests, there is a book here for you this month. Sophie Ward, The Schoolhouse (Vintage) The Schoolhouse was an experimental school in the 1970s. The children were given room to roam and indulge the worst of childhood’s impulses, especially as they turn on each other. Now a librarian with an austere and quiet life, Isobel is still in the grips of what happened in the Schoolhouse. When her childhood nightma…
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Since we are spoiled for choice here at the Psychological Thriller department of CrimeReads HQ, I decided to do an experiment. There are no dead girls to put the plot in motion. There are no uncomfortable moments of sexualizing girls. There are no determined moms with empty nurseries. There are no fields of unidentified corpses that turn out to be women who were in the wrong place and took a worse turn, ending up in a mass grave. There is no gratuitous blood and gore, no mandate to raise the body count, and no sexual violence. When asked, I usually say that I don’t really react much to reading about terrible things because I do it so often, which is true. I’m not easy t…
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And so it’s early November, a good time to start dreading the holidays and hoping we have some semblance of normality in the new year. By all means don’t work too hard; nothing else is going to happen before then. I mean, I hope nothing happens. It will be fine. Seriously. Here are some books to ride out 2021 on. Wanda M. Morris, All Her Little Secrets (William Morrow) Ellice Littlejohn has buried her past and built a good life (I feel like I could recycle that sentence, so it might come up again). She’s an Ivy Leaguer and an African American attorney at a corporate firm in Atlanta. Oh, and she’s seeing a rich, fancy white guy—her boss, Michael. That’s the set-up; w…
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Readers and writers alike come to crime fiction for different reasons, and critics usually break those many reasons down into two: a desire to control the monstrous or a desire to envision social change. But few of us fall simply into either category, and some of our interests in reading and writing about crime are private. Whatever personal compulsion brings me to the genre, I want crime fiction that walks the blurry line of circumstance. I want crime fiction that explores how any of us takes one step off a curb, realizing too late we don’t know the streets’ secrets. We suddenly need to, maybe need to and desire to, learn those secrets for ourselves. But this oblique or…
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Nothing keeps me flipping pages late into the night like a twisty who-done-it mystery or a fast-paced thriller, but my absolute favorite genre mash up is when those elements are mixed with a little bit of magic. There’s something about the addition of magical elements that adds a new layer of tension, intrigue and excitement to the pages. Perhaps that’s why I not only read, but write, speculative thrillers. The Darkness Rises, my latest speculative thriller releasing April 9, follows Whitney, a high school student who sees dark clouds hovering over people when they are in danger. She’s always tried to save people when she sees the warnings ghosting over their heads. But …
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Teens on vacation with their big, messy families. Teens on vacation without their families. What could go wrong? In two words, a lot. “An idyllic vacation takes a dark and deadly turn” is one of my favorite thriller sub-genres, and this longstanding literary tradition has made its mark in YA over the past few years. The genre is all about escape: the vacation itself, and the thrilling story that unfolds from a picture-perfect beginning. The vast majority of teens never take the kind of luxe or parent-free vacation imagined in these thrillers. I was lucky to take several memorable family trips as a teen, but we were not a posh resort or private island family, and I was d…
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For several years in the mid-nineties I lived in Vientiane, the then crumbling, sun bleached capital of Laos. The country was just opening after decades of isolation following a nominally communist takeover in late 1975, the aftershock from the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh several months earlier. Never formally part of America’s hostilities in Indochina, Laos was referred to as the Secret War, in which the Vietnamese backed Pathet Lao fought against the Central Intelligence Agency and its local proxies, supported by the US air force, which dropped so much ordinance, it left Laos the most bombed country in history. Laos still felt incredibly isolated and impoverished in…
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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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Last month, San Francisco’s distinguished Castro Theater provided the setting for a birthday party of sorts. The Long Goodbye, a 1973 neo-noir thriller, based on the 1953 novel by celebrated pulp scribe Raymond Chandler, was about to turn fifty. The guest of honor, star Elliott Gould, preceded the screening with fun and happily meandering reminiscences about the film and his exceptional career. Besides being the sort of occasion that made you grateful for a return to inhabiting other people’s physical presence, the screening highlighted what a valuable and challenging contribution to popular culture this film has always been. In The Long Goodbye, Gould plays Philip Marl…
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Fifty years ago, Milano Calibro 9, or Calibre 9 as it was released in the United States, hit Italian cinema screens. A small time mafia foot soldier, Ugo Piazzo (Gastone Moschin, a famous Italian comic actor at the time), leaves prison only to be caught up in a conspiracy around the disappearance three years earlier of $300,000 from a Milanese crime boss known as the Americano. Believing that Ugo took the money and stashed it while he was in jail, the Americano sends Rocco (German Italian actor Mario Adorf), a clownish but lethal mob enforcer, to retrieve it. Ugo denies he had anything to do with the missing cash, but no one, including the police and his ambitious strippe…
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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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Whether it’s whispered around a campfire, or passed down across generations, folk tales have often been the spark that ignited much of our love for stories. They give us brief glimpses into different times and different cultures, and it’s always a treat for me to find these threads woven into works of fiction today. It has even inspired me to reimagine my favourite Sri Lankan folktale in my latest book, Island Witch. In my new novel, set in 1880s Ceylon, Amara, the daughter of the local demon priest, is caught in the cross currents of her traditional beliefs and the new colonial ideas that have been brought into her coastal town, while being bullied and called a “witch” …
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