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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Every writer likes to think they’re a psychologist. Inventing a character means having at least a cursory sense of their backstory, motivations, past traumas—the history that makes them unlike every other person in this world. By definition, writers are observers and people-watchers, and most of us believe that this gives us an uncommon understanding of what makes them tick. But Jonathan Kellerman really is a psychologist. Prior to his career as a novelist, he worked as a staff psychologist and clinical professor of pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine and then opened a private practice. He is now a clinical professor of pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine, but…
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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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Josh Kendall is the executive editor of Mulholland Books. Josh works with some of my current favorite writers: Jordan Harper, Gabino Iglesias, Walter Mosley, Michael Koryta, Joe Landsdale, Michael Farris Smith, and many, many more. With Shop Talk lumbering along into its third year, I decided it might be nice to mix things up. Considering the aforementioned laundry list of all-star authors, Josh seemed like a good place to start. The main goal of this column has always been to delve deeper into the work. That’s what interests me most, how people in this industry make books. How they’re written. How they’re revised. And now, for the first-time in Shop Talk history—how t…
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There is comfort in reading a whodunnit led by a talented detective. We know what we’re getting with a Sherlock or a Miss Marple—the next moment of genius is a few paragraphs away, and the villain will be unmasked in the end. But I’m not here to talk about that sort of book. I’m here for the reluctant detectives, the unlucky souls dragged toward clues kicking and screaming. They have better things to do with their time than chasing wayward criminals, but are given no other choice. This dilemma delivers an edge of adventure, wondering what crazy thing they’ll do next, either willingly or by force. The reluctant sleuth is not usually a genius, and often is a bit of a mess…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephen King, Holly (Scribner) “A tour de force. Creepy as hell but full of heart, too.” –Linwood Barclay Craig Johnson, The Longmire Defense (Viking) “[A] standout . . . The whodunit, which presents a dizzying number of red herrings, is one of Johnson’s trickiest, keeping readers deliciously off-balance throughout. Series newcomers will have no problem jumping into the action, and longtime readers will relish the dive into Longmire’s family history.” –Publishers Weekly Kaira Rouda, Beneath the Surface (Thomas & Mercer) “When the wealthy patriarch of a family business …
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Of mythological figures of antiquity, none are more monstrous than harpies, furies, gorgons—Scylla and Charybdis, Lamia, Chimera, Sphinx—nightmare creatures representing, to the affronted male gaze, the perversion of “femininity”: the female who in her physical being repulses sexual desire, rather than arousing it; the female who has repudiated the traditional role of submission, subordination, maternal nurturing. Since these fantasy figures have been created by men, we can assume that the female monster is a crude projection of male fears; she is the embodiment of female power uncontrolled by the male, who has most perversely taken on some of the qualities of the male he…
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In my new novel SLEEPING GIANTS, the director of a children’s home uses a draconian new treatment method. Despite being without any scientific backing, this treatment has been heralded as the latest cure for troubled children. It’s cruel, invasive, and dangerous, and has already been implicated in the deaths of several children. Like so many who commit harm, the director is convinced she is doing the right thing. She thinks she is helping, not hindering. She believes she is on the right side. Even as her harm becomes obvious, she refuses to admit she is wrong. Instead, she doubles down, and commits even more violence to protect herself. It’s an issue that haunts me, as …
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This month’s psychological thrillers are divided between white-knuckle tension and laugh-out-loud social commentary. Some are close to horror in their high stakes and visceral violence; others use murder as a jumping off point to explore ordinary emotions in a dramatic environment. You’ll see old favorites mixed in with new and rising voices, each worthy of your appreciation as they contribute to a subgenre at the peak of its popularity, and showing no sign of slowing down any time soon. Tracy Sierra, Nightwatching (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking) Tracy Sierra has done the impossible: changed my mind about the home invasion thriller. In Nightwatching, a young widow is sh…
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Sometimes novels inadvertently reflect some aspect of the current zeitgeist, and Irish writer Claire Coughlan’s first one is this kind of story. Set in 1968 during the Christmas season, Where They Lie is a complex tale with a large cast—both living and dead—about the mysterious disappearance in 1943 of a theatre actress, Julia Bridges, and a former mid-wife, Gloria Fitzpatrick, who may or may not have played a role in that disappearance. Gloria was also a patron of the theatre where Julia performed. While never charged with a crime related to Julia’s disappearance, in 1956 Gloria was sentenced to hang for performing a backstreet abortion. Fast forward to the night befo…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Don Winslow, City in Ruins (William Morrow) “With City in Ruins, Winslow wraps up a spectacular crime fiction trilogy: a sweeping story that morphs and expands over time.” –Washington Post Harry Dolan, Don’t Turn Around (Atlantic Monthly) “Canny spine-tingler Dolan brings his pot to such a rolling boil of violence and shocking revelations halfway through that you may wonder what could possibly follow . . . Go ahead and suspend your disbelief. Every shiver will tell you it’s worth it.” –Kirkus Reviews Helen Monks Takhar, Nothing Without Me (Random House) “Monks Takhar explo…
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With crime readers ever worshipping at the stacks of dark academia (myself among them), is it any wonder that the category’s wicked pen has bled onto neighboring shelves? Its fatal quill planting itself into the backs of unwitting genres? In fact, if we wander just beyond dark academia’s oak-paneled recesses and shadowy archives, in the direction of the science quad, the classroom merges with the laboratory to reveal a cache of academically ambitious mysteries and thrillers I like to think of as dark science. Don’t call it science-fiction—although there may be some crossover—and you wouldn’t mistake it for dark academia’s touchstone, The Secret History, either, although w…
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Pharaoh Ramesses II was an unrepentant warmonger and slaver, but he is also credited with building the earliest known library in the 1200s BCE. To paraphrase the equally problematic Walt Whitman, he contained multitudes. Inscribed in stone over the sacred library doors was a Greek phrase meaning “healing place of the soul.” Rather elegant for a man who almost certainly married at least four of his daughters, but I can’t argue the point. Stories heal. Books save lives. I’m proof, and odds are, some of you are too. The first book I remember finding myself in was Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Like Jonas, I had seen things I could never unsee, things I could not explain to other k…
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If there is one truth in this life, it’s this: in Texas, it’s hot as hell in the summer. Scorching, unrelenting, and punishing, summertime calls for icy swimming holes, cold beer, and most of all, scorching thrillers. Lowdown Road by Scott Von Doviak “Pursuit doesn’t get any hotter” is the tagline for Doviak’s latest, masterful white-knuckle suspense, a Dukes of Hazard-esque thrill ride set in the summer of 1974 in which two cousins form a plan to drive a taco truck full of marijuana, stolen, nonetheless, across state lines to where Evil Knievel aims to jump over the Snake River on his motorcycle. The NYTimes recently raved, “with its’ hapless good ol’ boy antiheroes …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Keith Rosson, Fever House (Random House) “[A] whirlwind mystery . . . that hurls [Rosson’s] genre-slashing ambition into the stratosphere.” –NPR Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam) “[A] sensitive tale of reconstructed lives and reexamined choices….Alam’s vivid descriptions of Karachi, nuanced characters, and deft ability to delve into big ideas while keeping the story moving make this an emotionally engaging read.” –Booklist Isabelle Autissier (transl. Gretchen Schmid), Suddenly “There’s no question about it: Isabelle Autissier is an excellent writer. . . . When it …
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Romcom mystery is a genre that perfectly blends whodunit, wit, grit, romance and laugh-out-loud moments. With quirky female protagonists desperately trying to navigate life’s complexities, these stories come alive with characters you can’t help but cheer for as they come up against extraordinary events in their ordinary lives. Whether they are waitresses, actresses, nurses, lawyers, or food anthropologists, they manage to keep their humor in situations that are often far from laughable. Lighter on crime and heavier on humor, romcom mysteries can sometimes border on madcap but still deliver the same rollercoaster ride of thrills, spills, red herrings, twists and turns of…
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I’m not sure what the lowest point in my “fertility journey” has been. Was it the time I bought herbal gummies from Target that the garish pink label claimed had been prayed over? Was it all the increasingly personal, desperate posts I read through in the forum of my fertility app — which is apparently being investigated by the FTC? Or was it during one of the several horror movies about motherhood I’ve recently watched in which I found myself jealously musing, “Who cares if I give birth to a demon child? I’d love it anyway!” Because there have been a lot of horror movies about having babies these days, and, for some reason, their makers think we’re all more scared of cre…
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When I started writing a novel about conspiracy theorists, I had a pretty good idea what to make of them. I was a cynic. I had followed the lawsuit brought against Alex Jones by the families of the Sandy Hook victims. I had read tweets doubting the authenticity of the bombing at the Manchester Evening News Arena in 2017, where 22 people were killed in my hometown. I started writing Day One in lockdown, as I watched anti-vax protestors target medicine watchdogs, hospitals and NHS test centers. I walked past lampposts where their stickers were pasted, describing immunization and face masks as the Incremental Steps to Total Enslavement. I rolled my eyes and kept walking. Bu…
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In the theatre, plays used to be divided into comedy and tragedy. Historically, however, comedies weren’t necessarily funny—instead, to quote Oscar Wilde, ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means’. This definition of comedy has faded into the past, but it’s useful to return to when unpicking why comic fiction has come to be contrasted not with tragedy or drama, but with ‘serious’ works. This would be fine if by ‘serious’ we meant sincere, solemn or earnest. But all too often ‘serious’ is understood to denote fiction that is substantial, thoughtful, demanding and meriting deep consideration – with the implication that, by contrast, comic …
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You’re reading a mystery. You want to know whodunnit. You follow the detective—maybe it’s a cop or a PI, maybe it’s an amateur sleuth forced into circumstances to play that role—as they unearth clue after clue. Eventually, they identify the villain. How? By marshalling evidence. Maybe there are fingerprints. A witness. DNA. A confession in the penultimate chapter. You as the reader finally arrive at that elusive thing, The Truth. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? All mysteries are, in a way, a search for truth. Hell, fiction in general is such a search—mysteries are just a tad more bold about it. We read to learn something about ourselves, the people around us, t…
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Once a place of movie-making fantasy, a decaying movie set became the starting point for vengeance on Hollywood. Known as “Spahn Ranch,” this crumbling and deserted Western soundstage was the ramshackle home and headquarters for what eventually became known as “The Family.” The moniker represented the delinquent and motley crew of outcasts who abandoned their suburban and city lives to follow the scripture according to Charles Manson. There, living away from society and hidden away in the San Bernadino Valley, Manson and his Family came to commit the unthinkable in the summer of 1969. The carnage started on August 8 when the clan brutally killed pregnant actress Sharon …
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‘Laughter is poison to fear,’ said George R. R. Martin in A Game of Thrones. ‘To laugh is to dispel the darkness,’ agreed Isobelle Carmody in The Gathering. Both insightful quotes that speak to a universal truth. Fear is allayed the instant we laugh at the source of it, and what better way to cope with the inevitable horrors of life? Unfortunately, if you’re a writer of mystery thrillers and you like to blend a dark, creeping sense of terror with humor, the fact a single laugh can cancel out the tense anticipation you’ve built up over thousands of words, is one huge bummer. This dilemma stalked me while I wrote my latest novel The Mysterious Case of The Alperton Angels.…
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Mary Kubica is a very private person. So private, in fact, no one but her husband knew she’d started writing a novel, The Good Girl. And even then, she didn’t let him read her manuscript. She fell in love with writing when she was almost a teenager, she says. “It was one of those things that when I discovered it, I never stopped…It was very much a hobby for me. I never thought it was something I would pursue.” She studied history and English in college and took one creative writing class where she wouldn’t even share her written musings with classmates. After college she taught history in the Chicago suburbs to high school freshmen and juniors. Standing in front of a c…
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Authenticity is a big issue in literature. Who wants to read a fake? Nadie. Nobody! Now, when discussing English texts, the topic of authenticity tends to focus on how to express in this language events or dialogues that happen in another. My previous piece, “Writing with an Accent,” was precisely about how I used a foreign language (Spanish) to preserve authenticity without compromising understanding in my novel Death under the Perseids, which takes place in Havana. But I have also encountered the opposite problem—how to write realistic-sounding scenes from the point of view of an American character, considering that I am not American myself and English isn’t my first l…
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Each month, CrimeReads/me celebrates the art of the translated novel with a roundup of the best new international crime fiction releases. The list below is divided between horror, thrillers, dystopia, and satire, each driven by a moral force, for one of the most wide-ranging selections of texts I’ve ever included in this column. As the art of translation continues to be under siege, it is more important than ever to value the hard-working translators bringing international voices to new readers, and I would like to extend my utmost appreciation to these professionals. Asako Yuzuki, Butter Translated by Polly Barton (Ecco) In this sumptuous tale, a gourmand hedonist …
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For more than three decades I have worked in prisons, in secure units in hospitals, and in the community, acting in both assessment and treatment roles and working with female and male patients. I initially trained in clinical psychology, using treatment models including cognitive behavioral therapy (a talking therapy that focuses on identifying and altering harmful patterns of behavior and thinking patterns) and the psychodynamic approach, which seeks to help an individual access and then understand their unconscious thoughts and feelings. But the vast majority of my work has been in the field of forensic psychotherapy, which brings the psychoanalytic approach into the f…
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