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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The American comic book is inseparable from foreign policy, the great twentieth-century battles between capitalism and totalitarianism, and the political goals of the world’s preeminent military and cultural power. The history of the American comic book is a story of visual culture, commerce, race, and policy. These four fields are analogous to the four colors used to print comic books: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. They lie atop one another, smearing, blending, and bleeding to create a complete image. To separate them is to disassemble a coherent whole and to shatter a picture that in its entirety shows us how culture and diplomacy were entangled during the mid-twent…
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In 1952 a 29-year old Somalian man was hanged at Her Majesty’s Prison Cardiff in Wales by Britain’s best known public executioner Albert Pierrepoint. After a long drawn-out detention, a highly questionable police investigation, and a speedy trial at the Glamorgan Assizes in Swansea, Mahmood Mattan had been found guilty of murdering shopkeeper Lily Volpert in the then notorious Tiger Bay area of the Welsh capital. Despite arguments from his lawyers Mattan was refused leave to appeal by the Home Secretary. Forty-six years after Mattan’s execution, and 34 years after the death penalty was finally due to increasing public outcries and distaste, the Court of Appeal (the highe…
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I have discovered the secret to making a great roundtable: Alex Segura. If Alex is involved, or I get interested in a book by someone Alex has introduced me to, it’s a breeze to fill our imaginary table. This time I wanted to focus on the positives and negatives LGBTQ+ writers face. I’ve been thinking about it ever since we did the sex roundtable: if we rarely see any vanilla sex, then all of the other flavors are probably not being served either. Anyway, this came about because of PJ Vernon’s excellent new thriller, Bath Haus, and his enthusiastic participation at the aforementioned sex roundtable where he was suggested to me by…Alex Segura! The rest of our distinguish…
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– by Laura Lippman, author of Dream Girl, coming Tuesday, June 22 My mother the (retired) librarian read my latest book while visiting me over Memorial Day weekend. We are WASP-y people—well, she’s 100 percent WASP, I’m 75 percent—so I did not expect effusive praise and I was not disappointed. She said that Dream Girl kept her attention and she would be curious to see what reviewers said. “It’s so different from your other books,” she added. I will unpack a lot of this at my next therapy session. (For the record, the book has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal, the last of which called it a “masterpiece.’) But the comment that…
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I won’t say noir. And not because I can’t bear any over pronounced French since we lost Alex Trebeck. And not because the villains of my adolescence were always drenched in its Drakkar. But because noir has rules, the same way irony does, and I really don’t know what they are. There are factions who squabble over including hard-boiled detectives or excluding any hint of redemption, and those are arguments I want no part of. I’m not a purist, in any sense of the word. For me it’s a voice and some dark stuff happening, something withheld, maybe a curl of smoke in there somewhere. So I won’t say noir. And I can’t call this list Not Quite Noir, as google just told me that’s …
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Many of the greatest stories about fathers and children are, at heart, crime stories. Think Laius and Oedipus, or Oedipus and Antigone, think Abraham and Isaac, Hamlet and his Ghost, Fyodor Pavlovich and the sons Karamazov, Pap and Huck Finn. These relationships are built as much around murder, madness, betrayal, revenge and attrition as they are genetics and lineage, to say nothing of love. Crime lit is no less interested in the darker aspects of parenthood, although it does seem that mothers are often more central to these types of stories. Still, there are plenty of the bad dads to be found in the mystery and suspense section of the bookstore, as well as good ones tha…
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New Jersey’s most dangerous women can be found in a four traffic-light town not reachable by public transportation. From Newark, take Interstate 78 to Clinton, turn left at the traffic light. Across from the Walmart Plaza lies the entrance to the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility. EMCF is a two-hour trip by car from Manhattan, but for those visitors without vehicles there’s a prison bus that leaves from Midtown on Friday evening and arrives eight hours later. All must prepare to be searched and to stow their possessions in a locker before visiting an inmate. No water, no sodas, nothing but your flesh covered appropriately, i.e., no halter tops or bustiers. Seen from th…
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In my last two posts in this series, I have joked that living in New York City during the summer makes me want to go somewhere else (take a road trip or go to the beach). But actually, no, living in New York City during the summer also just makes me want to stay here, because I love summer in New York City. I do. What’s not to love? I love almost getting hit by a barreling ice cream truck every time I cross the street. I love that I can’t take a stroll down to the river in the evenings without six old Italian men blowing cigar smoke in my face. I love wondering “leaf or cockroach?” every time I step on something crackly in the dark. You would love it all, too, if you, lik…
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Whether you’re packing a locked-room mystery for that long-delayed vacation, seeking the perfect thriller to keep you up at night, or looking for a noir so bleak and beautiful you’ll be weeping under your sunglasses, 2021 has plenty of books to choose from. Notable trends this year include a revitalization of rural noir, the continued revival of intricate espionage fiction, and increasingly blurred boundaries between the psychological thriller and the social justice thriller. In short, we’ve got a ton of great books to celebrate this year, even though it’s only halfway through. So here are our favorites, so far, in 2021. Kathy Wang, Impostor Syndrome (Custom House) W…
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When I first began working on what is now my debut novel, Shutter, I set out to write the obsessive novel that I was always searching for in a bookstore. I wanted to read about a young woman who was going through a similar turmoil to my own—which, at twenty-four, was navigating life outside of my usual definitions of daughter, student, employee. I wanted to read about someone who was distinctly untethered, as I was. For three years, my safe harbor, the only thing that felt truly mine, was this novel, this protagonist, Betty Roux, whom I believed needed my help. Recently I heard Betty described as a classic millennial. At first, I was taken aback. This definition felt sim…
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I have a 17-year-old son, and over the past year, I have been teaching him to drive. He’s grown up in a different generation than me, one with Ubers and Lyfts. A lot of options on how to get around. And in my day job in advertising, I often hear that many twenty-somethings at the agency don’t even own cars… a move that suddenly seemed brilliant in 2020 amid the pandemic. And so, my son asked me one day when he was first learning… “why do I need a car anyway?” My answer was simple. Movement equals freedom. Freedom exposes you to new choices and experiences. And those experiences shape your identity. With a car, you can go places you’ve never gone—and meet people that you…
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“Lion ain’t cross chasin a deer.” Rye took a long, covetous draw on his cigarette, then flicked the ash down near his boots. “Thing about him—ain’t bloodthirsty, ain’t blood-guilty. That’s a rare circumstance. All the same to him. He don’t think a whole lot of himself, see, but he thinks even less of everybody else.” “I’ve heard it told he’s a twin,” said Fozzy. “Other one March by name, owin to bein mild and quick-passin, while August is mean and takes his time.” Rye chuckled. “I heard that one myself,” he said. “I heard that one and a whole lot of others.” Next morning, under a sky blushed with a mustard hue, Gussie jibed his route northward, wanting more distance be…
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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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