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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At the start of his career, Christopher Nolan directed three films that embraced the tropes and spirit of noir. Beyond the shifty characters and underhanded betrayals and sudden violence, he imbued these works with a sense of neurotic fear and fatalism that harkened back to the great originals of the 1940s and 50s. Filmed for an ultra-low budget, the black-and-white “Following” (1998) is about a young writer who follows strangers around London; he’s soon noticed by Cobb (Alex Haw), a slick criminal who quickly becomes a mentor figure—but a double-cross awaits. Nolan’s next film, “Memento” (2000) is a twisty mind-bender about a brain-damaged man (Guy Pearce) pursuing his …
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It may be wishful thinking, but it’s never too early to start planning what to take with you to the beach this summer. These new-in-paperback titles are some of the most exciting mysteries and crime novels around—plus, they won’t break the bank! * Jessica Barry, Don’t Turn Around, Harper Paperbacks (3/2) “Barry’s adrenaline-fueled adventure explores the Me Too movement, cancel culture, reproductive rights and white male extremism. Buckle up for a heart-stopping ride.”–People Magazine Darynda Jones, A Bad Day for Sunshine, St. Martin’s Griffin (3/2) Jones has a real talent for balancing suspense with laugh-out-loud humor, never losing the tension from either. –Boo…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Nicole Glover, The Conductors (HMH) Glover’s debut is a captivating blend of genres, tapping into strands of historical fiction, mystery, and fantasy. The Conductors tells the story of Hetty Rhodes, a former conductor on the Underground Railroad, now settled in Philadelphia, practicing magic and taking on unsolved cases the police won’t touch. A new job takes her through some mysterious corners of postwar Philadelphia and offers up startling revelations about the city’s new order and the lingering effects of community trauma. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief Alexandra An…
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When U.S. Coast Guard cutters shelled and sank the Canadian rumrunner I’m Alone in the Gulf of Mexico in March 1929, one of its crewmen perished. Meet Captain Jack Randell, the scrappy smuggler whose daring exploits turned deadly—and sparked an international incident. ___________________________________ Rifle and machine-gun bullets ripped through the sails and rigging of the booze-laden Canadian schooner I’m Alone on a March morning in 1929. Shells from the deck gun of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter blasted holes in the rumrunner’s hull and it began to sink, bow-first. Skipper Jack Randell, struggling to stand on the sloping deck, remained defiant. “No, damn you!” he shout…
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By ten a.m. on the morning of Saturday, October 18, 1947, the awful word had gotten round among the other fifty-nine first-class passengers sailing aboard the Durban Castle, an ocean liner situated off the coast of equatorial Africa that was en route to the English city of Southampton from Cape Town, South Africa. Gay Gibson had disappeared! Gay Gibson, the vanished young woman, was an enchanting auburn-haired, milky-skinned stage actress, only twenty-one years old, who had left her home in South Africa aboard the Durban Castle in order, she told people, to find her fame and fortune strutting upon the boards in England, where she had originally resided with her peripatet…
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HUGHIE MCLOON WALKED OUT of the speakeasy at a quarter to two in the morning with a hoodlum on each arm. Here he was, the most recognized and popular little guy in Philadelphia—hadn’t they asked him to hold up the round cards at the Dempsey-Tunney fight with 130,000 people in the stands?— and now he was running his own café at Tenth and Cuthbert, five short blocks from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, and life should have been, as they said in those days, the berries. McLoon was serving sandwiches, “light lunch,” and bootleg ale and whisky ladled from buckets secreted behind the counter when two wise guys with names off a Hofbrau menu, Meister and Fries, imposed …
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Spring has arrived, the clocks have moved forward, and we’re all one step closer to being about to travel for real, but as we wait for the world to open up, there’s still plenty of international crime novels to tide us over. March’s line-up features eerie Scandinavian folk horror, a thrilling Nigerian mystery, an elegant investigation in Italy, and new historicals from Poland and France. Camilla Sten, The Lost Village Translated by Alexandra Fleming (Minotaur) The folk horror wave continues! Thank god for Midsommar and all the many wonderful works that are now able to be compared to it. In The Lost Village, a documentary filmmaker is drawn to uncovering the secrets …
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In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was everywhere. One of the director’s genuine masterpieces, “Psycho,” was released that year, on the heels of “North by Northwest” the year before, which had followed “Vertigo” and “The Wrong Man” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” “The Birds” lay ahead of him. The 60-year-old director, who had always been a familiar figure to some because of his sly cameos in his films, had become a household name through his movies and his TV show, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” The half-hour anthology series began in 1955 and ran for 10 years, including the years when it was expanded and renamed “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.” Add to that “Alfred Hitchcock’s Myster…
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It was recently pointed out to me by a friend that my books are stuffed to the gills with cheating spouses. This wasn’t new information, exactly, but it did make me wonder why that was the case. Was it a peculiar obsession of mine, or was it the fact that cheating spouses are great fuel for thriller novels? I suspect it’s a little bit of both. And while all my books have a glut of unfaithful lovers, my latest, Every Vow You Break, is a novel in which the entire plot turns on a single moment of weakness, when a bride-to-be has a drunken one-night fling on her bachelorette weekend. One of the reasons adultery works so well in the realm of suspense fiction is that it can so…
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The art world is so full of colorful characters (pun intended) that I had no trouble finding real people to populate my fictional Art of Murder mystery series, all three of which are set in New York City’s bohemian milieu and its eastern Long Island outpost, the Hamptons. From the European exiles during World War II to Andy Warhol’s entourage in the Swingin’ Sixties, they don’t come any more outrageous. Their iconoclasm, supersized egos, and sexual high jinx made them perfect personalities around which to build imaginary narratives. An Exquisite Corpse features André Breton, the so-called Pope of Surrealism, his gorgeous wife Jacqueline Lamba, her American lover, artist D…
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It’s a perennial question: do spies write the best spy novels? It’s the business of secrets, after all; you can’t help but wonder how much authors get right. Surely, the only authentic spy books are the ones written by people on the inside, right? As a retired intelligence professional and a published novelist, and now the author of a spy novel, I’m here to set the record straight: Even when you’ve been in the espionage business, it’s hard to write a good spy novel. The heart of a good spy novel is not the caper but the personal or moral issue facing the protagonist. In a nutshell, that is the spy business, particularly on the clandestine side. You’re constantly asking…
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The idea for my latest novel, You’ll Thank Me For This, came from an article in The New York Times about a Dutch tradition known as “droppings” in which tweens and teens are blindfolded and left in the woods and expected to find their way back using only rudimentary tools such as compasses, maps, the wind and the stars—obviously no smart phones or modern GPS devices. Although I’ve lived in the Netherlands for 15 years, I had never learned about droppings, and although I do contribute regularly to the Times (about art and culture) from here, the article was written by a colleague, Ellen Barry. I asked around and lots of my friends had done a dropping in their youths; thei…
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Before I embarked upon my first ever fiction, I was a writer of non-fiction, of articles, essays, and anything else I could think of to get published. To keep a roof over my head, I also had a day job in outside sales, which gave me an income and a framework to my day, and to be honest, I had the job where I wanted it—I could work my own hours provided I met my targets. The bonus of hard work and good results was more writing time each week, though a magazine assignment sometimes meant clambering out of bed at three in the morning to interview someone in a far-flung country. One day, stuck in traffic on the way to work, waiting for the cars ahead to move, I had an idea f…
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Novelists are not prophets or psychics, clairvoyants or descendants of Nostradamus. They are not supposed to be, at least. But over the years, some have seemed pretty damn close. Dean Koontz once wrote a thriller called, The Eyes of Darkness, which predicted a global pandemic started by a lethal virus called the “Wuhan-400,” originating in Wuhan, China. True, in the original edition published in 1981, the virus was produced in the Soviet Union and it was called the “Gorki-400.” In 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Koontz put out a new edition in which he changed the villain to the Communist Chinese government. Plenty of naysayers say Koontz didn’t get it exa…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Alma Katsu, Red Widow (Putnam) “Katsu, a longtime intelligence analyst for the C.I.A. and N.S.A, writes what she’s most professionally familiar with after years in the paranormal and horror noel trenches. The plotting is sophisticated and laced with surprises, but what stands out most is the emotional core of Lyndsey and Theresa’s alliance, and whether there is room, in a nest of vipers, for true sisterhood.” –The New York Times Book Review Camilla Sten, (transl. Alexandra Fleming), The Lost Village (Minotaur) “Very hard to put down…delivers maximum dread with remarkable restrain…
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There is a widespread misconception that the heroes and villains in life will be marked clearly for all to see; to easily distinguish who we should listen to and who is trying to con us. Media doesn’t help. Just look at superhero films. Captain America and Iron Man wear bright colors, have their identities known to everyone, and are always around to protect innocents despite sometimes causing massive destruction themselves. The villains they fight, on the other hand, are what we’d expect from the truly evil and vile. The Red Skull is a literal Nazi with an almost comical skull for a face. Thanos was a massive purple alien who thought the only way to save the world was to …
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Anti-heroes are the assholes of literature. But they serve a purpose: they teach us something about morality, about nobility, about the line between right and wrong, good and bad. They challenge our own moral compass and get us to think: “What would I do? How would I act? How can I do better?” In my thriller, Do No Harm, my protagonist, Dr. Emma Sweeney, isn’t your traditional anti-hero. She isn’t cool or a bad ass. She isn’t a maverick or some sort of epic mess up. She is no Walter White, cooking up meth and breaking the law with style. She’s just a mom who wants to save her son’s life. And she’s willing to take the law into her own hands to accomplish this goal. She s…
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I just wanted to remind you all of the time, in 2016, when a Norwegian organization called Kongsberg Maritime sent a high-tech robot down into Loch Ness to scan the depths, and it sent back sonar scans of a creature that looked exactly like the Loch Ness monster. Sadly, very sadly, this turned out to be a model of the Loch Ness Monster built for Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which had accidentally sunk into the Loch during filming in 1969. The survey, which BBC’s Steven McKenzie reports was supported by VisitScotland and expert Adrian Shine’s “the Loch Ness Project,” reported that they were positive that the sonar scan had detected the prop a…
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Lone Star Sleuths: An Anthology of Texas Crime Fiction from the Wittliff Collections (UT Press, 2007) included a bibliography of 196 Texas authors, past and present. Likely there are enough now to fill every one of the state’s 254 counties. Among the names—from Texas or writing about Texas—were some of the best in the business: Jim Thompson, Joe R. Lansdale, James Crumley, Rick Riordan, Patricia Highsmith, James Lee Burke, Harry Hunsicker, Rolando Hinojosa, Walter Mosley, Jay Brandon, Kinky Friedman, Lee Child, Dan Jenkins. An updated list today surely would include Attica Locke, Cormac McCarthy, Meg Gardiner, Nic Pizzolatto, Kathleen Kent, Lisa Sandlin, and Fernando Flor…
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In 1961, a dashing young President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was sworn into office amidst world crisis. To greet the new President, East Germany covertly erected the Berlin Wall and Russia launched Yuri Gregorian into Earth orbit from a secret underground bunker. Not to be outdone, CIA trained mercenaries stormed the beaches of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and later assassinated the Dominican President, Rafael Trujillo, in bungled attempts at regime change. Nuclear warheads were bristling at “Fail Safe” designation on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The Cold War was hot and spies were in demand. Espionage fiction was also in demand, led by a dashing British secret agent …
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America wasn’t even three months into Ronald Reagan’s first term when Cutter’s Way came out, but no film of the following decade would provide so indelible a metaphor for the nation’s callous transition from post-Watergate, post-Vietnam angst to the cartoonish nostalgia of Morning in America as when the movie’s eponymous hero, Alexander Cutter (John Heard)—a one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed casualty of our deadly misadventure in Southeast Asia—drunkenly unloads his pistol into a smiling stuffed animal floating in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Released in March of 1981, Cutter’s Way (originally titled Cutter and Bone, after the Newton Thornburg novel of five years prio…
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My book The Note Through the Wire tells the WWII love story of Josefine Lobnik, a Slovene resistance fighter, and Bruce Murray, an Allied prisoner of war. They met by chance when she passed a note through the wire of a POW camp seeking information on her brother Leopold who had been captured by the Nazis. I’ve known about this story for almost 40 years—Bruce and Josefine were my parents-in-law and I learned about their wartime exploits when I was introduced to them over a traditional Slovenian dinner accompanied by more beer, wine and slivovitz than was healthy for any of us. I felt somewhat intimidated being in the company of genuine war heroes but quickly learned that …
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The funeral took place on a Friday. It was ten days into December and the air was grey with sleet. I met Jakob Aasen outside the chapel. At first I hardly recognised him. He had grown a beard and his dark, tightly curled hair was speckled with grey. For an instant we stood looking at one another. Then he smiled tentatively, while I nodded a kind of acknowledgement. ‘Varg?’ I nodded. ‘Jakob…?’ We shook hands. ‘How long is it since we…?’ I shrugged. ‘1965.’ ‘Yes, but … surely we must’ve seen each other since then.’ ‘Couple of times in the street maybe. By chance. Have you been in Bergen the whole time?’ ‘More or less. And you?’ ‘Yes, at any rate since 1970.’ ‘Six…
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I can’t remember when I first heard of Mike Hodges’s seminal 1971 British gangster film, Get Carter, but it was long before I finally managed to see it late one night on cable television in a hotel in Prague in the late 1990s. And it was several more years until I was able to track down a copy of the then relatively rare source novel of the film, Ted Lewis’s Jack’s Return Home, published in 1970. Until the last half decade or so, Get Carter as the book would subsequently be retitled and how it will be referred to it in this piece, along with Lewis’s eight other novels, were all out of print and little known. This is despite the praise heaped on them by luminaries such …
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Psychopaths lie, manipulate and they kill. We’re unlikely to invite them into our homes and offer them a seat at the dinner table. Our families are unlikely to be jumping up and down and planning their wedding outfits if we announced our engagement to a Hannibal Lecter wannabe. We indulge in True Crime documentaries and the serial killer memes are rife on our social media timelines. Psychopaths are everywhere. They infiltrate every moment of our lives. Our demand for the psychopath’s story on our tv screens, bookshelves and group chats shows no signs of abating. Psychologists have given our love for psychopaths a name. Hybistrophilia is a sexual interest in and attractio…
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