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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In my debut thriller, Firekeeper’s Daughter, 18-year-old Daunis witnesses a murder and must use her knowledge of chemistry, traditional Ojibwe medicines, and even hockey to find out who is behind a series of drug-related deaths on her Indian reservation. I don’t shy away from telling a darkly realistic coming-of-age story. But I also include comic moments that are also every bit as real on my reservation. A great grandmother named Granny June who, upon seeing a graffitied billboard—one letter changed to read: VOTE! It’s your tribal eRection—dryly remarks, “I’d vote for that.” I lived and worked for many years in my tribal community in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. One of m…
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Sibling relationships are the stuff of gothic novels. When characters have grown up together from childhood, breathing the same familial atmosphere and inheriting the same assumptions about life, there is always going to be potential for intensity and intrigue. The intimate bond that sisters and brothers share may be a blessing or a curse, but either way it is inescapable. In my own novel, The Whispering House, the central sibling relationship is fraught with anger and guilt, but the protagonist, Freya, cannot move on with her own life until the mystery of her sister’s death is resolved. The gothic novels I’ve chosen here explore the deepest darkest possibilities of sibl…
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Although their partnership had lasted only ten months, Gurney knew more about the personal life of Mike Morgan than that of anyone else he’d worked with in his twenty-five years in the NYPD. From the day he was assigned to replace Gurney’s retiring partner in the homicide division, Morgan had treated him as a confidant—with the result that Gurney had learned more than he wanted to know about the man’s longing for approval from his revered cop father, his reckless relationships with women, his waves of paranoia. He’d also witnessed Morgan’s obsession with superficial orderliness, especially punctuality. So it was no surprise when, at exactly 3:59 p.m., a black Chevy Tahoe…
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“Can I come in?” asked Fazio. “Yeah, come on in. So you’re only getting back now?” “Chief, would you believe it if I told you I didn’t even have time to eat lunch?” “Where were you?” “Still at Trincanato’s.” “Did something happen?” “First, two of Spagnolo’s kids came. Spagnolo was the worker who hung himself. But the guards didn’t want to let them into the hangar.” “Are they minors?” “No way! One’s thirty, the other’s twenty-eight. Both without jobs. Sacked. At any rate, things could have got out of hand if we hadn’t been there . . .” “And then what?” “And then, when the prosecutor and Dr. Pasquano were done and the body was taken away, Giurlanno, Spagnolo’s old…
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The front cover of the 1997 edition of Lolita, the one I’ve dog-eared and underlined, features a black-and-white photograph of the lower half of an adolescent girl wearing bobby socks, saddle shoes, and a very short skirt, one leg self-consciously—or coyly—bent. The accompanying blurb, from Vanity Fair, proclaims that this novel is “the only convincing love story of our century.” The publisher’s ad copy on the back describes it as “a meditation on love.” The description on the book’s Amazon page calls the relationship between Humbert Humbert, in his late thirties, and twelve-year-old Lolita “a love affair,” “a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows,…
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For the past ten years I have lived in Oxford, MS, which is most famous for being the hometown of William Faulkner and John Grisham, neither of whom live here anymore. When I moved to Oxford with my husband Chris Offutt, I expected the place would be steeped in their legends, and it is. What surprised me was finding ourselves embraced by a living, vibrant community of writers. All we had to do was wander into City Grocery Bar, two doors down from the beating heart of our town, Square Books, and find all the crime writers there: William Boyle, Tom Franklin, Ace Atkins, the poet Derrick Harriell, whose short story won an Edgar last year, Michael Farris Smith, Matt Bondurant…
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Ten years ago, I came across a true story that enthralled me like no other: the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from a remote post in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, over Christmas 1900. The mystery itself was fascinating enough—the abandoned, ghostly lighthouse; two stopped clocks; and the Principal Keeper’s weather log recounting a terrible storm when there had been no such thing—but the setting made it irresistible. I’ve long been drawn to the sea, its wild splendor and changing moods, the secretive depths that call us on a voyage of discovery. This real-life event roped together all I love to get lost in as a reader, and I knew I had to tell it. An author’s c…
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From the moment I began writing fiction, I knew my stories would be fantasies. I’ve always read widely and enjoyed a variety of genres, but I hold a special place in my heart for magical stories that feel as though they might just be real. A childhood love for C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle led me, as an adult, to authors like Gabriel García Márquez, Alice Hoffman, and Neil Gaiman. My debut novel, The Memory Collectors, is firmly grounded in our world, with a little bit of magic woven throughout. It tells the tale of two women with a shared gift: they can sense the emotions left behind on objects. Each of them is haunted by events in their pasts, and when they meet, the…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Melissa Ginsburg, The House Uptown (Flatiron) “Melissa Ginsburg’s page-turner is a devastatingly simple trap: characters so beguiling you settle in for a charming coming-of-age fable before realizing the spring is snapping shut on an inexorable and satisfying calamity. The theme is the-past-isn’t-dead-it-isn’t-even-past, but painted not with Faulkner’s heavy hand so much as with the crisp ingenuity of Ross Macdonald.” –Jonathan Lethem, Harlan Coben, Win (Grand Central) “Twisty—and we’d expect no less from the author of hot thrillers like Tell No One and Missing You.” –AARP Nadi…
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Fire Bones begins with a mystery: a Lebanese-American ferry pilot and Pentecostal preacher from the Arkansas Delta named Amra Boustani goes missing after a transatlantic flight. Back home, a poet named Greg Brownderville and a filmmaker named Bart Weiss investigate her disappearance, crossing paths with the townspeople of Thisaway, Arkansas: Amra’s friends, a ragtag bunch of outsiders and misfits and schemers, men and women who have walked out of a medieval pilgrimage tale into the carnivalesque contemporary Deep South. But what exactly is Fire Bones? Let’s start with what it isn’t. It doesn’t seem to be a chair or a telescope. It’s not a fake Christmas tree or one of …
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She slept naked. Dates with her psychiatrist were scrawled in a diary beside her bed, and it was her psychiatrist, in the end, who would find her lifeless body. She was thirty-six years old. A broken marriage, affairs with married men—but all of that was public knowledge. What wasn’t public was the problems with drugs and alcohol: amphetamines and barbituates, mostly, including old-fashioned sleeping tablets known as “knock-out drops.” Recently there had been lapses in personal hygiene: her toes and fingernails were unkempt, and her teeth were in a state of decay. She was not well, had not been well for some time. Most of the drugs had been prescribed to help with her me…
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In the spring of 2019, long before the global pandemic hijacked the news, the FBI’s Operation Varsity Blues (OVB) college admissions scandal dominated the headlines for months. Jaws dropped around the world as rich and famous parents were indicted for faking sports resumes, cheating on standardized tests, and paying huge sums in bogus philanthropic contributions to guarantee golden admission tickets for their offspring. The incessant news coverage continued with each plea deal struck and prison sentence meted out. A few years before OVB made headlines, we’d begun exploring the parental college admissions battleground—the crown jewel of competitive parenting. We’d observe…
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Well, so here’s March again, and we are coming up on our one-year anniversary of pandemic lockdown (with a way too brief respite last summer). People are getting weird. Maybe it’s the endless ice and snow, rain and hail, lather rinse repeat of the Canadian winter, but I find myself and hear other people talking to people just to talk. Torontonians are not chatty, but suddenly everyone from the pharmacy (Shoppers, the Duane Reade of Toronto) to the ice cream place (Ed’s Real Scoop) is small talking up a storm. Such are the constraints of the way we live now. But there are books—yes, thank you for the books, we need them even if we have gotten into the habit of jumping pro…
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“Think Downton Abbey meets Sneakers, but in World War II!” That’s how a Hollywood bigwig might pitch the story of Bletchley Park, a remote English country manor stuffed with codebreakers, all laboring under dire secrecy to break the supposedly unbreakable Axis military codes. But Bletchley Park’s extraordinary achievements are no Hollywood screenwriter’s fever dream; they’re real…and would never have happened without thousands of extraordinary women. A university campus, a Wonderland, “the biggest bloody lunatic asylum in Britain”: BP, as it was casually known by insiders, resembled all three. A Victorian country house chosen for its remote location and its railway proxi…
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Once upon a time. In a deep, dark wood. In a kingdom far away. These fairy tale beginnings and so much more speak to a place and time very long ago. How many of us ever wonder if these places and those stories were real? Were there inklings of nonfiction embedded into the words of fairy tales we have come to know so dearly? The last lines in “Cinderella” are not “And they lived happily ever after.” The last lines in “Cinderella” are: “And thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness all their days.” This punishment was of course applied to the wicked sisters, and shortly before the tale ended we learned that “pigeons pecked out one eye fr…
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How can a mystery weave a tale about the human psyche? Can the unravelling of plot and the unravelling of human desires occur simultaneously in a story? Those questions were humming away in the background of my mind as I set about writing my debut novel. For authors who write to explore the human condition, they’re often pressing concerns. Characters may need a plot, but plot also needs character—I wanted to tie a story of crime into a tale about the messiness of human psychology, the complexity of private grudges, and all the joy and anguish of foiled desires. Diving into motivation helped me to bring it all together. A look back through literature shows that stories a…
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The setting is easily visualized: a leaf-starred campus, buildings beset with ivy, dorms packed with teenagers who may have just met for the first time but for whom friendship feels instant and intense. It’s a time of life when everything feels like the most important thing that will ever happen, each mistake monumental in scope and each victory a magnified triumph. It’s a heady cocktail of intellectual challenges, emotional complexity, a dynamic social life—maybe even a public reckoning. With these memories so easily conjured, is it any wonder that we’re so drawn to campus novels, and thrillers in particular? In my debut adult novel, The Girls Are All So Nice Here, eigh…
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Most mystery lovers know of Wilkie Collins, beloved for his classics “The Woman in White” and “The Moonstone,” old-fashioned tales meant to be savored page-by-page by the fire late at night. Beyond that, however, one might accuse readers of what amounts to criminal neglect. The evidence? While the two classics noted above have hundreds of thousands of ratings and thousands of reader reviews at goodreads.com, and their titles can be dropped into conversations among book readers with confidence that others will have read them, or at least plan to, the same cannot be said for his many other works. “No Name” and “Armadale,” both excellent novels written during the same creat…
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As a historian of American crime, I spend an unhealthy amount of time poring over old newspapers—in archives, on microfilm, and, increasingly, online. While researching a book on Belle Gunness—the infamous “Lady Bluebeard” who slaughtered an indeterminate number of victims at her Indiana “murder farm” in the early twentieth century—I had occasion to consult the July 7, 1902, issue of the Fort Wayne Daily News. Along with stories on a strike by twelve hundred railroad freight workers, a visit to the United States by the Crown Prince of Siam, a local man who survived a shark attack while swimming off a pier in Atlantic City, and an elderly “negress” who inherited four hund…
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Perhaps it makes me a cliché, my bookshelf bursting with le Carré, Follett, Clancy, and Ludlum. Like many of my ilk—spinners of spy stories, that is—I grew up reading the classics. Give me a cloak-and-dagger, cat-and-mouse twisty tale any day. Modern critics might lambast the trope-filled material, but I still find sparkling nuggets of originality buried within the familiar character archetypes and well-worn plot arcs. That said, this foundational espionage literature shares a great deal of common DNA. These novels are intelligent, often witty, and almost entirely about defeating the Soviets. Then, when that ugly wall crashed down, we ticked ahead on the cosmological tim…
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I’m just going to write from the heart here. I had a plan for this piece, which has been simmering inside me for quite a while. It was going to be a feel-good story with a happy outcome, or at least a few answers, but here’s the thing, I don’t have any answers. It’s Day 362 of my lockdown and French Kiss still isn’t available to stream anywhere. As in nowhere, not on any major streaming services, not as an individual title available for purchase on Amazon, not On Demand, nowhere, gone. And it’s eating me up. Okay I’ll take a step back. Why are you reading about this on a site dedicated to crime fiction? Well, glad you asked. French Kiss is a crime film. It may be a pictu…
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Way back in the semi-mythical mists of Roman time, for the first three hundred years of Rome’s existence, there was no written law. What was and wasn’t legal was up to the king, and then, when kings were booted to the kerb, to the priests. In 451 BCE, however, it was decided, for whatever reason, that this situation was not a sustainable or useful way forward for Rome. Romans being Romans, a fundamentally pragmatic people, they decided to set up a committee to deal with the situation. This committee, of ten men with consular imperium, put together ten tablets of laws and then bolted on another two tablets the following year. These were known as the Twelve Tables and they …
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My favorite thrillers revolve around the complexities of female relationships, twisted family dynamics, and unreliable, often unlikeable female characters. There is nothing more satisfying than a thriller layered with juicy secrets. But these characters are also notoriously difficult to craft. Readers are naturally drawn to sympathetic protagonists. And from a larger societal standpoint, there is more pressure for women to handle the weight of the world with grace than men. For example, the alcoholic male detective is a very common trope in crime fiction, and the detective is generally portrayed and received as sympathetic—he’s got a difficult job, after all. We understan…
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When I sit down to watch a movie, it’s almost always going to be something in the horror genre. It’s my most binged and my go-to. There’s something addictive about being scared—the type of scared where you’re tucked up in bed with your fluffy pajamas and a bowl of popcorn, I mean. Within the genre, there’s one trope that I can’t get enough of—summer camps! Isolating people, sometimes strangers, in a camp, miles from the safety of home, and making something or someone come after them is such a brilliant idea. There’s no escape, because the trucks or the boats are always broken, and all you can do is try to survive. I’ve watched many camp movies, and nothing produced in t…
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As I near the airport, I see the police presence that tells me another demonstration is under way. Development for the new runway started three months ago, and periodically a cluster of protesters forms near Arrivals to make their feelings known. They’re no trouble, in the main, and—although I’d never go on record with this—I sympathize with them. I just think they’re going after the wrong target. We’ve created a world in which we need to fly—that can’t change now. Better, surely, to tackle the factory emissions, the landfill? I think guiltily of the daily wet wipes I use and resolve to dig out my Clarins again. A banner’s been stretched across the road. plains not plane…
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