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 Canadian Paradox Some places in the world are what they call “low-trust societies.” The political institutions are fragile and corrupt, business practices are dodgy, debts are rarely repaid, and people, rightly, fear being ripped off on any transaction. In the “high-trust societies,” conversely, businesses are honest, laws are fair and consistently enforced, and the majority of people can go about their day in the knowledge that the overall level of integrity in economic life is very high. With that in mind, given what we know about the following two countries, why is it that the Canadian financial sector is so fraud-ridden that Joe Queenan, writing in Forbes magazin…
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During the late-1960s, with Los Angeles’ skies still blotted by poisonous smog, an angry mother fastened a sign in her station wagon that you never would’ve imagined in the planet’s car capital. “This GM,” her placard read, “is a killing machine.” Intended as an activist war cry, her words by the end of the next decade carried a more diabolical meaning. Predators were no longer only skulking neighborhood back alleys or through unlatched windows to snatch up their quarry. They were adopting their own vehicles as murder accomplices, exploiting Southern California’s go-anywhere roadways to create distance between themselves and the corpses they left behind. For these dark…
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In July 1992, Guido Brunetti arrived as a new protagonist on the mystery scene in Donna Leon’s first novel, Death at La Fenice, which combined her love of opera with her gift for character and her deep appreciation of Venice. Kirkus Reviews called it “deftly plotted and smoothly written,” and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch proclaimed it was “a challenging mystery, a sophisticated drama.” Each year since, a new Brunetti story has appeared, redolent of family and food, exploring the ambiguities of guilt and justice, each at the same high standard Leon established at the start. Transient Desires, published today, March 9, 2021, is her 30th book in the series in 30 years—a rem…
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I am obsessed with Italy. I am obsessed with France. I am obsessed with anything Mediterranean. My screensavers are of Greek islands, Italian cypress trees, French vineyards. I gobble down books set in the area and visit as often as I can. As a young girl, I dreamed of a honeymoon on the isle of Crete—simply because I’d read a story set there as a child. And the Mediterranean is in my blood. My family is Italian and live in the Piedmont region, and I find any excuse to visit. So it’s not a surprise that my latest novel is set off the coast of Italy. It’s the story of a destination wedding gone badly awry, a tale of murder, and obsession, and twisted love, set on a fictio…
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After Duso left, Brunetti began to consider how best to go about questioning Vio’s uncle. He could present himself unexpectedly at the office of the transport company and ask to speak to Signor Borgato, or he could arrive with the full panoply of the law: visit not announced, police launch with an armed officer as well as the pilot, demands in place of suggestions. And certainly more trouble for Marcello. Brunetti had always loathed, above all, bullies: he despised their arrogance, their contempt for people weaker than they, and their calm assurance that they were to have more of everything for the asking or taking. To oppose them was to provoke them, and to provoke them…
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“Give me a decent bottle of poison,” Agatha Christie reportedly said, “and I’ll construct the perfect crime.” As it turns out, she did it countless times: nearly half of Christie’s 85 mystery novels involve poison. And these are not fictional poisons, nor passing references; on the contrary, her toxins are well-known to science and often placed at the very heart of her stories. Christie’s ingenious ability to build complex narratives around poison—including their administration and macabre effects—was due, in part, to her time as a war nurse during WWI. In 1917, she passed the examinations required to qualify her an apothecary’s assistant. During this time in the hospita…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Laurie Flynn, The Girls Are All So Nice Here (Simon and Schuster) “A sharp, pitch-black thriller that takes the mean-girls trope to another level.” –Kirkus Donna Leon, Transient Desires (Atlantic Monthly Press) “Atmospheric . . . The action builds to a thrilling denouement involving coast guard boats and navy commandos.” –Publishers Weekly J.T. Ellison, Her Dark Lies (MIRA) “Mesmerizing…Fans of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca will want to check out this compulsively readable tale.” –Publishers Weekly Kate Quinn, The Rose Code (William Morrow) “Quinn (The Huntress) retu…
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The historical roles of women in combat during the Second World War have always interested me. When I started my research into the women who served their countries for my upcoming novel, The Paris Apartment, I was introduced early to the biographies and memoirs of women in combat on the Eastern European front, where the war had come to the cities and towns with unspeakable savagery and a shocking number of casualties for both civilians and soldiers. From this horror emerged lethal snipers such as Klavdiya Kalugina, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, and Roza Shanina. Sergeant Mariya Oktyabrskaya was awarded the Soviet Union’s highest award for bravery during combat at the helm of her…
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I’ve always loved my science fiction/fantasy and romance with a touch of suspense—and lots of action. Those are the types of stories I gravitate towards in the books I read and the movies I watch, and they’re the stories I have the most fun writing. When I first thought about the GhostWalker series, I knew I wanted it to revolve around a group of soldiers who have super-human abilities as the result of a secret experiment. From telekinesis to DNA modifications, the GhostWalkers have seen a lot of paranormal activity, and most of the science fiction is based on real science somewhere along the way—including the seventeenth installment in the series, out this March, Lightni…
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When you think ‘Boston Noir,’ you probably think of The Departed or The Town or, David Ortiz help us, Boondock Saints. The best of Boston noir is a different shade of darkness than the more traditional film noir. (And that’s pretty damn dark.) Add on extra layers of guilt and a strong religious presence, and you’ve got something unique. While filming in Massachusetts has become more prevalent in recent years, for decades there wasn’t much of film production in the state. All the films listed below were made in these darker days, when seeing the streets of Boston on screen was a rarer occurrence. These roots of film noir run deep and include some early examples of on-loc…
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We’re a year into the pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of city dwellers have fled their urban apartments for suburban spaces. It is, if you live outside the city limits, a seller’s market. New York City, where I live, is in the middle of an all-time low-rent bonanza. It is a crazy time for real estate, that’s no doubt. If you’re like me, the pandemic has increased your habit of casually browsing Zillow and Realtor.com listings (well, I look at StreetEasy, a site for NY real estate only, but you get the picture), wondering what it would feel like to leave my apartment and swap it for a bigger space. I have dogs who would love a backyard. I would love a bigger closet, or, i…
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At the risk of sounding like an imposter myself, I have to ask: What is crime fiction? This is not, perhaps, a question that someone who has just published a crime novel ought to be asking. But the more I think about it, the more trouble I have answering it. The genre’s borders are decidedly blurry. Is a crime novel simply a novel whose plot involves a criminal act? Perhaps we ought to throw in a measure of suspense too. But in that case, Ian McEwan’s Atonement (winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award) should be found on the “mystery and thrillers” shelf along with Gillian Flynn and Jane Harper. Graham Greene famously drew a distinction between his thrille…
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Quiet Time, my first mystery, was a fictionalized version of the brutal murder of a suburban housewife. Not just any housewife, but Betty Frye, on the eve of my marriage to her son. Back in 1973, he and I were college students at CU in Boulder, practicing karate and living together on the Hill. The morning Betty was murdered, I spoke with her; hours later, I saw her killer. Her death made me a crime writer. Quiet Time was my lab for learning fiction craft. The manuscript underwent twenty-odd drafts, each more heavily fictionalized. I wasn’t imaginative enough to invent brand-new characters, though I did change the killer. And the ending was entirely made up, since in rea…
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On Christmas Eve, 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Republic of France, boarded his coach bound for the Paris Opera. His coachman, César, was drunk, and sped recklessly past a cart piled with hay partially blocking the street. Seconds later, the cart exploded. A hundred yards behind, a second coach carrying Bonaparte’s wife, Josephine—delayed by her decision to change scarves—felt the force of the blast, which shattered her window and sent a shard of glass slicing across the hand of her daughter, a fellow passenger. Josephine’s sister-in-law was hurled against the side of the coach, seriously injuring her unborn child. The cask was packed tight with gunpowd…
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I started working at my local library two years ago. After a decade spent in the city, I knew I wasn’t happy and so left the world of finance behind in order to concentrate on writing. It wasn’t planned. I was called into my boss’s office and offered a promotion, and right there and then decided to quit. I’d recently read a book by the author John Hart, and subsequently an interview in which he talked about turning his back on a successful law career in order to spend more time writing. It was hugely inspiring. My wife was a student at the time, and pregnant, and had no idea I wanted to write a book. She was very supportive (and is slowly learning to love me again). I…
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There’s nothing more delicious than a good scandal, and the best scandals are practically a cottage industry, spawning books, movies, even the odd opera or two. Here are six of my favorite scandals and the novels that bring them to life. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes Oh, how they must have gossiped when the original Real Housewife of Sparta ran off with a younger man! I’m talking, of course, about one of the most legendary scandals in history—Helen and Paris. It’s often referred to as an abduction, but most versions show Helen an active participant, throwing off her arranged marriage for an elopement with a sexy Trojan prince. We don’t know if it was historical o…
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The rule of thumb in book publishing is simple: Unless your name is Harper Lee, your first novel will not be your best and most likely won’t be a bestseller either. All other mere mortals in the world must rely on a well-measured publishing axiom known as the learning curve. Tom Straw is no exception to the rule for first-time authors, but the rest of his publishing career broke every rule in the book. The first rule he broke was his identity. It was a closely held secret for seven years. This seven-time New York Times bestselling author (yes, he hit number one), was only outed in recent years and has earned the moniker as the best unknown author on the New York Times li…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Benjamin Wood, A Station on the Path to Something Better (Europa) Benjamin Wood’s emotional noir about a young boy taken on a desperate road trip by his estranged father is as beautifully written as its title is long. The father promises to take his son to the set of a popular TV series he claims to work on, but the journey turns into anything but, as the father’s untruths catch up with him and he resorts to violence to salvage his self-worth. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor Melissa Ginsburg, The House Uptown (Flatiron) In The Hous…
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My brother, an avid backpacker, carries a satellite phone with him in the backcountry. I suppose it is meant for emergencies, although I’m not sure he’s ever used it for that purpose. The most recent message our siblings text thread received from that phone was a joke about how long he would wait in line for an In-N-Out double-double. I thought about this as I read Zoje Stage’s essay “How Do You Write an Isolation Thriller When Everybody Is Connected All The Time?” It is a very good question, one I have been turning over in my head since I read that piece a few weeks ago. My first, and most flippant, reaction was to think, “You set it in space”—which is admittedly a rath…
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I heard about Tony Costa weeks before I met him. I was seven that summer of 1966, when Mom got the job at the Royal Coachman and the three of us shared a single room on the first floor near the office. Louisa and I did our best to stay out of her hair, and whenever I could, I’d tag along behind Cecelia as she made her rounds through the rooms. If she wasn’t humming some church hymn, she was talking about “my Tony.” “When my Tony gets back from his trip, I’ll have him come over and meet you.” “My Tony is a good man.” “I raised my Tony by myself after his father died in the war.” She didn’t say what war, but I figured it was a long time ago and far away. Cecelia talked ab…
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A horse is a horse is a horse is a horse, except in a Western, in which a horse is a horse while also often embodying something deeply metaphorical. Wildness. Freedom. Beauty. Livelihood. Domestication. Friendship. Innocence. Anyway, I watch Westerns worried for the horses. The job of the horse in a Western is to be both ordinary and special—ubiquitous vehicles as much as they are close companions. Sometimes they are a simple ride out of town. Sometimes they are the cowboy’s only friend in the world. In the Western, no figure is more vulnerable than the horse, particularly because eliminating the horse both incapacitates and exposes the cowboy, who is usually the real ta…
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I was in seventh grade when I picked up The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, and my strongest memory of the book is showing my classmate some inventive swear words in the dialog and giggling about it. I’d been reading science fiction for over two years at that point, but Crichton was my introduction to the sci-fi thriller subgenre. I discovered a love for stories with suspense and high action. Fast forward about three decades, and my first novel fits that same profile. While looking for comp titles (i.e. books with a similar style and theme), I noticed something that’s followed me for much of my life: the best known authors of science fiction thrillers are white men.…
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I grew up near three hundred wild acres that contained woodland, marshland, rocky coves, granite ledge, and a mysterious grave. My sisters and I spent countless hours exploring when we were young—fishing for snapper blues and blue crabs, searching for owl pellets, collecting bouquets of wildflowers and marsh grass—so when the time came for me to set The Shadow Box in a wild landscape, that was the one I knew I had to write about. In the novel, Claire Beaudry Chase has been attacked and left for dead. She has to hide out and stay alive, and she uses her own instincts, her knowledge of the woods and shore, and skills taught to her by her father. Her husband is a state pro…
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“He hadn’t wanted to come here. He’d wanted it less and less as the bus traveled further across the wasteland; miles of nothing, just land, empty land. Land that didn’t get anywhere except into more land, and always against the sky the unmoving barrier of mountains. It was like moving into a trap.” The man we know only as Sailor has arrived in Santa Fe at an inauspicious moment: it’s Fiesta weekend. Sailor is a Chicago gangster, single-mindedly hunting his former patron, a U.S. Senator named Douglass: he believes Douglass has cheated him out of a substantial amount of money. So single-minded is Sailor’s pursuit that he didn’t learn about Fiesta before he got on the bus i…
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Juan Pablo Granda stepped into a small office in a middle-class neighborhood in the permanently foggy city of Lima, Perú, on February 18, 2013. The lights were off. He couldn’t see. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Granda began to make out menacing shapes: two men, short and squat, with handguns strapped to their hips. Behind them, their boss sat at a desk. A single-barreled shotgun leaned against the wall. Granda, a thirty-one-year-old Florida State University graduate with degrees in international business and management, wasn’t there to buy cocaine or weapons, as the room’s bristling tension might suggest. He was there to buy gold, the metal that has mystif…
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