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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The characters boarding the SS Varuna, the location of the opulent locked-room mystery universe conjured in Death and Other Details by writers, executive producers, and showrunners Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss, have a lot of baggage—literal, figurative and emotional—to unpack. In their kit bags (and steamer trunks) are lifetimes of secrets, lies, sex and, yes, some video footage. Someone on board the celebratory cruise—organized and paid for by Lawrence Collier, who is retiring from his eponymous company—is going to be murdered. And, as Rufus Cotesworth, the “World’s Greatest Detective,” played by Mandy Patinkin, intones after the body is discovered, “The murderer …
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When I began this series for CrimeReads, I imagined myself reading a lot of Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, and Chester Himes. That was fine with me; other than a brief Agatha Christie phase in middle school, I’d never spent much time on the classics of crime fiction, and I looked forward to hearing what writers I admired had to say about them. What I didn’t anticipate is that I’d also be introduced to novels from the past five or ten years that I’d somehow missed or overlooked. Descent by Tim Johnston—a tense, complex, and beautifully written literary thriller—is one of these. And who could be a better guide to the classics of the modern day than Megan Miranda, auth…
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This month’s best psychological thrillers have a wide variety of settings and a focus on characterization. There’s also several on this list concerned with upending and evolving tropes in the genre, a valuable goal as the psychological thriller’s heyday continues. Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits 100 Years (Viking) Shubnum Khan has written a lush, romantic gothic novel set in a crumbling seaside estate in South Africa. A century before, the house bloomed with an doomed romance; now, a young girl wanders its halls, finding ways to bring new joy to the strange residents, and getting closer to discovering the secrets that first shattered the home’s happiness and led to its…
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Tracy Clark is the two-time Sue Grafton Memorial Award-winning author of the highly acclaimed Chicago Mystery Series featuring ex-homicide cop turned PI Cassandra Raines. The protagonist is a hard-driving, Black private investigator who works the streets of the Windy City while dodging cops, cons, and killers. Gregg Hurwitz is the New York Times, #1 internationally bestselling author of 24 thrillers, including the Orphan X series, and two award-winning thriller novels for teens. Currently, Gregg is actively working against polarization in politics and culture. To that end, he’s produced several hundred commercials which got over a hundred million views on digital TV plat…
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The Mystery Writers of America has announced the nominees for the 2024 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2023. The 78th Annual Edgar® Awards, which also celebrates the 215th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, will be celebrated on May 1, 2024. ___________________________________ BEST NOVEL ___________________________________ Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Monthly Press) All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron Books) The Madwomen of Paris by Jennifer Cody Epstein (Penguin Random House – Ballantine Books) Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll…
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Science fiction and fantasy are often full of epic space battles and sprawling quests. But to me, they’re best at their most intimate and personal. Even with mystical abilities or cybernetic enhancements, people are still messy and complex and deeply flawed. Fantastical elements can often even intensify those aspects of human nature. Our relationships, our failures, and of course, our crimes. I love a great whodunnit, and one with sorcery or sentient spaceships is even better. In my debut novel, The Longest Autumn, priestess Tirne must solve just such a mystery. As one of four seasonal Heralds, it is her job to escort the deity Autumn between the human and godly realms e…
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If I had to describe The Nice Guys (2016) in one word, it would be “underrated.” Though it achieved instant critical acclaim, its modest performance at the box office prevented it from achieving both a mass audience and fulfilling its potential as a franchise. But the concept of being “underrated,” of having people and the world around you think less of what you really are, was baked into this film’s identity even before its somewhat disappointing release. This adjective permeates almost everything about it, from its story to its sense of humor and even its commentary on life itself. This idea of being “underrated” is best embodied in the performance given by Ryan Gosling…
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I grew up in Philadelphia, where winters could be brutal. David Goodis said it best on the opening page of Black Friday: “January cold came in from two rivers, formed four walls around Hart and closed in on him… He was shivering and he could feel the cold eating into his chest and tearing away at his spine…The cold was even worse on Broad Street. From the east it brough an icy flavor from the Delaware. From the west it carried a mean grey frost from the Schuylkill.” Temps that low can make a human being long to be somewhere else. Somewhere warm and sunny… like Los Angeles, California. But when you’re cold and can’t afford a winter vacation, you do the next best thing: y…
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Here are the undisputed facts. On March 15, 1968, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker ordered Captain Ernest Medina to lead his company of about 100 men in an attack on the village of My Lai (4) in Quang Ngai province, South Vietnam. At 8:00 am of March 16, 1968, Medina’s company assaulted the village. In a little over an hour, the Americans killed somewhere between 100 and 500 Vietnamese civilians and committed several rapes. There is simply no doubt that this was a “war crime” under any definition. Why did it occur? The American military did not order the massacre. Quite the contrary, the US Army in Vietnam was very concerned with avoiding civilian causalities (and remains…
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Growing up in a middle-class family in Mumbai, I wasn’t surrounded by luxuries, but there was one thing our home was never short of – books. My love of mysteries began with the first Famous Five novel my dad brought home and immediately, I was hooked. As an adult, thrillers and mysteries continue to be my favorite genre, but I wish there were more novels written with main characters who looked like me. When I started writing my own novel, following the advice, ‘write what you know’, I centered my locked room novel on a multigenerational South Asian family. The main character is Jia, an Indian single mom who is invited by her married sister, Seema to take shelter in her …
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Another year has dawned, and it’s time for another list purporting to be the sum of all Most Anticipated Titles in our beloved genre. I have been asked to keep the number of titles on the list to 50, for my own sanity. But who needs sanity when you have books?!? And what a year of books it is already shaping up to be, featuring tons of high-concept thrillers, deeply insightful psychologicals, Golden-Age influenced mysteries, and plenty of take-no-prisoners noir. Keep an eye on the site over the next few weeks as we draw out various subgenres for additional previews. As always, this list is long not because we expect everyone to read everything—quite the contrary! We want…
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The Silence in Her Eyes is a book I wasn’t supposed to write. The first time I told my editor that I was thinking about writing a psychological thriller, she was taken aback. She responded with a groan: “Why do all my authors suddenly want to write thrillers?” If my historical novel The German Girl sold more than a million copies, she said, why would I suddenly want to switch genres? A fair question. But even though it came out of the blue to her, it was actually something I’d been thinking about for years. The very day I finished writing The German Girl, I began fleshing out a new story. I was fully aware that I needed to write the two historical novels I already had…
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On January 19, 1919, 34-year-old identical twin sisters Gladys and Dorothea Cromwell boarded the ocean liner La Lorraine at Bordeaux, France, headed back home to New York City. For the previous two years, the twins—descendants of the English statesman Oliver Cromwell and heirs to a fortune—had volunteered with the Red Cross, working on the front lines day and night, getting scant sleep on open fields, tending to wounded soldiers and surrounded by death. Hours into the ship’s journey, in the early evening, witnesses noticed two women on the upper deck, wearing matching black capes, walking arm in arm. They separated. One sister climbed the rail and jumped, vanishing into t…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Thomas Perry, Hero (Mysterious Press) “A tour de force…should be required reading for thrill-seekers.” –Booklist Lea Carpenter, Ilium (Knopf) “Refreshingly cerebral, literary, and cunningly cinematic . . . [Ilium is an] exploration of personal moral ambiguity playing out in the world of international intrigue.” –Booklist Armando Lucas Correa, The Silence in Her Eyes (Atria) “A gripping story…This slow-build suspense novel keep the tension rising as readers are drawn ever deeper into Leah’s claustrophobic world…The twists are enjoyable.” –Library Journal Lizzie Pook, Mau…
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It had to be the worst decision of his life. Heinrich Friedrich Albert was sitting comfortably and reading as he traveled uptown on the Sixth Avenue elevated train in New York on the afternoon of July 24, 1915. When he looked up and realized the train was at the 50th Street station and about to move on, he panicked and decided to rush from his seat, yelling to the guard on the platform to hold the door open. That was all he was thinking about—not missing his stop. As he exited the train, however, a woman sitting near him shouted out that he had forgotten his briefcase. He tried to get back into the train but was unable to do so. In the meantime, a man had taken the briefc…
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“I loved books and wanted my whole life to be around books.” Such were the words of Richard Marek, an acclaimed editor, author, ghostwriter, and longtime Dutton president and publisher who died in 2020. In his half-century in book publishing, Marek helped bring over 300 books into the world, including Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, and several of Robert Ludlum’s “Bourne” thrillers. I never imagined that my own manuscripts would end up in the hands of an editor like Marek, much less be the last he ever worked on. In 2018, I was searching for an agent for my first novel, The Refl…
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We all thought everything was going to change didn’t we? There was a moment back there, when more and more women started standing up and saying, ‘yeah it’s happened to me too’, when Harvey Weinstein went to prison, when women starting talking publicly about what it’s actually like for us to exist in a man’s world, when marches happened, when the media got behind the hashtag. But, let’s be honest, when you look at your life and the life of the women you love, fundamentally what has really changed? To be sure, no longer can a predatory boss make advances without fear of a tribunal. Coercive control is a recognized offense. Equal pay is at least discussed. Most companies a…
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“The first thing we do,” announces Dick the Butcher in Act IV, Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, “is kill all the lawyers.” Approximately four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, this pithy phrase has become one of his most famous witticisms, appropriated often to disparage the legal profession, or at least acknowledge the unfortunate social archetype of the crooked, or even overpriced, counselor. The context in which Dick utters this phrase, though, is key to understanding its true meaning, and Shakespeare’s intent. Dick is a villainous character who wants to eradicate society of the very defenders of justice who could both stop the revolt he inte…
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Our Crime and the City columnist and international correspondent Paul French looks back at some of 2023’s best crime series from around the globe. * Ganglands (Braqueurs) series 2 (Netflix France) – Julian Leclercq and Hamid Hlioua’s trademark fast paced revenge drama brings back grizzled veteran heist merchant Sami Bouajila and banlieue diva sidekick Tracy Gotoas. The second series is filmed mostly in Brussels and features some great shoot outs and car chases. Kin series 2 (RTÉ Ireland) – Peter McKenna and Ciaran Donnelly’s tough Dublin crime family drama returned for a second series of the somewhat depleted Kinsella family left from series 1. The show is loosely…
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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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