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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During the late-1960s, with Los Angeles’ skies still blotted by poisonous smog, an angry mother fastened a sign in her station wagon that you never would’ve imagined in the planet’s car capital. “This GM,” her placard read, “is a killing machine.” Intended as an activist war cry, her words by the end of the next decade carried a more diabolical meaning. Predators were no longer only skulking neighborhood back alleys or through unlatched windows to snatch up their quarry. They were adopting their own vehicles as murder accomplices, exploiting Southern California’s go-anywhere roadways to create distance between themselves and the corpses they left behind. For these dark…
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Picture the most murderous mammal in the world. Not the best predator, taking down prey with a single swipe of a great talon or claw, but the one that excels in slaying its own kind. Are you picturing a human being? Well, you would be wrong. But you might be surprised to know Homo sapiens actually falls at number 30 out of more than a thousand species on the list of animals that most often kill members of their own kind. Humans, it turns out, are just average members of a particularly violent lot, the primates. And the most prolific murderers* in the animal world are a different species altogether. Which, you might ask? Believe it or not, it’s the meerkat, a cute litt…
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“…because the past was always around her and might return at any time. It prowled the world searching for her, and she knew it was growing angrier at every passing day.” ― Nicholas Sparks What if…? The two most provocative words in the English language and the inspiration for countless novels. What if… you needed to leave your life—flee, disappear, run faster than something or someone that was chasing you? My first novel, Hush Little Baby, and my latest novel, Hadley & Grace, explore this familiar trope. The first was inspired by a friend who fled an abusive marriage. The second was inspired by one of the greatest women-on-the-run stories ever, Thelma and Louise. Bel…
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Recently Naomi Hirahara and I, fully vaccinated, met up at a local soda fountain. In between discussion of pandemic tragedies and the bright spot of MariNaomi’s stop AAPI hate mural, the first AAPI public artwork in the San Gabriel Valley, we found we were co-contributors to the upcoming Akashic Noir South Central edited by Gary Phillips. We chatted about her stunningly prolific life as a writer, and her groundbreaking novel, Clark and Division. Set in 1944 Chicago, her latest novel tackles Japanese American life post incarceration in US concentration camps. This interview has been condensed for clarity and space. Désirée Zamorano: I always want to know, when an author w…
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Soon Wiley’s debut novel, When We Fell Apart, is sublimely haunting and will linger in your mind long after you turn the last page. After a young woman disappears in Seoul, her ex-pat boyfriend searches for her, and in the process, for himself. Ahead of the book’s publication, Soon Wiley was kind enough to answer a few questions over email. Molly Odintz: This is your debut, but it doesn’t feel like a debut—the writing is so sophisticated. What’s your writing process? Soon Wiley: First off, thanks for the high praise! Like a lot of writers, my first foray into fiction was with the short story form. During my MFA program, I was incredibly fortunate to have some excellent …
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Part the First: The Ambitious Young Author Despite having produced more than one hundred and thirty mystery novels between 1886 and 1932, the year of his death, English born, New Zealand raised author Ferguson Wright Hume (1859-1932) today is remembered—to the extent that he is remembered—for one work, his debut murder tale, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886). Accounts typically assert that upon the novel’s publication some 500,000 copies of Hansom Cab were placed into the eager hands of murder fanciers (some sources suggest up to a million copies may have been sold), making the novel a landmark financial success within the mystery genre. Few people indeed ever achieve s…
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When U.S. Coast Guard cutters shelled and sank the Canadian rumrunner I’m Alone in the Gulf of Mexico in March 1929, one of its crewmen perished. Meet Captain Jack Randell, the scrappy smuggler whose daring exploits turned deadly—and sparked an international incident. ___________________________________ Rifle and machine-gun bullets ripped through the sails and rigging of the booze-laden Canadian schooner I’m Alone on a March morning in 1929. Shells from the deck gun of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter blasted holes in the rumrunner’s hull and it began to sink, bow-first. Skipper Jack Randell, struggling to stand on the sloping deck, remained defiant. “No, damn you!” he shout…
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Yes, that’s right! James Ellroy, famed telegrammatic prose stylist and the author of classic noirs L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, and White Jazz (among many others), will be releasing a true crime podcast series. And as you all hoped after reading the headline, yes, he WILL be narrating it. The podcast is entitled James Ellroy’s Hollywood Death Trip. Evidently, it will dig into several of the most indelible and gory murders mid-century Los Angeles ever witnessed. The five-part series, produced by the group Audio Up, will be released in August, 2021. Audio Up said that listeners will be invited to “explore some of the darkest crimes in Los Angeles h…
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___________________________________ Jessie Levy and the Dillinger Gang ___________________________________ During the Great Depression, there were big banks, and desperately poor people, and in between the two, a great vacuum—a vacuum that was quickly filled by the glamorous, devil-may-care exploits of 1930s gangsters like Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, and John Dillinger and his men. (Even if the exploits themselves were not actually all that glamorous, it didn’t really matter—once they hit the papers, everyone swooned.) But being a ‘30s gangster wasn’t all fun and games. Dillinger’s men ended up in jail almost as often as they robbed banks, and frequently needed …
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Aside from writing, I have another huge passion—being outdoors, surrounded by nature, especially in winter. Feeling the bite of cold wind high in the mountains makes me feel so alive and when I can’t get outside, the next best thing for me is reading books which conjure that same feeling, immersing you in their setting so absolutely that you really do feel the cold slap of wind on your face or hear the crunch of snow beneath your feet… The Sanatorium is set in Switzerland, high in the Alps, in a luxury hotel converted from an old abandoned sanatorium which gets isolated by a once in a generation snowstorm. It’s a locked room crime thriller where the remote mountain setti…
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A dead body at the start of a book is interesting not because of its titillation — so inured are we to this image it barely affects us anymore — but because of the promise of a cognitive puzzle that can be solved. When one thinks about it, it’s astounding that the murder mystery genre is as rich as it is. After all, it doesn’t have the variety of alien landscapes like sci fi or fantasy, nor the diverse frights of the horror genre; its plot is highly constrained in that there must be a death, there must be an investigation, and, almost universally, there must be a final reveal. Yet this structure works. Something in our brain responds to it; just like how we are geneticall…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new nonfiction crime books. * Dirty Gold: The Rise and Fall of an International Smuggling Ring By Jay Weaver, Nicholas Nehamas, Jim Wyss, and Kyra Gurney (PublicAffairs) Dirty Gold is an eye-opening, compulsively readable investigation into the world of illegally-mined gold and the business networks that prop that system up. From a team of Miami Herald reporters who first exposed the South Florida businessmen trafficking in gold taken out of illicit Peruvian operations, this book will change the way you look at the precious metal, which fuels an underworld trade more lucrative than cocaine, with devastating humanitarian c…
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I’ve always been impressed with the level to which authors, readers, and editors support each other in the crime fiction community, but the folks at #pitchwars go above and beyond. I interviewed some of the wonderful mentors and mentees of Pitch Wars to find out how their community works to help new authors break into the industry. We talked about gatekeeping, getting started, and how to gracefully take an edit, among other things. Thanks to Kellye Garrett (Hollywood Ending), Layne Fargo (They Never Learn), Mia P. Manansala (Arsenic and Adobo), Mary Keliikoa (Denied), and Dianne Freeman (A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Murder) for answering all my questions about this fant…
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I escaped Romania in the middle of the night, by bike, on February 2, 1965. It was the moment when the country was locked in a communist prison. I was seventeen years old then. Now, twenty- four years later, in the diplomatic and political frost of 1989, with the beginning of freedom, I’m returning. As I walk through customs at Bucharest’s Otopeni airport with my American pass‐ port held tightly in my hand, I feel a strange sensation: memory is pulling me back to a lost time. I see my seventeen-year-old self in front of me, leading me into the labyrinth of youth. She takes my hand and warns me of pitfalls while I enter a world I may have forgotten. She’s cute, smiling, s…
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As a historian of American crime, I spend an unhealthy amount of time poring over old newspapers—in archives, on microfilm, and, increasingly, online. While researching a book on Belle Gunness—the infamous “Lady Bluebeard” who slaughtered an indeterminate number of victims at her Indiana “murder farm” in the early twentieth century—I had occasion to consult the July 7, 1902, issue of the Fort Wayne Daily News. Along with stories on a strike by twelve hundred railroad freight workers, a visit to the United States by the Crown Prince of Siam, a local man who survived a shark attack while swimming off a pier in Atlantic City, and an elderly “negress” who inherited four hund…
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The Canadian Paradox Some places in the world are what they call “low-trust societies.” The political institutions are fragile and corrupt, business practices are dodgy, debts are rarely repaid, and people, rightly, fear being ripped off on any transaction. In the “high-trust societies,” conversely, businesses are honest, laws are fair and consistently enforced, and the majority of people can go about their day in the knowledge that the overall level of integrity in economic life is very high. With that in mind, given what we know about the following two countries, why is it that the Canadian financial sector is so fraud-ridden that Joe Queenan, writing in Forbes magazin…
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Fadeout, originally published in 1970, introduced Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator based in Los Angeles, in the first in a series of twelve crime novels the Los Angeles Times would hail as “groundbreaking” in the 2004 obituary of its author, Joseph Hansen. Why groundbreaking? They were beautifully written and dexterously plotted, but that wasn’t the reason. Brandstetter himself, rich, white and blessed with movie star good looks—a far cry from his hard luck noir predecessors like Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer—doesn’t seem, at first glance, to be much of a groundbreaker. But the adjective is justified because Brandstetter is by nature what Marlowe and Archer w…
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It all started when a close friend who grew up near me in the forests of northern Wisconsin shared how she had received a phone call out of the blue that led to the discovery that her late father had led a secret life: fathering at least three illegitimate children with three different women. Her father had been very wealthy and my friend was one of his three heirs. She and her siblings had one question: Did this mean those illegitimate children were also his heirs? At her request, I called an estate lawyer who said that if they had not been specifically excluded by name in her father’s will that the answer was “yes.” My friend was upset with this news as were her sibli…
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Earlier this month, we were excited to learn that Sisters in Crime has launched a new program to support emerging LGBTQIA+ authors! Submissions are now open for the inaugural Pride Award for Emerging LGBTQIA+ Crime Writers, which will provide a $2,000 grant to an emerging crime fiction writer at the beginning of their career who identifies as LGBTQIA+. There is no cost to submit. This is the first year for the Pride Award, which has been created as the legacy project from past Sisters in Crime president Sherry Harris. We caught up with this year’s judges, John Copenhaver, Cheryl Head, and Kristen Lepionka, to find out more about the new program, and to discuss the state…
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Even though literature had, for centuries, brimmed with clever problem-solvers, from tricksters to reformed thieves to wise men to police prefects, Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” still awed the literary world when it appeared in 1841. A gruesome double-murder has taken place in a home along the Rue Morgue (a fictional street in Paris). Several witnesses heard several voices, but no one can agree on what language one of the speakers may have been using. Several clues linger about, each more baffling than the next. The police are stumped. But C. Auguste Dupin, a chevalier and rare book aficionado, solves the mystery at home after reading…
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Dr. Laura Hobson: “This is Oxford.” Detective Inspector Robbie Lewis: “Don’t I bloody know it.” From “The Quality of Mercy,” Lewis, Season 3, Episode 2 ____________________________ Ian Pearce was the Assistant Location Manager for the ITV mystery series, Lewis, for eighteen episodes, from 2012 to 2015 and for the pilot of Foyle’s War. Pearce has had a long career as a Location Manager for many British films and TV series. Currently he is the Managing Director for the film company Supply 2 Location in Scotland. Lewis was an off-shoot of the original Inspector Morse TV series, based on the novels of Colin Dexter. Lewis ran from 2006 until 2015 and followed the police i…
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“Mr. Rai.” Constable Neri at my elbow, her gaze incisive in a softly rounded face, and her skin a midbrown shade made dull by the lack of sunlight. “Would you like me to drive you home?” “That’s my father,” I said. “Call me Aarav.” Not Ari. Never that. It’s what my mother called me, and I couldn’t bear to hear it from any other lips. The last girlfriend who’d tried had been so frightened by my reaction that she’d packed up and left the same day. “You looked like you wanted to strangle me,” she’d said on the phone the next day. “That much rage, your face all twisted up until I didn’t know you anymore . . .” Her voice had broken. “Aarav, you need to see a shrink or you’ll…
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Patricia Highsmith first met Kathryn Hamill Cohen at a party hosted by Rosalind Constable in New York. Kathryn, an ex-Ziegfeld girl, was twenty-four, beautiful and from a moneyed family. Her husband, Dennis, founded the Cresset Press (later an imprint of Bantam Books) which would eventually publish UK editions of Strangers on a Train, The Blunderer and The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Kathryn had an impressive professional life of her own. Following her early years as an actress, she read medicine at Newnham College, Cambridge, and, before being employed as a hospital physician, she worked as a personal assistant to Aneurin Bevan, the British Minister of Health who was instru…
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These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. —Ernie Pyle, war correspondent Between the abduction and cannibal-mutilation murder of Grace Budd by Albert Fish in 1928 and the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, “the Black Dahlia,” in 1947, a generation of future “epidemic era” serial killers was born, including Juan Corona (1934), Angelo Buono (1934), Charles Manson(1934), Joseph Kallinger (1935), Henry Lee Lucas (1936), Carroll Edward Cole (1938), Jerry Brudos (1939), Dean Corll (1939), Patrick Kearney (1939), Robert Hansen (1939), Lawrence Bittaker (1940), John Wayne Gacy (1942), Rodney Alcala (1943), Gary Heidnik (1943), Arthur Shawcross (194…
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In the spring of 2019, long before the global pandemic hijacked the news, the FBI’s Operation Varsity Blues (OVB) college admissions scandal dominated the headlines for months. Jaws dropped around the world as rich and famous parents were indicted for faking sports resumes, cheating on standardized tests, and paying huge sums in bogus philanthropic contributions to guarantee golden admission tickets for their offspring. The incessant news coverage continued with each plea deal struck and prison sentence meted out. A few years before OVB made headlines, we’d begun exploring the parental college admissions battleground—the crown jewel of competitive parenting. We’d observe…
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