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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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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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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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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A great challenge of Hawaiian detective fiction is to depict Hawai`i authentically. It takes more than ukuleles and flower leis to accomplish this. James Fallows once observed in the Atlantic that through mysteries and thrillers imbued with authenticity we can learn about exotic and distant locales, or distant times. The Soho Crime series, featuring the world’s most remote places, testifies to the first proposition, and (say) Alan Furst epitomizes the second, transporting us to chilly garrets the Gestapo may burst into at any moment. But without such authenticity, even best-selling murder mysteries become what Graham Greene called mere “entertainments.” For most Am…
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During this last period of lockdown and isolation, we’ve all searched for ways of escape. I found mine by rereading two of my favorite authors, PG Wodehouse and Jerome K Jerome. I first discovered Wodehouse and Jerome one Saturday afternoon when I was twelve or thirteen, an impressionable age, browsing through the stacks of my local library. To say the experience was an epiphany would be an understatement. No one I knew talked like that. I never knew such a world existed. (It doesn’t, but more about that later.) I’d never read anything so funny in my life. I still haven’t. So what makes British humor so funny? Is it different than American humor? British humor has a…
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Magic is mysterious, and mystery is magical: we are enthralled by that which we don’t (yet) know, and many of us are under the spell of a near-visceral compulsion to learn the truth—“solve” the mystery. It’s a natural instinct, to wish to know. Problems exist to be solved but mystery is ever elusive. Even if we know who has committed the crime, we need to know how; we need to know why. Beyond that, we crave to know meaning. In magic, the ingenious magician is one who not only knows how to perform magic but knows how to deflect his viewers’ avid attention from the workings of magic itself, which are (of course) illusory—the magician is the “illusionist.” Of magic it is co…
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“You were right, Nalam,” Ralph Daniels said as soon as Joshua Nalam picked up his call. “Diane Connors did show up on Eve Duncan’s doorstep today. I was staking out the cottage when I caught sight of Connors and another woman walking into the place. I wasn’t sure what you’d want me to do so I just maintained surveillance. She stayed and talked to Duncan for an hour or so and then left. That’s what you wanted me to do, right?” Joshua Nalam swore beneath his breath. “No, you idiot. I also want to know what they were talking about. You were there for a full day and didn’t bug the cottage?” “I’m not an idiot,” Daniels said with deadly softness. “You might be able to talk to…
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Two officers landed on my twin brother, cuffed him, and strong-armed him down the hallway during a Christmas visit at our mother’s condominium in Willmar, Minnesota. It took six attendants in the emergency room to wrestle him onto a gurney. It’s still hard for me to believe we hadn’t acknowledged the signs before—his frantic juggling of a dozen plastic bags, stuffed with his clothing, while home on a military leave; his incoherent tirade at a friend who greeted him as they departed from a service in our church. But it was only then, in 1986, the year Marvin and I turned forty-five, that he was diagnosed as having severe bipolar disorder. While Marvin’s manic rage landed …
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A few months ago, I jokingly wondered whether Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011), a movie I was in the midst of celebrating as the greatest spy film ever made, hadn’t actually cut the legs out on a few careers, based on a quick glance at the IMDb pages of some of the top people involved in the production, notably director Tomas Alfredson, who did a brilliant job with the complex le Carré material but somehow wasn’t given another opportunity at the helm of a film until 2017. (And when they did give him something to do, it was The Snowman, of all things.) In that same article I also implored—implored might not be a strong enough word, it was more of a cosmic plea—that some…
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Julius and Ethel Rosenberg remain the only Americans ever put to death in peacetime for conspiracy to commit espionage, the only two American civilians executed for espionage-related crimes committed during the Cold War that roughly lasted from 1946 to 1991, and Ethel is the only American woman killed for a crime other than murder. Today there is widespread recognition that Julius did pass military information to the Soviet Union, yet skepticism that the couple had, according to the phrase used at the time, stolen “the secrets” of the atomic bomb. Much was known about the basic physics involved in making a bomb; the main difficulty was devising practical weapons and the a…
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Somewhere in a recondite basement poorly lit by one dim, flickering bulb there is a sub rosa committee of crime readers crowding around an investigation board featuring a map of the world full-up with pushpins and other markers. Next to each indicator is a corresponding profile which all the readers know by heart. For instance, in South Florida there’s a fedora-wearing P.I. in a sweat-stained floral shirt investigating a body found in the Glades. In the Pacific Northwest a shadowy killer stands at the edge of a tree line, his figure blurred by the sheets of rain. And on the bustling streets of London a deductive detective knows the game is afoot. But in the thick pine for…
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We all love a good villain. From Tom Ripley to Hannibal Lecter, it’s the bad guys who make us sit up and pay attention when the movie scene changes or we dare to turn the page. In cinema, the cheapest scares come from the sudden jump cut, the full-face close up, a blast of discordant violins. There is no real equivalent in the novel, and none of those techniques produce what a truly effective literary villain can: that insidious creep of fear you get while reading, the dread that crawls up your spine, and often even lingers long after the cover is closed. But what is it about them that fascinates us so much? Let me rephrase that: how does the author fascinate us? Why do w…
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When discussing the lifestyle of a radio DJ, most people probably would fall back on the television sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati as the authoritative source of their knowledge. The comedic tales of Dr. Johnny Fever, Venus Flytrap, and the rest of the gang at WKRP painted a picture of broadcasting as being a career filled with raucous fun and excitement. It was certainly an influence in my decision to take a job as part-time DJ at a small station in southern New Jersey in 1990. To my surprise, that first radio job was far from being the lively gig that I was anticipating. In fact, working the Saturday overnight shift was about as boring as reading a poetry book written by a…
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Lists are useful and terrifying things. I have a “To Do” list for my day job that is approaching 350 items since we shifted to a remote, quarantined office existence (don’t worry, I’ve checked off almost all of them over time). There are, however, lists generated by other people that sucker me in and drive me mad. I am referring to the “Best of” lists, particularly when they come to books or movies. I should know better. These lists are compiled by people who devote their lives to these fields, whereas I, lucky enough to have a full-time day job to subsidize the side-gig/addiction of being a writer, find myself with not enough hours in the not enough days to keep up with…
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Crime and the City has been to Morocco before. Then we talked mostly about the crime writing coming out of, or set round about, the capital Rabat and the cities of Marrakech, Fez and Casablanca. We only briefly mentioned Tangier. But Tangier is a very special place, both within Morocco and also internationally. It sits in a key location—on the Maghreb coast of North Africa, at the western end of the Straits of Gibraltar, facing Spain and just about where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic. This unique location gave Tangier its unique history. From 1923 to the mid-1950s Tangier was an international city, controlled by foreign colonial powers, a port gateway between Europ…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Wade, River Sing Out (Blackstone) ”Wade, whose striking debut, All Things Left Wild (2020), traveled back a century in Texas history, uses an unlikely friendship to explore an equally wild present-day landscape…A haunting fable of an impossible relationship fueled by elemental need and despair.” – Kirkus Reviews Eric Redman, Bones of Hilo (Crooked Lane Books) “[Redman’s] local color goes far beyond touristy tidbits…[the] backstory [is] fascinating and timely.” – Kirkus Reviews Laurie R. King, Castle Shade (Bantam) “A lively adventure in the very best of intell…
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