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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Three years ago, when I ranked 100 Sherlock Holmes performances in an article for this very website, I had thought that I had landed upon the most challenging project I’d ever undertake at CrimeReads. Watching countless film and TV adaptations, attempting to ascribe value to various interpretations of the character, attempting to force a logical ranking out of them all… for weeks, I wrung my hands over it, and, when it was over, I washed my hands of it—and the notion of putting together any similar list ever again. And yet here we are. Here we are again. The list which you are about to read is a ranking of the 85 film and TV performances of Sherlock Holmes’s esteemed col…
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“I’m a firm believer that things happen when the time is right,” says USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan. She should know. Her time to write psychological suspense didn’t arrive until she was 55 years old. Ryan was in America’s early 1970s class of female broadcast pioneers along with Jane Pauley, Jessica Savitch, and Leslie Stahl. Long before she ever considered writing thrillers, she’d won the hearts of her viewers along with numerous Emmys for her investigative reporting on WHDH-TV in Indianapolis, and in Atlanta and Boston. Then one day in 2004, a spam email popped up on her computer screen at Channel 7 News, and by mistake, she opened it. The subject …
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“What a rotten writer of detective stories Life is!” By the time he wrote these words, Nathan Leopold, Jr. was middle-aged and balding. But in the American consciousness, he was forever immortalized as the sullen teenager he had been in the sweltering Chicago summer of 1924, infamously linked—in name and in deed—with his partner in crime, Richard Loeb. Leopold and Loeb were nineteen and eighteen respectively when they committed the “crime of the century.” On May 21, the two boys, driving a blue Willys-Knight rented under a pseudonym, picked up fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks as he walked home from school. They had planned carefully for months, orchestrating what they thou…
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Here is a short list of things that are easy: –Brunch. –Turning on the television for your children instead of reading to them. –Looking at your phone and checking some vacuous app some deem crucial. –Sleeping in. –Eating too much. –Making love. And so on and so on. The “easy” list is extensive and if done in excess becomes boring. As the saying goes: everything in moderation. Here is a slightly longer list of things that are not easy: –Going to brunch and pretending to enjoy yourself. –Turning off the television and convincing your children that reading is better. –Not looking at your phone for an hour (try it, prove me wrong). –Awaking early to be productive…
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Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That’s the easy way to remember what happened to Henry VIII’s six wives, and even though four of them died natural deaths, he’s most known for executing two of them—both for treason and adultery, although only one was guilty. By the time he was searching for a fourth wife, eligible royal women throughout Europe were making excuses as to why marriage to the king was out of the question. Christina of Denmark allegedly made the comment that she would need two heads, one for disposal by the king of England. It was this minefield I stepped into when deciding to write a modern retelling, with sixth wife Kate Parker (Cath…
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In my teenaged years, when I traveled to my parents’ native Greece for the summers, I brought with me an entire duffel bag full of books. In high school, and taking myself seriously (too seriously) as a future novelist, I packed this second bag with entire bodies of work by authors I felt were Important. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner: I knew these were the writers of the Great American Novels, and so I stuffed their paperbacks into my bag. As a first-generation Greek/American, I didn’t exactly know what the literary canon was in English, the language I learned second while speaking Greek at home. I found my reading list through a combination of hearsay, high-school sy…
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One night in 1970, Rena Pederson, a young wire-service reporter organizing news bulletins printed by the Dallas office’s teletype machines, came across a dispatch about an audacious crime. The so-called King of Diamonds was at it again, absconding from a local mansion with jewels worth an estimated $60,000. “That,” Pederson recalls, “was ten times what I made a year at UPI.” The clever crook, it seemed, had been active for years, stealing from dozens of homes owned by Texas tycoons whose new money came from oil wells and retail empires. Pederson would spend the next several decades amassing an impressive journalistic resume, but even as she climbed The Dallas Morning Ne…
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A better world is a near future story told through the perspective of a doctor, mother, and wife, who moves with her family to a protected company town where she thinks they’ll all be safe. She soon discovers that this town is hiding secrets about how it was founded, and upon whose backs that safety is won. It was great fun to write, inspired by Atwood, Jackson, and Levin. It looks ahead while nodding to those fun stories from the 1970s that were both more mainstream and more jaundiced, because of the era that made them popular. The nascent idea for A Better World was founded on an unwelcome repetitive thought I developed as a new mom and it was that thought that infor…
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Most of us have experienced a bad neighbor or two in our lifetimes. From dorm life to 20-something apartment life, I remember a lot of neighbors with loud music, pot wafting through the halls, wild parties, and some squeaky bed frames I’d like to forget, but those were simply slight annoyances compared to the bad neighbors in these spine tingling thrillers. In my new novel, The Vacancy in Room 10, I had loads of fun creating sinister neighbors keeping dangerous secrets. So if you’re also a fan of scary neighbors you won’t want to miss these. From gaslighting, kidnapping, betrayal of all kinds, and even murder, this list of thrillers is guaranteed to give you the chills a…
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On August 10th, 2023 I was given a small metal chip to celebrate a year of sobriety. It was the first full year of sobriety I’d experienced since 1977. I’d gotten high for the first when I was ten, courtesy of a lung-busting hit off a device called The Neutron Bong. Despite that name, it was not Cheech and Chong who served up the opportunity. An older cousin and my big brother were the ones who turned the matching keys that armed the aforesaid nuclear bong. In this situation, both “older” and “big” are relative terms. My cousin was in high school and my brother was only two-and-a-half years older than myself. While some months shy of his thirteenth birthday, my brother …
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In the late 1960s, the screenwriter Jack Whittingham, who had collaborated on the writing of Thunderball, started to write a screenplay based on the life of Ian Fleming. Whittingham’s daughter Sylvan says: ‘He had Fleming as a Reuters correspondent travelling on that train across Russia. Fleming was sitting in a compartment, and this alter ego like a ghost came out of him, and this whole adventure took place. That was how Dad played it – that Fleming had this other life that was Bond.’ The project was aborted, yet it reveals something of Whittingham’s perception of Bond that he saw his origins in Ian’s first important foreign assignment. During his fortnight in Moscow,…
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Some books take longer than others. In my case, I first heard about Dr. Paul Volkman – a med-school classmate of my dad who was charged with a massive prescription drug-dealing scheme that led to the deaths of numerous patients – in 2009, about a month before my 24th birthday. I knew instantly that there was a story to tell there, but…well, it took a while to tell it. Fifteen years, to be exact. My book about Volkman, Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the “Pill Mill Killer,“ comes out next month, just a few days before I turn 39. A lot has happened in the years that I worked on this project. I spent 18 months as the news editor of my local al…
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I’ve always loved reading books set in mysterious houses. A great mystery is filled with ambiance, and some of my favorite novels are ones where the setting sets the tone for the book. When I was writing my new novel The House on Biscayne Bay, I wanted to honor the rich tradition of suspenseful novels set at enigmatic estates while also exploring the fascinating history and architecture of South Florida. In designing Marbrisa, a home filled with secrets and a deadly history, I thought about what I loved most about these novels and the places that define them. These houses create the perfect setting to transport the reader to a time and place where anything feels possible…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Langan, A Better World (Atria) “An apocalyptic thriller that becomes more terrifying with every turn of the page.” –Booklist Megan Miranda, Daughter of Mine (S&S/MarySue Ricci) “Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation… Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.” –Kirkus Reviews CJ Tudor, The Gathering (Ballantine) “Vampires, or ‘vampyrs,’ roam the…
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McKenna Jordan is the owner of Murder By The Book in Houston, Texas, and a consultant for Minotaur Books at Macmillan Publishers. ___________________________________ Bookselling is this weird world where it’s kind of like rainbows and unicorns and magic, but it’s also a business. My job is to discover new authors. To find amazing new voices and to put those books into as many hands as I can. Customers know about the number one New York Times bestsellers. What they don’t know about is the brand-new historical mystery set in India that they’re going to absolutely love because of the charming characters. So those are the books that I seek out as the proprietor of Murde…
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When I first started writing Bless Your Heart and the Evans women, it was a goodbye letter, not the start of a new series. I’d recently lost my grandmother to a brief but brutal sickness, and not long before that, my great-grandmother in one of those sudden-but-expected sorts of ways. With my mother battling a chronic illness and my once-strong matriarchal family scattered to the wind, I found myself in an existential free-fall: I’d grown up on the wings of these strong, capable, passionate women, and suddenly they were all gone. Craving one more adventure with those grandmothers I’d loved so much, I decided to bring them back. Unfortunately, my powers of necromancy are …
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Nothing keeps me flipping pages late into the night like a twisty who-done-it mystery or a fast-paced thriller, but my absolute favorite genre mash up is when those elements are mixed with a little bit of magic. There’s something about the addition of magical elements that adds a new layer of tension, intrigue and excitement to the pages. Perhaps that’s why I not only read, but write, speculative thrillers. The Darkness Rises, my latest speculative thriller releasing April 9, follows Whitney, a high school student who sees dark clouds hovering over people when they are in danger. She’s always tried to save people when she sees the warnings ghosting over their heads. But …
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The thing about the new Ripley limited series, which premiered on Netflix this week, is that its leading actor, Andrew Scott, is incredibly good. He’s incredibly good in it, and he’s incredibly good in everything. I might even say that he’s the best actor working today. We don’t really need another adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, since we already have Anthony Minghella’s masterpiece from 1999 and René Clément’s Purple Noon from 1960 (not to mention Wim Wenders’s superb 1977 film The American Friend, an adaptation of Ripley’s Game, and two other films, a 2002 Ripley’s Game and a 2005 Ripley Under Ground). All of these have brought us generally excellent Ripleys in t…
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April is the cruelest month, so perhaps that’s why all the thrillers coming out this month are so delightfully vicious. In the list below, you’ll find new works from top writers in the genre and some rising voices to round out the mix. You’ll also find the adage “hell is other people” split rather evenly between “hell is other people who you are related to” and “hell is other people that you are not related to but still have a weird amount of control over your life.” Without further ado, behold, the best psychologicals of the month. Sara Koffi, While We Were Burning (Putnam) In this well-plotted cat-and-mouse thriller, a surburban white woman still reeling from the d…
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Doug Liman’s “Road House” remake spends most of its runtime keeping things as sunny and breezy as its Florida Keys setting. Elwood Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal, replacing the original’s Patrick Swayze) is chief bouncer for the eponymous establishment, the kind of happy warrior who’ll drive a bunch of miscreants to the hospital after politely slapping them senseless in a parking lot. But near the film’s climax, Dalton’s character sidesteps in a darker, decidedly unpleasant direction—and places himself firmly in Gyllenhaal’s growing pantheon of warped noir characters. During the scene in question, Dalton suffers a series of setbacks severe enough to seemingly crack his psyche i…
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There is no stronger bond in this world than family, and a caring, loving parent will do just about anything to keep his or her loved ones safe. Dive into a lake to save a drowning child, or step in front of a train to rescue a toddler who’s fallen onto the tracks. Go up against a gang of human traffickers, escape from an abusive spouse, track down a band of ruthless kidnappers. As a mystery and thriller writer I’ve always been drawn to stories in which an innocent person encounters some sort of evil entity or force that causes him or her to risk life and limb in order to rescue a daughter or son, husband or wife. In my new novel Beyond All Doubt, a grieving widower/sin…
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As a society we are not just interested in jewelry heists: you might even say we are obsessed with them. Books, films, TV shows abound decade after decade from Robin Hood to Lupin. From the Moonstone to the Oceans franchise. We love jewelry robberies the point that we seem to even admire the professional criminals who carry out these robberies. Think Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. Yes, we’re relieved to know he’s given up his thievery, but would we really be that upset if we’d discovered every once in a while, he still pocketed a diamond bauble or two. As a writer who has been telling stories that revolve around jewelry for over a decade, I’ve often wondered at the mean…
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Over the past few years, there’s been quite a few novels popping up featuring translators solving crimes. Some of the books are by authors who themselves have experience in translation, and reward readers with their turns of phrase and tricks of prose lifted from the cadences of other languages. I try to keep abreast of trends in the genre, especially ones difficult to google (if you search for crime fiction about translators, you’re likely to find works of fiction in translation instead), and I’ve found the mother-lode with this one (or perhaps, the mother tongue?). In particular, I put together this list because two books this year demanded it: Jennifer Croft, the awar…
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What makes an academic institution the perfect setting for fictional crime? Perhaps it’s because there is so much at stake when a child or young adult is exposed to a crime. A campus, whether primary, secondary or tertiary, offers the potential for a juicy closed-room thriller – not to mention a substantial roll of suspects from a pool of pupils, teachers and parents. When I wrote my third novel The School Run, I chose a fictional private high school for my sinister goings-on. St Ignatius Boys’ Grammar was an institution so hallowed and revered that mothers would do anything to get an admissions offer for their sons – including commit murder. It was so intriguing to me…
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Last Seen in Havana, a suspenseful addition to Teresa Dovalpage’s Havana Mystery series, was released by Soho Press in February 2024. The novel, which takes place in Havana poignantly captures the perspectives and experiences of Sarah Lee Nelson, a young woman from San Diego who remains in Cuba in 1986, after falling in love with a Cuban man, and Mercedes Spivey, a Cuban-born professional baker, who returns to Havana from the U.S. in 2019 to help the ailing grandmother who raised her. In alternating chapters, Last Seen in Havana leaps from the mid-1980s to a time that just precedes the pandemic in unspooling a powerfully moving mystery, one that will stay with readers lon…
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