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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There once was a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, “You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.” He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother’s throat. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” I came across this Grimm tale while conducting research for my novel, Monsters We Have Made, a story which also begins with a terrible crime committed by children: in this case, two young girls who fall under the sway of a mysterious creature they discover on the Internet. Like the fairy tale, my story, too, explores questions of boundaries: pl…
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There are innumerable ways to answer the question of “When is it time to stop writing?” It could be time to stop when the publishing contracts dry up. Or it could be when your book sales dwindle to a dribbling trickle. When the last thing you want to do is come up with one more idea. It could also be time to stop when you flat out don’t feel like writing any longer and you’re afraid that every sentence you write reveals that reluctance. I wrote my first published mystery in 2009, and I recently turned in my eighteenth. The use of mathematics tells me that I’ve written an average of 1.125 books per year for the last fifteen years. Another burst of figuring tells me that I…
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“Helltown. The nickname fits this place perfectly,” said Norman Mailer as he peered out at Long Point and the Provincetown harbor from the third-floor study of his home at the east end of Commercial Street. Sitting at his desk, he also had a pristine view of the Pilgrim Monument, the 252-foot granite tower looming like a colossal sentry in the distance. To Mailer, the town in July was “as colorful as St. Tropez on Saturday morning and as dirty as Coney Island come Sunday night.” But it was autumn now, and the leaves were dead. The town was dead too. Mailer had just returned from Chicago, and he was all alone in his five-bedroom, 5,800-square-foot brick fortress, w…
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In the 1970s, I was a few years out of high school with dreams of being a writer when, in Toronto, to see a friend, I had time on my hands. The author, Morley Callaghan, lived there. I stopped at a public phone and looked him up in the phone book – remember those? I loved his work. I found his short story, “A Cap for Steve,” very moving. Callaghan was celebrated and had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I knew from reading Callaghan’s memoir, That Summer in Paris, that he’d been friends with the likes of James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Callaghan’s summer in Paris was in the late 1920s. At the time, Fitzgerald was working on Tender I…
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I am eight years old. The bullies are waiting for me outside the girls’ bathroom. I race down the school hall as fast as my young legs can carry me, but the bullies are faster. They pounce, pushing me down, and I hit the floor hard, the air slamming out of my lungs. You’re a killer. A boy yells. Like your mom. Killer, killer. I tell myself not to look at them. That gloating stretch of their mouths. The shadows lengthening over me. The front door bursts open, and Mimi appears, her eyes spitting black fire. My cousin, only a year older, but her rage fills the hall. The bullies scatter like frantic ants, but this time, she is faster. A well-aimed punch and the leade…
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Even though literature had, for centuries, brimmed with clever problem-solvers, from tricksters to reformed thieves to wise men to police prefects, Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” still awed the literary world when it appeared in 1841. A gruesome double-murder has taken place in a home along the Rue Morgue (a fictional street in Paris). Several witnesses heard several voices, but no one can agree on what language one of the speakers may have been using. Several clues linger about, each more baffling than the next. The police are stumped. But C. Auguste Dupin, a chevalier and rare book aficionado, solves the mystery at home after reading…
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“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.” (Mark Twain) I call this Red-Lining Reality, because these are things editors put a red line through; readers won’t find them believable. My family travelled to Italy a few years back. We were going anyway, but this conveniently provided me with information for the story I had in mind for my fourth book, Cecilian Vespers, about the murder of a renowned theologian. Some of the clues related to the lives of long-dead saints, including Saint Philomena. I’d never heard of her till I began my research, So. My husband and daughter and I were in Italy, in Treviso,…
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It’s no secret that social media revolutionized the way we see and interact with the world. Literally—the entire world is now at everyone’s fingertips, one login away. For many, this has been a blessing, as they reached stardom with little more than mirror selfies and tweeted shower thoughts. But for others, the ubiquity and addictive nature of social media has unintended consequences. I’ve always been interested in the many ways social media can go wrong, sometimes with deadly results. In my book THE LAST BEAUTIFUL GIRL, the protagonist rises to Internet fame by recreating the glory days of a socialite from a hundred years ago, but danger is lurking in the corners of her…
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Mom wouldn’t hold me like the mothers I saw on television. She didn’t like to be touched or touch anyone else. She would say, “Stop that. You are all right,” with maybe a slight pat on the back if I fell down or experienced one of the many emotional bruisings that cause kids to cry. After years of getting no response from Mom to my crying, I conditioned myself to cry silently and later not to cry, or for that matter, to not show emotion in any circumstance. However, since May 12, 2013, I have cried more than at any other time in my life. As my then-husband Jimmy turned off the ten o’clock news, I realized my older sister, Vicky, hadn’t called today. She lived 150 miles…
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When I fell in love with crime fiction, one of the first things I noticed was how crime writers love to evoke an exceptionally rich sense of place. Raymond Chandler’s mean-streeted LA. John D. MacDonald’s cynically despoiled Florida. James Lee Burke’s lush, lyrical, fallen Louisiana. The heroes’ worldviews in these books were so tightly wrapped up in their environments, it was impossible to imagine them being transplanted anywhere else. What really got my attention, though, were certain stories in which very specific environments became something more—not simply expressions of their hero’s persona, but full-throated characters in their own right. Du Maurier’s malevolent…
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A light breeze salted the Brighton seafront when the taxi carrying Patrick Magee pulled up outside the Grand Hotel. The driver opened the boot and gave a cheerful warning to the porter who reached for the case. “You’d better hold onto your nuts for this one, you’ll need ’em.” It was just after noon on September 15, 1984, and it felt like the last day of summer. Sunshine burned through a residue of clouds, warming the pebbles on the beach. The English Channel glistened, serene. The Grand soared over King’s Road like an overstuffed wedding cake, eight stories of eaves, cornices, and Victorian elaboration coated cream and white. A Union Jack fluttered from the roof. Bu…
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January 12, 1925 The most powerful man in Indiana stood next to the new governor at the Inaugural Ball, there to be thanked, applauded, and blessed for using the nation’s oldest domestic terror group to gain control of a uniquely American state. David C. Stephenson was sandy blond and thin-haired, with blue-gray eyes and a fleshy second chin much too middle-aged for a man of thirty-three. Charm oozed from him like grease from a sizzling sausage. Everyone called him Steve. But in print, in posters, in letters and telegrams and flyers all over the Midwest, he was known as the Old Man. He preferred that name, and the mystique that went with it, to the only formal title he e…
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Reading about dysfunctional families is one of my absolute favourite pastimes, especially when the setting is just as creepy and unsettling as the story itself. For my latest book, The Soulmate, the cliffside setting overlooking the ocean was inspired by a well-known suicide spot in Sydney, Australia. I like to think that, in the book, the cliff becomes almost a character in itself – and that’s how I feel about some of these deliciously twisty crime reads. Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty Everyone’s heard of Big Little Lies thanks to the fantastic TV series starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon. While the series was set oceanside in California, the book is set i…
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Just weeks after I moved from my hometown of New York City to the California Bay Area in fall 2017, I woke up to smoky skies. On my way to work at HuffPost’s office in downtown San Francisco, I passed people with scarves clenched over their mouths, N95 masks on, years before the pandemic would make this a common sight. At my desk, my throat scratching oddly, a headache blossoming between my eyes, I saw the latest reports come in: a historic blaze had torn through Sonoma and Napa, leaving fields of ash where neighborhoods once deemed at low risk for fire used to stand. I got into my car and drove north, toward a thickening cloud of ash. As I pulled into the town of Santa …
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I don’t know about other people, but nothing stresses me out like having too much work on my plate and too little time to do it. At any given time, I have papers to grade, classes to prepare for, dissertations to read, documents to review for upcoming meetings, emails to respond to, letters of recommendation to write. The list goes on and on—and every single one of them has a deadline. And that’s just my day job. When it comes to my writing life, I have more deadlines. Some of them are self-imposed, of course, but I’d never finish anything if I didn’t have them. I’m an insomniac (writing these words at 3:07 a.m.) because I can’t sleep knowing that a mountain of work is al…
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Ann Woodward had resolved to live a quiet life in Europe, where she could mourn her late husband, Billy Woodward, far from the madding crowd of the American press, the town of Saint Moritz, high in the Swiss Alps, was certainly an unusual place to retreat to. Renowned for its winter sports, popular as a spa hamlet, and exclusive as a community where entertainers, celebrities, and assorted socialites gathered, Saint Moritz was a lesser European sun around which various society moons revolved. While summer tourism was popular, it was in winter that this small city shined. Luminaries descended in head-to-toe furs in the daytime and flashy jewels at night, their diamonds and …
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The Valentine’s Day love note from a secret admirer has an evil twin—the “vinegar valentine” from a hidden hater. When mass-produced valentines replaced handmade ones in the Victorian era, satirical valentines were as available as sentimental ones. Vinegar valentines, ancestors of poison pen letters and trolls’ tweets, ridiculed their recipients and sometimes drove them to suicide or assault. Sending cards with poems of love and friendship to mark Valentine’s Day became common in the 18th century. This practice grew out of an earlier tradition of gift-exchange between lovers on that day. In pre-Victorian England, valentines were handmade and resembled today’s cards in th…
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In the James Brooks film As Good As It Gets, a star-struck fan asks the misanthropic romance novelist Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), “How do you write women so well?” “I think of a man,” says Melvin, “and I take away reason and accountability.” Yes, it’s a hilariously horrible answer. But it’s also a great question. How do you write characters that feel real? That are real? You know the usual formulas. You’ve studied them in workshops, heard them on podcasts. “Give them weaknesses. Vulnerabilities. Come up with distinctive characteristics, quirks and eccentricities. Develop a backstory.” Aspiring novelists are taught to build a profile for their protagonist. Detail…
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After I was raped at knifepoint at thirteen years old, I recall thinking that I could never call the police if I were raped again. No one would believe a two-time loser. I’d had my one bite at the apple when it came to protection from that kind of violence, and it hadn’t been much of an apple. Battered and visibly bruised, I’d endured the rape exam in the hospital; a nurse telling me she “would have scratched the guy’s eyes out”; and multiple police interrogations, epitomized by one cop’s artful question, “Did he stick his thing in you?” The rapist was never caught. And, in my mind, I was beyond the protection of the law. For writers of thrillers other than police proced…
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She could feel the damp evening winds coming in through the cracks around the windowpanes. Only a few years earlier, an income ing draft in this room—her childhood bedroom—would have been unthinkable. Her mother had a discerning eye for detail that would have twitched at the slightest imperfection in a home, especially if it affected the comfort of someone sleeping under her roof. And her father had been the best realtor on the Cape, the kind who had become an expert handyman over the years as an added service to his clients. But it wasn’t only the seams around the windowsills that had cracked lately in the Eldredge family. Eager to find sleep, Melissa stepped from the b…
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This started as a normal piece for CrimeReads. You know the one: the author, dutifully shilling their newly released title, assembles a lively roundup of books that are sorta-kinda like theirs, with a headline that involves a number and some click-baiting tease (Eight Thrillers That Will Help You Pick Out Better Drapes, or Twelve Cozies You Can’t Bring Home to Mother, or whatever). This is usually achieved with a minimum of fuss. At the end of it, the author’s publicist is happy for the extra exposure, the author sells a few books, and CrimeReads gets some free content. Everybody wins. That’s all I was looking to accomplish for my latest thriller, Unthinkable. The book…
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“Dark academia is the only kind I know,” a professor friend told me recently. While writing my novel, The Bequest, which begins at a fictional Scottish university, I was inspired in part by my own experience as a PhD student in History, and even more by books like The Secret History. As it turns out, the legacy of Donna Tartt’s debut novel extends far beyond literary circles. Over the past few years, the aesthetic known as Dark Academia, often associated with The Secret History, has become one of the hottest and most pervasive trends on social media, a veritable subculture featuring storied institutions of higher learning, autumn leaves, Gothic architecture, dark décor,…
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This week we’re highlighting the recently 50 years-old crime movies of 1973, and if you haven’t gleaned this already, it was a hell of a good year for robbery on film. Heisters, hustlers, scammers, confidence artists and thieves of all stripes were all the rage on the silver screen, so much so that some have practically been forgotten to today’s viewers. (Seriously, consider the Gene Hackman picture below.) Fortunately, you’ve got a weekend to get caught up on the action. Maybe you’re in the mood for a little robbery-implicated gun-running in the Boston area? Or a classic vengeance tale? How about a road trip? 1973 has got you covered, it all just depends on your mood. D…
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Deciding that you want to rob a bank is the easy part. We’ve all thought about it—how wonderful it would feel, shouting those first, forceful words, “this is a stick-up”—but an idle reverie amounts to very little, and pretty soon we all bump up against the inevitable: this isn’t something one person can do alone. No, you’re going to need a team of operators filling discrete and sometimes ridiculously convoluted roles, and even then, without the proper leadership and a shared vision, you still might not pull this thing off, or if you do, you might not make a proper getaway or get the right kind of identity-altering plastic surgery later. Choosing the right team—one that …
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Look, I got really into Columbo during the pandemic, too, so I get it. I’m excited for the new Rian Johnson/Natasha Lyonne series, and I really hope that every episode begins with a half hour block of a movie star murdering someone and thinking they’re going to get away with it. But that’s not going to get me through a whole month. Fortunately, there’s also our old friend Joe Goldberg and a whole new society for the writers of You to skewer with their blade-sharp satire. February’s shaping up to be pretty strong. Here’s a guide to what’s coming. Poker Face (Premieres January 26 / Peacock) This is obviously the headliner for the month: Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne …
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