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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Brisbane, capital of Australia’s state of Queensland and the country’s third biggest city. Sitting on the banks of the Brisbane River (which has been known to seriously flood the town) and the northern end of the Gold Coast of long sandy beaches and surfing spots, it’s home to over two million people. Now Brisbane is an architectural mix of low rise colonial era buildings with cooling verandas and glittering new central business district skyscrapers. You get the contrast if you watch the hit Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) show Harrow, about a Brisbane forensic pathologist with a healthy disregard for authority and an uneasy relationship with the city’s cops. Of…
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A cold rush of air traveling over your bare skin despite the warmth of the room. Something waking you in the still of the night, a footstep, a whisper of words, a slight pressure on the end of the bed, but nobody is there. Walking into an empty room but feeling as though you’re not alone. Signs of an active imagination or a ghost protagonist? For me, creating a dead protagonist was not what fueled me to write my novel What You Never Knew. It was necessary for me to kill off a character within the first few pages of the book, as it’s this event that sets everything else in motion. My only problem was that I still needed the perspective of the deceased character throughou…
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Dr. Laura Hobson: “This is Oxford.” Detective Inspector Robbie Lewis: “Don’t I bloody know it.” From “The Quality of Mercy,” Lewis, Season 3, Episode 2 ____________________________ Ian Pearce was the Assistant Location Manager for the ITV mystery series, Lewis, for eighteen episodes, from 2012 to 2015 and for the pilot of Foyle’s War. Pearce has had a long career as a Location Manager for many British films and TV series. Currently he is the Managing Director for the film company Supply 2 Location in Scotland. Lewis was an off-shoot of the original Inspector Morse TV series, based on the novels of Colin Dexter. Lewis ran from 2006 until 2015 and followed the police i…
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When I was a newspaper reporter, one of my colleagues on the advertising side of the operation was as much a fan of the TV series “Justified” as I was. My family hails from Tennessee, so I was attuned to the southern sensibilities of “Justified,” which was about flawed law enforcement agents and flawed criminals in modern-day Kentucky. My family knew many of the cities and wild places and types of people in the series. We recognized the truth and smiled at the exaggerations and appreciated how Kentucky tourism officials would feel when their state, on a weekly basis, was depicted as a place full of trashy rednecks and meth heads. My coworker, on the other hand, was an …
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“From the purely tactical point of view, women were able to move about without exciting so much suspicion as men and were therefore exceedingly useful to us…” —Maurice Buckmaster, They Fought Alone: The Story of British Agents in France While researching my latest novel, The Invisible Woman, about Allied spy Virginia Hall, I made a surprising discovery. Nazis largely didn’t think women were as brave, intelligent, and even devious and vengeful as men. Because of this, women were often overlooked in the hunt for resistors and spies. German propaganda at the time depicted a feminine ideal of woman as mother, preferably of four or more children, tending home quietly and …
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I’ve been poisoned with arsenic trioxide. Well, technically, “treated” with arsenic would be a more accurate portrayal. In the summer of 2011, for nearly three months, five days a week, arsenic trioxide dripped from a bag hanging on a pole beside me into an IV tube that connected, through a butterfly needle, to one of my veins. Throughout those infusion visits as an acute promyelocytic leukemia patient at the age of 31, I often thought about Agatha Christie’s adoration of arsenic as a murder weapon. My uncle Bobby was equally intrigued by the “toxin” that would save my life. He bought me a copy of Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Me…
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You don’t need a long weekend in April to enjoy a good international thriller binge, but it helps. In some corners of the world, there’s an Easter break right about now, which if memory serves was the traditional weekend to watch Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, not an activity people indulge in too often these day, though that’s not going to stop me from doing my Yul Brynner imitation all weekend. The point is, some of us are already programmed for a good long binge this weekend, preferably one that spans continents and involves some interesting clothes, so let’s dive in and see what the new offerings are for all your international thriller needs. If you watched…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Caroline Kepnes, You Love Me (Random House) Kepnes keeps turning up the intensity with each new installment of the Joe Goldberg series, this time sending her protagonist-villain to an island in the Pacific Northwest, where he finds work, naturally enough for Joe, at a local library, and of course trains his attention (and delusions) on one of the librarians. In the past, Joe has been very much a creature and observer of cities, first New York and then Los Angeles. The move to a small-town adds a special, terrible intimacy to his crimes, not to men…
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“Be gay, do crime.” These four short words have become the new rallying cry at Pride demonstrations, but a glance at the canon of queer film suggests you might not hear this sentiment at the cinema. Classic films like The Children’s Hour and Suddenly, Last Summer often take up Gothic elements to convey the paranoia and sense of entrapment felt by queer characters, but their plots are focused on individual psychology rather than the detection of a crime, as are more overt crime films, such Harold Prince’s gay murder mystery Something for Everyone from 1970. This disconnect between queer cinema and crime film might be surprising, given that, until fifty years ago, to be g…
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New York Times bestselling author Michael Koryta got the call from the records office at Indiana University shortly before he was scheduled to graduate. Looking back, it’s easy to understand why he overlooked a single core prerequisite. Koryta was busy writing part-time for the Bloomington Herald-Times, he worked occasionally for a private detective and in what spare time he had left, he was writing novels. He did all of this while studying for a degree in criminal justice because he never lost sight of his goal to become a crime fiction writer. Koryta was a college sophomore when he sold his first novel. While shopping his manuscript, the 19-year-old didn’t tell anyone…
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Monday, June 29, 1992 A girl with dark brown hair jumped off the train at the same time as the four young men from the San Viator cuadrilla. The five teenagers spread out across the bare station at Cabezón de la Sal, a town in Cantabria famous for its salt flats. Their backpacks were full of supplies, and their hearts were full of expectations for the summer. Waiting for them was the project director, Saúl Tovar, a young professor dressed informally in a checkered shirt. He welcomed them and introduced several student assistants who had already attended summer camp there. There weren’t many: a few second- and third-year girls studying history who swarmed around Saúl, …
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Reading has always been a great escape in my life. Books gave me joy, taught me much, but mostly, they were entertainment. I had a good upbringing, raised by my mom and grandma. We weren’t rich or poor, I had what I needed. Books, however, were a luxury, an “extra” given to me as gifts or on special occasions because they weren’t in the budget. So I spent many hundreds of hours at the library. Free books! Thousands to choose from. Tastes change, and different people like different genres, but from the beginning, I gravitated toward mysteries and thrillers. My childhood favorites are similar to many writers in my genre: Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew; Agatha Christie and L…
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What is it that draws suspense authors to Texas settings? In a word: variety. From the sunbaked desert to the shadowy piney woods, from the rugged Chisos Mountains out west, to the sugary sand beaches down south, authors of Texas-based stories have a wide variety of dramatic settings to choose from. As America’s second-largest state, Texas encompassing nearly 270,000 square miles, offering storytellers an array of interesting places to set their adventures. And the people are just as varied as the topography. Across the sprawling Lone Star State, many different people and worlds collide, creating conflict and tension—two key ingredients in suspense fiction. The list of…
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“Well, that was fun, but it wasn’t at all realistic!” is an often shared opinion by readers after snapping closed an engrossing though twisty thriller. I always find those kind of assessments amusing because: Don’t we read fiction to escape reality? No matter how far-fetched the plot, I bet I could find a real-life example that is even more outlandish because “Truth is stranger than fiction,” as Mark Twain once said. When I decided to begin researching for my book The Three Mrs. Greys—a novel about Cyrus Grey, a conman who marries three different women and lies unconscious in the hospital room while his wives are left to unravel his secrets and solve his attempted murd…
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The old lady sits in her favourite rocker. To her listener it seems unyieldingly hard, softened for her fragile frame only by the thinnest of cushions at her back. Her hair, silver grey, has lost neither its lustre nor its abundance, but is pulled back into the severest of buns. The smooth, shiny-thin skin of her face is flushed from the heat of the fire, embers glowing in the blackened hearth of this vast cheminée that so dominates the end wall of the salon. Her voice, like her frame, is slight, and he finds himself realising that at seventy-five she is really only ten years older than he. Will the next ten years reduce him as it has her? But still, there is a clarity …
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Elizabeth Brooks, The Whispering House (Tin House) “… atmospheric and creepy, and as needy, nostalgic Freya is pulled deeper and deeper into its shadows, the reader’s worry for her grows—and, with it, the novel’s suspense. Freya is haunted by words she wishes she could take back, the sister she lost, the love that never was, the hopes for the future that she couldn’t attain; all of these materialize in the deep shadows and shifting portrait-eyes of Byrne Hall. Brooks has crafted a slow-simmering, psychological, gothic novel about grief and longing.” –Leah Von Essen (Booklist) Viet Than…
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The 1920s—roaring as they were—were quite an evocative time period. So much so that when I sat down to write my debut novel Murder at the Mena House (followed by Murder at Wedgefield Manor, releasing March 30th), there was no question about when I would set the Jane Wunderly Mystery series. After all, what period paints a mental picture more easily than the 1920s, with its flappers, cocktails, and jazz? It’s been suggested, especially recently, that the social flavor of the 1920s was a reaction to the Spanish Flu pandemic that swept the globe in 1918 and 1919. Millions of people worldwide died, and when it was safe to congregate again, they did so in style. Combine that …
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Several years ago, I was hired to write an animal trafficking movie for Leonardo DiCaprio, who was hoping to shine a light on that particular issue. The elation of getting the job was soon followed by panic at the discovery that almost is nothing is known about how animals are actually trafficked. This was surprising, because animal trafficking is one of the largest illicit markets in the world, along with drugs and guns. But unlike drugs and guns, animals are not a law enforcement priority, so what little is known about poaching/trafficking is limited to stories in magazines like National Geographic about poachers in sub-Saharan Africa and ivory markets in Asia. But bare…
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The 2008 documentary Have You Seen Andy? is, sadly, not a unique true crime story. An unsolved mystery, a missing child, a devastating family tragedy… it fits neatly into the seemingly endless list of heartbreaking disappearances that leave families lost and broken. What snagged the fabric of my attention in this tale was the narrator: the filmmaker, Melanie Perkins, had been Andy’s childhood friend when he disappeared at age 10. His disappearance was written into her being, and she couldn’t leave Andy behind. She was a nine-year-old girl when her best friend went missing, and I’m sure her part of the story was remembered by her parents, and perhaps Andy’s mother thought …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Victoria Helen Stone, The Last One Home (Lake Union) “Stone gradually reveals her multifaceted characters’ secrets as the intricate, fast-paced plot builds to a surprising conclusion. Fans of dark, twisted tales of dysfunctional families will be satisfied.” –Publishers Weekly Paula Munier, The Hiding Place (Minotaur) “The sequel to Blind Search is a riveting, fast-paced story of family and small-town secrets. Tension builds quickly in the emotional story involving unforgettable working dogs and the people who love them.” –Library Journal Allison Brennan, Tell No Lies (MIRA)…
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Bangalore, officially now called Bengaluru, is the capital city of the Indian state of Karnakata in south west India. Eleven million people in what is now India’s third largest city. The country’s ‘Wild South’ and also one of India’s ‘Garden Cities’. But, of course, most people now think of Bangalore as ‘India’s Silicon Valley’, home to an estimated 7,700 millionaires and eight billionaires with a total wealth of US$320 billion. And, as we all know, where there are that many millionaires and billionaires with that much money there will be some crime too just as night follows day. If any book has made English language readers more aware of Bangalore then it’s probably Ar…
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In crime and mystery novels, predictability is one of the most complicated elements of the narrative—but balancing it correctly is often essential for the page-turning, satisfying read that I’m always craving. Predictability is a tightrope walk; if I guess the twists too soon, that can make the lead up feel hollow or the climax feel low-stakes, but if the set-up doesn’t accurately reflect the reveal, the twists or ending seem totally bonkers. My favorite twists are ones I didn’t see coming, but seem obvious (or, at least, reasonable) when I look back on what I’ve read. I don’t mind guessing a twist if the characters are engaging and the scenes are still full of delicious…
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When I set out to write my first mystery, I knew two things: 1) There would be dogs—my admittedly lofty ambition was to be “Julia Spencer-Fleming with dogs”; and 2) The dogs would not be golden retrievers. Why not? Because everyone writes about golden retrievers. Goldens are one of America’s favorite dogs, ranking #3 in popularity in the AKC’s list of 195 breeds. Only Labrador retrievers and German shepherds are more popular—and you wouldn’t know that by looking at our entertainment, as goldens predominate on TV and film and in books. From to Air Bud and Golden Winter to Homeward Bound and Marley & Me, the media are gaga about goldens. To be fair, they are nice dogs…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new nonfiction crime books. * Dirty Gold: The Rise and Fall of an International Smuggling Ring By Jay Weaver, Nicholas Nehamas, Jim Wyss, and Kyra Gurney (PublicAffairs) Dirty Gold is an eye-opening, compulsively readable investigation into the world of illegally-mined gold and the business networks that prop that system up. From a team of Miami Herald reporters who first exposed the South Florida businessmen trafficking in gold taken out of illicit Peruvian operations, this book will change the way you look at the precious metal, which fuels an underworld trade more lucrative than cocaine, with devastating humanitarian c…
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Revisiting The Anderson Tapes, Sidney Lumet’s Wisely Paranoid Heist Film, 50 Years Later
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The Anderson Tapes is a heist movie, there’s no doubt about that. It depicts the typical thrills and shenanigans of the genre, beginning when a charismatic ringleader assembles a colorful crew of criminal masterminds with varied skills, to pull off one last job. It is, to say the least, a good time at the movies. When it was released in 1971, it did quite well at the box office, grossing $5 million. But it received mixed reviews, and if it is remembered today at all, it is for presenting the world with the first mainstream film performance of Christopher Walken. But, if you really listen to The Anderson Tapes, then you will learn that it is bolder than a traditional heis…
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