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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I have always loved period pieces. When I set out to write Dead Dead Girls, I knew it was because I wanted to challenge myself and write something about which I was very passionate. The idea of time travel has always appealed to me, and the best way I could do that was by reading period pieces. The thing about period pieces is that the worldbuilding, or as I like to call it, the vibes, has got to be impeccable, or I’m not going to believe it. I immersed myself in the 1920s, the clothes, shoes, and dance moves, to make Louise’s world real. I’m a very finicky and detailed reader, but I like my vibes. While doing my research for Dead Dead Girls, I spent a lot of time readi…
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Ask readers of crime fiction whether they have heard of John Sanford, and the writer most likely to come to mind is John Sandford, the author of the Prey series of detective novels—as they commit the common mistake of overlooking the “d” hidden in the middle of the name. But long before John Camp chose Sandford as his pen name, there was John Sanford—author of 24 books, including two hard-boiled 1930’s masterworks that combine gut-wrenching plots with a literary flair that drew favorable comparisons with William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and James M. Cain. Sanford, who died in 2003, is best known as a writer of non-fiction—including creative interpretations of American…
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The season is changing! As I write this, it’s eighty-four degrees and sunny outside. I can hear an ice cream truck out my open window, and also a cop shouting over the cruiser speaker at that ice cream truck, because I guess it’s illegally parked. My eyes are itchy from the pollen and my hair is voluminous from the humidity. On my block, the smells of grilled hot dogs wafting from the balcony barbecues above mingle with the smells of hot dog urine from the sidewalk below. This morning, I saw a pigeon fight with a seagull over a Popsicle wrapper. Rejoice, all, for it is summer in the city. I love—and I mean really love—summer in New York, the terrible place where I was bo…
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In 1917, as World War I raged on, two officers named Harry Jones and Cedric Hill were being held captive in a remote POW camp in Turkey. There, Jones received a postcard from his aunt. She suggested he might pass the time practicing some form of spiritualism. She included precise instructions on constructing a Ouija board. Jones and Hill would soon be holding seances for the camp’s prisoners, a ritual that drew attention from the guards. Using coded information from home and their keen sense of human psychology, the two officers went on to cast a spell over their captors, a spell that would one day result in a daring escape. Here, we read about their first experiments man…
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I started writing crime novels back in the dark ages—the early eighties. I had always wanted to be a writer, but somehow other things had gotten in the way of my doing that—two years of teaching high school English, five years of being a school librarian on an Indian reservation, and ten years of selling life insurance, not to mention the births of my two children. In 1982, at age 38 and as a divorced single mother, I finally gave myself permission to start living that dream. I hadn’t been allowed in the Creative Writing program at the University of Arizona in 1964 on account of my being a girl. As a consequence, my first effort at fiction writing turned out to be a 1,40…
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I have a confession to make. In 2020, my debut novel, Little White Lies, was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association “New Blood” Dagger Award. I was delighted, of course, BUT… I never meant to write a “crime” novel. I’m not a “crime writer”. I hardly even read any crime. If I do, twenty-four hours after finishing, I often can’t remember “whodunit”. What stays with me instead are the characters. Their relationships. The atmosphere. Not the plot. So, gate-crashing about on the fringes of the genre, what am I? My marketing team would probably tell you that I’m a psychological thriller / psychological suspense author. And I’m quite happy with that categorization. I…
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Yarn lovers love yarns. After all, storytellers are said to “spin a yarn,” right? Knitting and reading simply go together. I’ve been knitting for as long as I’ve been writing (and reading). Every yarn lover that I know—be it knitter or crocheter—is also a book lover. And if you walk into any bookstore or book club and ask who knits, you’ll see a lot of raised hands (if they don’t already have hooks or needles in them). So why is that? To me, the process of creating a good story is much the same as knitting. You take one thing—a straight piece of yarn in this case—and transform it into another one stitch at a time. Patterns emerge. Transitions take place. Something enti…
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It was painstaking work, creating that fort out of a large thicket at the bottom of the hill. The opening was small and cut through the side so it couldn’t be spotted by anyone who might wander by. A tall cinder-block wall, about ten feet in height, stood a few feet in front and stretched across part of the bottom of the hill and down the road toward the Corniche. It surrounded an old, abandoned peppermint-stick lighthouse. The wall made for good cover and didn’t restrict our view to the other side of the hill and down the same road to our apartment building, which was a couple of blocks up from the Corniche, and the Mediterranean Sea. The fort became our hideaway. We na…
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A plague on these women who, lengthily wooed, Are not to be won until one’s out of the mood. And who then discerning one’s temperateness, Accuse one of cooling because they said yes! —”Curse in the Old Manner” (Dashiell Hammett poem published in The Bookman in September 1927) “You’re going to behave. I don’t want a lot of monkey-business out of you.” She laughed suddenly, asking: “Will you beat me if I’m bad?” —Exchange between the Continental Op and Gabrielle Leggett in Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Dain Curse (1929) Tell me something, Nick. Tell me the truth: when you were wrestling with Mimi, didn’t you have an erection? —Nora Charles to her husband Nick in The…
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As I type this, a new film has been released which offers a backstory into the motivations of the Disney villainess Cruella de Vil, a character who needs no introduction (or even, some might say, explanation) but has been given one anyway. I haven’t seen this new film, Cruella, which stars Emma Stone and sets itself up as a pseudo-prequel to Disney’s live-action 101 Dalmatians film from 1996, which starred Glenn Close as the diabolical, piebald, puppy-stealing termagant. I probably won’t see the new film (simply because I’m not very interested in Disney’s live-action remakes and such), but I’m not writing this to knock it. All I can say about it is that I’ve noticed that,…
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Con men flourish in two diametrically opposite times—when the people have nothing and are desperate for anything that will raise them out of poverty; and when there is boundless plenty for the vast majority, when countries are newly awash with easy money, and there are countless newly rich men and women who can just as easily be separated from their money as they acquired it. My book How To Kidnap The Rich is set in India, a country which is in both of these moments at once. For hundreds of millions of its very poorest, very lowest caste people, many former agricultural workers newly urbanised, every day can be a pitfall in being separated from their hard earned pittance…
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“You mean you, the translator, don’t read the novel all the way to the end before you start translating?” My new friend, who’s a Swedish novelist, couldn’t hide his surprise as we sat chatting during our first encounter in Oslo, Norway. I’d just told him that I’d been astounded and thrilled by the plot turn as I put the last pages and paragraphs of his novel into English. You see, the excitement of an investigation, a chase, an unexpected development, or a revelation is even more intense when you’re embracing the foreign-language text line by line and seeking to render it precisely and vividly into your own native language. I’ve been a mystery and puzzle addict since m…
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Though the idea for my second novel came to me while I was earning my MFA in creative writing, it didn’t start in a writing workshop. At Washington University in St. Louis, we filled our schedules with the mandatory workshops, but had two other courses that were entirely our own. Some of my peers chose independent study or specialized workshops to incubate their baby novels; at the time, I had no novel, couldn’t imagine stringing together more than fifteen pages. An English major, I retreated into the familiarity of humanities courses with provocative names and required readings so dense that they brought me to weekend panic attacks. In my second year, a seminar called H…
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No one who goes on a wellness retreat thinks they are joining a cult, but they often share very similar traits. There can be a set routine involving early rising, meditation, exercise and enforced silence. The leader is often charismatic, passionate, opinionated and persuasive whilst the followers are fervent, desperate and vulnerable. They’re lured in with the promise of enlightenment, peace and healing; they buy into the jargon, the promises and the exoteric practices. There are many differences of course, including the fact that no one expects to die on a wellness retreat. But it has happened and, in a largely unregulated industry, it could well happen again. My backg…
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Having decided I wanted to write about a young female spy in London on the brink of World War Two, I knew I’d be taking a deep dive into research for the project. This ‘work’ (though, happily, it never really felt like that) took me to London, Oxford and other sites in the UK, visiting archives, museums, houses, pubs and parks. As I immersed myself in these places, conjuring character, events and the specific historical era, I read some influential novels to lend flavour to my journey and add inspiration to the writing process. William Boyd’s Restless This novel inspired me to really plumb the depths of the psyche of a female spy. Boyd’s enigmatic Eva is a Russian rec…
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Delving into any aspect of the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy is an ambitious and even perilous endeavor. So much has been said and studied: thousands of pages of scientific evidence, hundreds of witness accounts including some that have evolved over fifty-plus years, numerous government investigations and literally thousands of books. It has long been difficult for so many to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, who had previously defected to Russia, killed Kennedy acting alone and that less than two days later, Jack Ruby, with his loose ties to the Dallas underworld, also acting alone, so easily killed Oswald. Dozens of conspiracy theories about who…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Chris Offutt, Killing Hills (Grove) Offutt is overdue for a new breakout novel, and The Killing Hills may just be it, part southern gothic, part searching, seething portrait of loss and betrayal, and part an entertaining offshoot of the world of Justified. It’s set in the Kentucky hills, and when a military CID is enlisted by his sister, the town’s new sheriff, to help out with a shadowy homicide investigation, all hell breaks loose. A story full of feuds, rivalries, and crimes hiding in plain sight, The Killing Hills is as poignant and powerful …
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The forensic anthropologist’s job is to try to read the bones of our skeleton as if they were a record, moving a professional stylus across them in search of the short, recognizable segments of body-based memory that form part of the song of a life, coaxing out fragments of the tune laid down there long ago. Usually this will be a life that has ended. We are interested in how it was lived and the person who lived it. We want to find the experiences recorded in the bones that will help to tell its story, and perhaps give the body back its name. Within our discipline of forensic anthropology—the study of the human, or the remains of the human, for medico-legal purposes— th…
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It’s Pearl’s first time. She sits in the cabinet as usual, behind its black damask curtain, but already she feels like someone else. Tonight she hasn’t got the floor-length veil over her face and there aren’t any ashes smeared on her skin. She isn’t playing a spirit guide now: she’s the Main Event. She worries about how it will feel when the ghosts take possession of her. Myrtle used to screw up her face and roll her eyes – but that was all for show. Myrtle freely admits it. ‘I’m a Sensitive,’ she told Pearl. ‘I hear the voices. But that ain’t enough for ladies and gents. They want a thrill. Tables rocking. Materialisation.’ The spirits have since whispered to Myrtle …
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One of my favorite things in the entire world is to lie in bed with the lights out, just the faint glow of my e-reader lighting up the edge of my pillow as I flip the virtual pages of a thriller that, by the end, leaves me gasping. I award bonus points if it keeps me up past my bedtime. That part doesn’t feel too great in the morning, when I’m fumbling to make that first cup of strong tea, but the rush is worth it. The books that keep me up all night must have characters who, against their better instincts, must learn to be truly and deeply brave, especially when it comes to family. It’s even better if it would be easier not to change. One of my most recent favorite read…
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The scene had the air of a ritual murder. Her body was dressed in its best clothes, and paraded around for spectators to mock. He declared himself finished with her. He beheaded her in the garden, while the party watched. He broke a bottle of red wine, splashed it across her face. Then he stumbled, drunken, away, declaring later that he had no regrets. He had been “cured completely” of his “passion.” He spoke of his her as scornfully as he had once described her with tenderness and interest. That “she” was a life-size doll, and “he” a living man, and a well-known Expressionist artist, is only part of the strangeness of this Pygmalion story. * Alma Mahler in 1910. …
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An isolated chateau, a remote health spa, an off-grid hunting lodge or private island. In a destination thriller, no-one can hear you scream—except, of course, the others who happen to be trapped there too. It’s a classic crime format reworked for the age of air miles: the current vogue in fiction for far-flung “luxe-spense” turns the trip of a lifetime into a gilded locked room. Part-Christie, part Conde Nast Traveller and a firm favorite among readers even before the pandemic put a stop to our wanderlust, destination thrillers have offered plenty of much-needed escapism over the past year too. The best ones are perfectly pitched at the point where aspiration and Schad…
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Throughout most of our evolution, from when life began, death and the possibility of an afterlife weren’t conceptions on the table for contemplation. We simply didn’t have the capacity. Death was simply the end of one’s existence. Anthropological evidence indicates that humans began to have religious beliefs and to conceive of life and death relatively recently—between forty-five thousand and two hundred thousand years ago. These conceptualizations were essential to major shifts occurring in cognition and behavior that marked an era in human development known as the “great leap forward.” These shifts, rooted in the capability for complex, abstract thought and language, ha…
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“You’re crushing my balls!” Jared whispered hoarsely into my ear as he clung to my back, my right arm between his legs, my left hand gripping his right arm, his torso draped across my neck in the classic fireman’s carry. I sensed he was gritting his teeth while trying not to let anyone else overhear. Jared was a 200-pound Navy SEAL not wanting to advertise his discomfort at having his gonads flattened against the shoulder of a female, fifty pounds lighter, who was struggling to hang onto him. “Shut the fuck up! What do you think you’re doing to me?” I spat. I was hot, I was sweaty, and I wanted to get him off my back. But I was determined to make it down the field towa…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Christine Mangan, Palace of the Drowned (Ecco) “Voluptuously atmospheric and surefooted at every turn, Palace of the Drowned more than delivers on the promise of Mangan’s debut, and firmly establishes her as a writer of consequence.” – Paula McLain Dolores Hitchens, The Cat Saw Murder (American Mystery Classics) “Hitchens’s use of foreshadowing elevates this above similar whodunits. That the observant Rachel is an appealing Jessica Fletcher antecedent makes the prospect of her further exploits in the American Mystery Classics series welcome.” Publishers Weekly Sujata Ma…
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