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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Detective series or thrillers about murders demand from the reader a level of intellectual curiosity, as well as nerves of steel and a strong stomach. When well written, they are gripping page turners that, more often than not, leave the reader with a sense of satisfaction that the crime has been solved and the perpetrator punished. However, novels about missing people demand and offer this, and more. They propose the tantalising possibility of hope. The enduring appeal of a story about a missing person comes, I think, from the fact that it allows the reader to grapple with a broader range of emotions, everything from despair to hope. The missing and their left-behind …
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It was at the tender age of twenty-one years old that I was first exposed to the untethered brilliance that is Sam Shepard. While studying screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film & Television, I was simultaneously dabbling in acting, going on auditions scattered around Los Angeles for third-rate TV commercials, micro-budget independent films, and acting in plays produced by a theater company whose stage was just a stone’s throw away from Skid Row. I was a headstrong, brash, and extremely opinionated young whippersnapper who had very black-and-white ideas on what made a piece of fiction, regardless of what medium it was in, good or bad. I was, t…
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Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” is the gold standard for anthology TV shows, science-fiction and fantasy TV series and, some might argue, TV shows period. The series, which ran for 156 episodes from 1959 to 1964, has some rivals for those accolades, for certain. “The Outer Limits,” broadcast from 1963 to 1965, had some sterling episodes. But Serling’s original series, often imitated, has never been duplicated. Although … I would argue that its first reboot, appearing on CBS for 65 episodes from 1985 to 1989, comes closer to capturing the spirit and integrity of the original – even closer than filmmaker Jordan Peele’s polished remake that aired 2019-2020. More on that…
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“How do you get your ideas?” Novelists are asked that question all the time. Answering it is a little like trying to explain how you got your personality or why you keep having that dream about showing up for a book signing completely naked. This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of my first novel, The Pardon, in which Miami criminal defense attorney Jack Swyteck made his debut. Jack is back for an eighteenth adventure in Goodbye Girl. Psychoanalysis aside, I can say from experience that the ideas for this long-running series have come to me in one of two ways. Sometimes, it’s the proverbial bolt of lightning. Other times, the story percolates for months, even year…
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The term Cascadia conjures images of thick green forests, lush ferns that could swallow a small car, creeping pea-soup fog, windswept bluffs with crashing ocean waves far below, and buckets upon buckets of rain. Those forest are filled with wild animals, some of them of the folklore variety. But the bioregion of Cascadia is so much more than rain-soaked coastlines, extending from southern Alaska to San Francisco, then expanding east to claim all of Washington, and most of British Columbia, Oregon, Idaho, and even a bit of Montana. There’s some rolling farmland and high mountain terrain thrown in for good measure. It’s a diverse region where the flora and fauna make it a l…
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When I was eight, I read a book that would dictate the course of my life. That book was Harriet the Spy. As a kid in suburban California, I was endlessly curious. About ancient Egypt, about animals, and about my neighbors. Suburbia, as we’ve read in countless domestic thrillers, is a place of secrets. I didn’t know this explicitly when I was a child, of course. But I think I sensed it. Which is why when I picked up Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, it made total sense. I could spy on my neighbors, just like Harriet, and find out All The Things! It was easy to believe that adults were concealing some choice secrets. I didn’t find out anything interesting, but I did g…
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Despite a backdrop of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions threatening travel plans to Iceland, I was able to catch up with Louise Penny, author of the popular Three Pines traditional mysteries starring Inspector Gamache. We talked over breakfast at the Hotel Saga in Reykjavik one Saturday morning during November’s Iceland Noir conference. Given the conference line-up, it felt right that nature would go out of its way to greet the stars. How often will you find Richard Armitage, Dan Brown, Neil Gaiman, Lisa Jewell, C.J. Tudor, and Irvine Welsh all sharing the same space, along with many fine authors working a range of genres*. But there’s more: The day before we met Loui…
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Our goal with all of our books is always to write something fun and fast-paced, but it also must touch on certain themes like privilege, racism and the inequality of our justice system because that’s the reality of the world we live in. That’s our experience and there’s no way to avoid it. We want our books to be part escapism, part very genuine critiques of the corrosive effects of social inequalities—but never with a heavy hand. Our stories are aggressive in their messaging but subtle in their execution, and our murder mystery, Perfect Little Lives is a quintessential example of that. This way there’s a backdrop of social commentary that isn’t on the nose or in your fac…
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It never dawned on me how much I use ‘friends as family’ as a trope in what I write. Hindsight is a funny thing. From that first book I wrote thirty novels ago to Death at a Scottish Wedding (Lucy Connelly), coming out in January, friends play an essential role in developing my main characters and the plot. In the Lucy Connelly Sea Isle series, Dr. Emilia leaves everyone behind when she moves from Seattle to a small town in Scotland, but her friends in the new village become closer than any family ever could. Not only do they help her solve crimes, but they are there when times are tough. While I’m lucky enough to come from a loving family, I wouldn’t survive without …
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A stranger comes to town. He is stern, quiet, with a whiff of criminality, seductive to women and men alike, his life like an arrow shooting him onward. He meets a family, he befriends a boy, he almost falls for another man’s wife, and then he saves them all in a burst of gunfire. Rider from Nowhere first appeared in serial in Argosy magazine, but by the time it reached book form, it bore the name of its emblematic lead character, Shane. Jack Schaefer’s 1949 novel sold 12 million copies. George Stevens’ blockbuster 1953 movie led a pack of Western films racing across the 1950s, including The Gunfighter, Man of the West, High Noon, The Man from Laramie, 3:10 to Yuma, and …
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There is a magnificent bit in a Sherlock Holmes story, which—subconsciously in the beginning, I guess – gave me the inspiration for my first detective novel, Death Under a Little Sky. Holmes and Watson, that charming odd couple of nineteenth century fiction, are on a train, chewing over the details of some seemingly baffling case, when they get to talking about the landscape that speeds past outside their window. Watson is, typically, conventional in his regard for its beauty; Holmes is, typically, caustic, in his response, noting that no dark and smog-soaked rookery is more likely to present “a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside”.…
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The beauty of being asked to interview Chris McGinley about his new book Once These Hills was I knew I was going to read it anyway and knew I was going to read it as soon as it hit my hands. Chris is a writer of very specific passions—classic Appalachian literature and crime fiction—and he has married the two beautifully as I suspected he would. I spoke to him recently to find out just how he did it. WB: The first thing that struck me about your amazing book Once These Hills is that it’s two things at once. It’s a gripping crime novel dressed up in the clothes of a classic Appalachian yarn full of superstition, hard-living, haints, wildlife, mountain characters, and all …
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If you have ever wanted to know how it feels to snatch a painting from a museum wall, slide it under your shirt, and take off, then Michael Finkel’s, The Art Thief is for you. Finkel puts you in the scene and in the mind of Stephane Breistwieser, a man who stole more than 200 artworks from European museums and churches for a combined worth of $2 billion dollars. Breistwieser loved art, believed he could take care of it better than any museum, never sold a single piece, and lived with it until he couldn’t (a spoiler I will not disclose). At just over two-hundred-pages it’s a concise page-turner, a book for anyone interested in the criminal mind, with all the daring and chu…
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What is it about the work of Patricia Highsmith that attracts some readers as powerfully as it repels others? I’m in the first group: I fell under the spell of her weird, chilling, compelling voice the first time I read her. Wondering what all the fuss was about, I went to the bookstore and randomly bought The Price of Salt (which was later made into the movie Carol), not knowing that it was an anomalous choice as it was more a love story—forbidden love, at the time—than the kind of crime story Highsmith became famous for. The power of the storytelling lay in the eerie clarity of her narrative voice and a fierce willingness to push her characters over all kinds of edges.…
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You hold in your hands one of Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics, a series that resurrects out-of-print gems in handsomely designed new editions. I owe this series a great debt because it introduced me to the work of one of my favorite mystery authors, John Dickson Carr. Carr was an American but lived and worked in England during the 1930s. Outlandishly prolific, he quickly built a body of work that placed him in the pantheon of what is now known as the “golden age of detective fiction.” This isn’t the brute poetry of Hammett or the seedy sexual decay of Cain, no Spades or Marlowes or gumshoes packing gats. This is murder as a gentleman’s game, the fair play of mas…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Grippando, Goodbye Girl (Harper) “This is the eighteenth Swyteck novel since The Pardon (1994), and it’s just as good as the rest. Grippando keeps coming up with complex and timely cases, and this one is first-rate.” –Booklist Amy Pease, Northwoods (Atria/Emily Bestler) “Outstanding…Pease’s sharp dialogue and well-rounded characters enrich the core mystery with an authentic representation of the everyday struggles of small-town Americans. Admirers of Eli Cranor will eagerly await more from this gifted writer.” –Publishers Weekly Katia Lief, Invisible Women (Atlantic M…
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Kinshasa – capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Formerly Léopoldville under the bad days of Belgian colonialism, now one of the fastest growing megacities in the world with 16 million citizens and rising quickly – the most populous city in Africa, ahead of Lagos and Cairo. Diamonds, and rare earths all feature now as key sectors of the Congo’s economy and essential to our modern lives but susceptible to the instability of the DRC. And a long history of featuring in crime writing… Let’s start with Joseph Conrad and the classic Heart of Darkness (1899). Conrad was briefly a steamboat captain in the Belgian Congo in the 1890s and the place and the actions of t…
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When The Fury of Beijing is published at the start of the new year, it will be the 19th book in the Ava Lee series—15 featuring Ava, and 4 featuring her mentor Uncle. They comprise about 7,000 pages, and 1,500,00 words. Not too shabby for what began with just her name and a couple of sentences bouncing around in my head. Fury will also be the last book in the series, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to write about how it began, and how it somehow made it as far as it did. The Ava journey started in July, 2009 and coincided with me having some major surgery. It wasn’t something I’d planned before the surgery, but then post-op as I was being wheeled to my room an o…
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Rian Johnson and Olivia Rutigliano talk Poker Face, Knives Out, and Golden Age Mysteries
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Reissued for the first time this century, John Dickson Carr’s The Problem of the Wire Cage is an atmospheric and amusing Golden Age mystery with a memorable puzzle at its center. Dickson Carr is famous for his puzzling “impossible crime” plots in which corpses are discovered in scenarios that seem to lack any logical explanation. Among all of Carr’s ingenious crime scenes, the present case is one of the best known: a dead man is found strangled in the middle of a clay tennis court, just after a storm. In the damp dirt, there is one set of footsteps—his own—leading back to the grass; the court is otherwise untouched. This edition from American Mystery Classics has a new in…
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When I first came up with the idea for Five Bad Deeds, I didn’t imagine telling the story from so many different points of view. I had my main character, Ellen Walsh, all fleshed out, and Five Bad Deeds was supposed to be very much her story. However, best laid plans often go awry. See, at its core, Five Bad Deeds is a story about perception – how we perceive ourselves, how others perceive us, and the occasional yawning gap between those two things. Therefore, it was important that Ellen’s character, and her actions, be seen through the lens of a number of different people – her family, friends and neighbours (and among those, her sworn enemy). Many crime novels use…
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My last book about the mafia, Mob Rules: What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman, was an international bestseller translated into 20 languages. Because of the book’s global appeal, I was invited by the German media conglomerate Axel Springer to speak at their annual retreat for editors, being held at the Hotel Villa Athena in Agrigento, Sicily. The first evening, I met an older gentleman who introduced himself as George. We struck up an enjoyable conversation that centered on our mutual love of history, and, at some point, George said to me: “I would like to publish your next book.” This softly spoken man, who conversed with me as if we had known each other f…
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Cornell Woolrich published Black Alibi in 1942. His tenth book overall, it was the third in his series of “Black” novels. The Bride Wore Black (1940), later adapted into a film by Francois Truffaut, led the sequence off, succeeded by The Black Curtain (1941), The Black Angel (1943), The Black Path of Fear (1944), and Rendezvous in Black (1948). None of the six books has a continuity with any of the others, but each in different ways mines the dark psychological territory a reader expects from Woolrich. Black Alibi wastes no time in its setup. We are in Ciudad Real, “the third largest city south of the Panama Canal,” and in the first chapter, titled The Alibi, casino and …
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I’m often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” My answer always varies, as each book is different. But for my latest, Mister Lullaby, the idea was sparked by a luridly creepy picture of the Petite Ceinture, a once-thriving and now abandoned railway looping around the center of Paris, built more than 150 years ago. Moss and algae now festoon the stone entrances and exits, with doors that lead down to the hidden world of the Paris catacombs below. Inside the Petite Ceinture, the silence is palpable; the darkness, seemingly eternal; the echoes, endless; the phosphorus mushrooms glowing in the darkest recesses, unworldly. My fictional tunnel in Harrod’s Reach, Nebraska, aba…
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Here in Avalon was never supposed to be about fairies. I’d envisioned the novel—a literary thriller about two sisters, one of whom, Cecilia, goes missing after getting involved with a mysterious interactive theatre troupe—as a straightforwardly Gothic cult story: complete with plenty of murders to solve. And, two or so drafts in, it still wasn’t working—or at least not working in the way I wanted it to. The characters weren’t quite coalescing; their motivations weren’t quite making sense; the Avalon itself—the shadowy cabaret troupe at the heart of the novel’s plot—always just beyond my reach, thematically, even as more and more of the book’s scenes were set there. And th…
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Cozy mystery is a subgenre of crime fiction. When readers ask what are cozy mysteries, I explain they’re mysteries without on-the-page violence, physical intimacy or naughty words. That’s the quick-and-simple answer. Then I watch as their faces light up with understanding. I love that moment. Of course, people who read cozy mystery novels—also called cozies—know there’s a lot more to this subgenre than stories without gore, sex or obscenities. It’s not just about what they don’t have. What I love most about cozies—in addition to the mysteries—are the elements they do have. I love the humor, the quirky secondary characters, the closeknit communities, and especially the in…
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