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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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Chris Power, A Lonely Man (FSG) “Chris Power’s elegant first novel is a slyly ensnaring literary thriller written in immaculate prose … an almost self-effacing commitment to unadorned clarity … Power’s restraint pays off, making for a subtly immersive read, his sentences rippling like clear water even as the story’s murkier undertow pulls you out to sea. He doesn’t skimp on themes either, raising interesting questions about whether stories draw their power from reality or imagination, who (if anyone) owns them, and what privileges narrative control confers on the teller. Contemporary socio…
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Chapter 4 tells of aperitifs, team play and whining, lotus leaves and utter fools, consistency and appreciation, Latin lovers and mommy’s boys. Poldi assembles a jigsaw puzzle and receives an answer she doesn’t like. Montana delivers an impassioned speech, Poldi’s nephew maps out a route to happiness, and Poldi herself needs a drink. After a disastrous evening she lays her cards on the table and Montana turns pale. “No!” “Yes.” “No!” “Yes, I tell you.” “Well, I’ll be buggered!” I said. Visibly gratified by my tipsy astonishment, Poldi grinned at me. My head was spinning. Lethal graffiti, Indian sitar players, laced ayurvedic smoothies, exorcisms, murder, my aunt in…
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The entire cast of Suddenly, last Summer was tense and overwrought even before cameras started rolling on the film’s final, pivotal, excruciating scene. The accounts of friction between the film’s four biggest power players—Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Katherine Hepburn, and director Joseph L. Mankewicz—were so rampant in Hollywood that, rather than deny them, they cooked up a scheme to make fun of the gossip and therefore make it seem ridiculous. They had the four main players of the production pose for a photo in which they mocked the rumors. In the foreground of the picture, Katharine Hepburn, with a fiendish grin, looks as if she is about to smack Elizabeth, w…
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When The Bishop’s Wife, the story of Mormon bishop’s wife Linda Wallheim investigating a woman’s disappearance in her own ward, came out, I went to a few Mormon women’s book clubs in Utah. One of those readers asked me, “Why couldn’t you have had the bad guy be a Mormon?” I was taken aback, then laughed a little, sure she wasn’t serious. But she was. “I wanted the bad guy to be a non-Mormon,” she said. And I asked, confused, “do you think Mormons are never the bad guys? Don’t you watch the news?” But she thought that I, as a Mormon, should feel an obligation to write positive depictions of Mormons, in part because that is what a lot of fiction published by local Mormon pr…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new nonfiction crime books. * Daniel Levin, Proof of Life: Twenty Days on the Hunt for a Missing Person in the Middle East (Algonquin) Levin, a lawyer whose career has taken him into war zone mediation, chronicles the harrowing search for a missing person in the Middle East. The story begins with a dinner in Paris, during which he’s told of a young man who has disappeared in Syria. From there, Levin goes on a dark odyssey through an underworld of fixers, informants, people who want to help and those who want to take advantage, or worse. A portrait of a contemporary morass in the Middle East emerges, as Levin thoughtfully …
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The First Day of Spring tells the story of eight-year-old Chrissie. Chrissie’s life is a patchwork of handstands against walls, sweets stolen from the corner shop, and murder: she has just strangled a younger child. The community panics, its residents gossip, and Chrissie is alight with a fizzy, electric buzz. The crime grants her a feeling of strength and power that is hard to come by at home, where food is scarce and attention scarcer. We next meet Chrissie fifteen years later, as Julia. She has been given a new identity, but struggles to keep the tendrils of her past from coiling into her present—and is horrified when they start to threaten her own young daughter. I c…
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Summer is here! It’s the perfect time for travel, food, fun, and reading. Luckily, with cozy mysteries, we get all of the above, and we don’t have to leave home for it. The fifth installment of my Deputy Donut Mystery series, Beyond a Reasonable Donut, features a Friday the 13th celebration, the Baker’s Dozen Festival. Attendees can tempt good and bad luck, laugh at pranks and jokes, and receive thirteen goodies when they pay for a dozen. Emily Westhill from Deputy Donut, a café in downtown Fallingbrook, Wisconsin, and her assistant Nina are excited to fry and serve “corny” fritters at the festival. For those craving sweets, the fritters can be dipped in sugar. Naturally…
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Fill up your beach bag with Kristen and Layne’s summer reading recommendations, featuring shotgun-toting housewives, stabby backpackers, sexy ballerinas, and so much more. All books for sale at the official Unlikeable Female Characters Bookshop (or an indie bookstore near you!) A few summer reading recommendations based on your mood: Dinner & a show: Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala / The Turnout by Megan Abbott A getaway (with murder): We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz / Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Eating the rich: The Hunting Wives by May Cobb / The Photographer by Mary Dixie Carter Being gay & doing crimes: Tro…
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The tape recorders in room WT-1 were activated by an ingenious system of electronic signals that did not require the pushing of buttons. The Secret Service logged the president’s movements around the White House. Aides could determine his location from panels of twinkling bulbs hanging above their desks, similar to the device used in English country homes to summon servants. The First Family Locator system powered up individual tape recorders, depending on the room Nixon had just entered. The Uher machine hooked up to the telephone in the Lincoln Sitting Room—extension 586—had switched itself on automatically after Nixon returned to the residence from the Kennedy Center. …
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There’s no such thing as a moral squirrel. They’re too focused on gathering nuts for winter to worry about stuff like that. Humans, on the other hand, are obsessed with morality. With right vs. wrong. Right: Are people kind and generous to one another? Wrong: Are people only out for themselves, no different from squirrels? Virtually all heroes in stories—I’m talking mainstream, commercial entertainment here—are angels. An iron moral compass guides them as they mete out justice against very obviously bad guys to restore the karmic balance of the universe. The righteous Harry Potter defeats agent of chaos Voldemort, Iron Man avenges crimes against the innocent, and so o…
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On October 21, 1888, a startling newspaper advertisement appeared in New York City. Block capitals declared that at the Academy of Music, that evening, the audience would witness the “DEATH OF SPIRITUALISM.” The performance would amount to “A THOROUGH AND COMPLETE EXPOSE,” an onstage battle of “SCIENCE vs. SPIRITUALISM.” What’s more, the legendary Fox sister Margaretta Fox Kane would be the star attraction. That night, hordes filled the famed theater where Victoria Woodhull had delivered an address to a boisterous crowd during her 1872 run for the presidency. In the words of the next day’s New York Herald, the place hummed with “the wildest excitement.” Among those prese…
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The CrimeReads editors pick the month’s best new books out in paperback. * Camilla Lackberg, The Golden Cage (Vintage) “A sexy, deliciously dark journey.” —Los Angeles Times Ruth Ware, One by One (Gallery/Scout Press) “Not only do Ware’s novels wink at Christie in a saucy way, but Ware herself is turning out to be as ingenious and indefatigable as the Queen of Crime.” —Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart (Picador) “My favorite debut crime novel of 2020 . . . just spot on about transforming life into art and who gets sacrificed—particularly women—as a result.” —Sarah Weinman, The Crime Lady Deepa Anappara, Djinn Patrol on the P…
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Growing up in a small Swiss town in the 70s and 80s, the availability of books in English was limited. My mum was British, my dad half Swiss, half British, and we only spoke English at home. Despite the fact I was schooled in German, I had a real appetite for stories in my mother tongue. Consequently, we’d stock up whenever we visited family in England, and I’d plunder Mum’s stack of novels every chance I got. Many of them were thrillers, and she’d allow me to read whatever grabbed my interest. As a side note, I recall her (jokingly) stapling together the pages of a novel that contained sexy bits when I was fourteen. No prizes for guessing which scenes I read first (sorry…
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Set in a quiet side street in the heart of Moscow’s Meshchanksy District, the Bekhterev Private Clinic occupied a five-story glass-and-concrete office building. Its namesake, Vladimir Bekhterev, born in 1857, was renowned chiefly as one of Russia’s most famous neurologists, a rival of Ivan Pavlov, and also for his probable murder on the orders of Josef Stalin. Asked to examine the dictator in 1927, Bekhterev had privately warned colleagues that Stalin was a paranoiac. He died suddenly and mysteriously the next day. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s new rulers reinstated him in the pantheon of national medical heroes. The Bekhterev Clinic had been sponsored by p…
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New York writers are used to toiling in the shadows of the greats who came before us. But when I began writing The Bouncer and its sequels, creating a crime series set in the city, I found myself both inspired and intimidated by how many authors had plumbed those depths before me. Since the days of Whitman and Melville, the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, New York City has always inspired excellence in both writing and crime. And at least since Poe, one has fed the other, giving Gotham’s underworld a rich and varied literature all its own. Here, in vaguely historical order, is a list of some my favorite books about outlaw New York. Low Life, by Luc Sante For anyone…
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In Underexposed!: The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made (Abrams) Joshua Hull and Posterspy chart the history of films that were almost, but not quite made. Here, they looks at David Fincher’s planned follow-up to Zodiac. ___________________________________ FADE IN A torso is discovered during an innocent game of tag, setting in motion a cat-and-mouse game between Eliot Ness and the Torso Killer in 1930s Cleveland. This is the plot of Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko’s six-issue comic book series, Torso, which was originally published by Image Comics in 1998. In 2006, while busy working on the thriller Zodiac, David Fincher signed on to direct an adaptation of Torso…
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This month’s international crime fiction roundup brings you plenty of corruption, coverups, and conspiracies. Sleuths in Iceland, Quebec, and Taiwan go all the way to the top for answers, a housebreaker in Egypt leverages state secrets to make his way to the center of society, a Parisian illusionist finds himself the target of his rich clients, and an unhappy bride is stalked by an admirer who knows far too much about her life in China. Perhaps you’ll even be able to take these books on a long-delayed vacation! Sergio Schmucler, The Guardian of Amsterdam Street Translated by Jessica Mendez Sayer (House of Anansi Press) In Mexico City, Galo has confined himself to Am…
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This piece was supposed to be about fiction. Given that my own novel, Impostor Syndrome, is about a Russian spy working as an executive at one of the world’s largest technology companies, it made sense to gather some of my favorite works of fiction on crime in Silicon Valley. I soon realized however, that most of my selections were actually non-fiction. Unlike say, investment banking (The Bonfire of the Vanities) or academia (On Beauty, Lucky Jim, and many more), it seems tech is one of the lesser examined areas in fiction. Maybe it’s because the personalities, and crimes, are often already outsized; the truth in many cases is already plenty outrageous. Some of my favor…
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Philip Agee remains unique in the annals of US intelligence in that he went from being the consummate intelligence insider—nobody is more entrenched than a Central Intelligence Agency case officer in the field—to being a thoroughgoing outsider, and did so by choice. Agee has continued to be, with the exception of Aldrich Ames, the United States’ most hated erstwhile spy. Within the CIA, his “was taken as one of the most harmful, worst betrayals that we [have] suffered, and the hostility to him was greater than it was towards almost anybody else,” notes Glenn Carle, himself a CIA whistleblower with respect to “enhanced interrogation.” While Agee did assert the natural righ…
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It all came to a head in the most surprising way. One morning, Miguel heard the key in the lock and assumed that Natalia had forgotten something, since she’d only said goodbye five minutes earlier. But his daughter was not who appeared in the door with a triumphant smile. Miguel’s stomach turned on seeing Gustavo, his ex-son-in-law. “What are you doing here?” he asked, not even attempting to hide his hostility. He hated Gustavo as intensely as he’d once loved him, years ago. Gustavo smiled in phony cordiality. “A hug would be nice, Miguel. It’s been a long time.” Miguel had trouble finding his words, had to chew them up and let them out like mush. “You are no longer…
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Before Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck became an essential part of the Western literary canon, he was an unpublished writer with three rejected novels to his name. (Relatable!) Apparently, one of these novels was a mystery called Murder at Full Moon, which featured (get ready for it) werewolves. Twenty-something Steinbeck wrote the novel under the pseudonym Peter Pym. The 233-page manuscript—currently stored in the Harry Ransom Center archives, where it has languished since it was rejected by publishers in 1930—centers on a small California coastal town whose residents are trying to make sense of a recent wave of grisly murders that happened during the full moon. Officials…
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“fools gamble With things they don’t own, even though the first thing they’ll lose is their life.”—Abbas Mahalawi The gardener had left the gate ajar as planned. We entered one after the other like house cats familiar with their home. Then we sped through the garden like ghosts. Ernesti pulled some large socks out of his bag and signaled for us to slip them over our shoes to silence our footsteps. Eduardo, the Italian butler, assured us that he had drugged the large guard dogs, as well as Cicurel and his wife. He had slipped a barbiturate into the dinner he had served them and had seen them eat it. They’d be sleeping like the dead now and wouldn’t awake before noon, he s…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Kathy Wang, Impostor Syndrome (Custom House) “Like John le Carré filtered through Tom Wolfe, Impostor Syndrome encapsulates our Facebook anxieties perfectly.” The Millions David Gordon, Against the Law (Mysterious Press) “This one has everything, from a car chase that makes what Steve McQueen does with that Mustang in Bullitt seem like a Sunday drive, to a showdown in a Russian bathhouse that is part Marx Brothers and part Kill Bill. For anyone with a taste for blood-spattered comic capers featuring characters who vault off the page, Against the Law is an exquisite fever dream in…
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What’s the difference between Breaking Bad and Ozark? Both are stories about husbands and fathers who fall into criminal enterprises while trying to provide for their families. Both shows have a strong sense of place and local culture. And both explore the entire moral spectrum between elemental survival and boundless greed. (Also, both require a moderately strong stomach since they occasionally dip their toes into Quentin Tarantino levels of violence.) But there is one important way in which Breaking Bad and Ozark are fundamentally different: the extent to which each show exposes process—not just what the characters do, but how they do it. Breaking Bad teaches us the in…
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I’ve always liked stories where people go to Hell. Because I like Hell. Because that’s where the angels are. Angels come from Hell. All angels are fallen angels. Angels know how to fall and rise at the same time. Every Russian literary work is a crime novel and it’s about this, more or less. Hell or angels. Same thing. Anglo-Saxon culture is consumed with morality. Latin culture with mortality. But Slavs, we are melancholic fireflies in your summertime. We know we are bad, bad, bad. And how to be good, good, good. But we don’t want to play that game. We are damned and transcendental. We are a cracked basin hit by a shard of sunlight. See: Tarkovsky. Remix with some Jewis…
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