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,
3,499 topics in this forum
-
- 0 replies
- 58 views
Spenser’s Boston, Temperance Brennan’s North Carolina, Dave Robicheaux’s New Iberia…real places with fictional detectives. The setting is an important part of any series of books and is often informed by a deep connection the author has with the location they have chosen. Robert B. Parker spent his whole life living and writing in Boston. Kathy Reichs, like her protagonist, is a forensic investigator based out of Charlotte who also worked in Quebec, both locations brought vividly to life in her novels, and James Lee Burke sets the majority of his work in his hometown, except when he occasionally detours to place a mystery in Montana. When we were coming up with the cha…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 58 views
Recently, one of my favorite authors—who I am also lucky to call a friend—published her first work of crime fiction for adults after putting out seven young adult mysteries and thrillers. I devoured Kara Thomas’s Out of the Ashes last spring, and with the upcoming release of my own debut adult thriller, The Split, after publishing five young adult thrillers myself, I was eager to talk to Kara about making the leap to the adult space after years of writing for a teen audience. I wrote—but didn’t sell—my first thriller for adults in 2017, when my first YA novel was under contract but not yet published. Writing in both spaces has always been a career goal of mine, and I had…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 58 views
In the late 1960s, the screenwriter Jack Whittingham, who had collaborated on the writing of Thunderball, started to write a screenplay based on the life of Ian Fleming. Whittingham’s daughter Sylvan says: ‘He had Fleming as a Reuters correspondent travelling on that train across Russia. Fleming was sitting in a compartment, and this alter ego like a ghost came out of him, and this whole adventure took place. That was how Dad played it – that Fleming had this other life that was Bond.’ The project was aborted, yet it reveals something of Whittingham’s perception of Bond that he saw his origins in Ian’s first important foreign assignment. During his fortnight in Moscow,…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 57 views
Let’s say you have a successful series of detective novels, anchored by a core set of well-established characters — a private detective, his wife, and his sidekick — who, in book after book, are threatened by and finally defeat formidable criminal antagonists. This detective is smart, smooth, logical, obsessed with his work, and sometimes troubled by that obsession. His equally smart wife respects his ability and devotion to his work, but keeps pushing for more balance in their life together, more closeness. His sidekick is skeptical of everything and everyone, constantly challenging the detective’s ideas, but he’s always there when the chips are down. The cases that dr…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 57 views
Like Dark Lover, the book that kickstarted my Black Dagger Brotherhood series, The St. Ambrose School for Girls is one of those “book of my heart” projects that had to be written. But it was not something I anticipated. I was going along, writing about vampires quite happily, with a full schedule of releases (thank you, Gallery!) when from out of the blue, Sarah M. Taylor came to me in a dream. I had a vivid vision of a fifteen-year-old girl with dyed black hair, black baggy clothes, and a tense look on her face. She was staring at me, as if she were trying to tell me something, and as I bolted out of sleep and sat up in bed, all I could think was… Who the hell was that…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 57 views
Whether it’s Felix Unger and Oscar Madison or Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, we love a good odd couple. Watching two opposite personalities clash while they try to reach a common goal is one of life’s finer reading pleasures. Crime fiction lovers in particular have a banquet of unlikely teams to root for, whether they are law enforcement, private investigators, or amateur sleuths. The Lou Norton Series by Rachel Howzell Hall LAPD Homicide Detective Elouise ‘Lou’ Norton serves the ever-changing border of gentrifying Los Angeles. In the first book of this outstanding series, Land of Shadows, Lou is assigned a new partner, Colin Taggert, and the two couldn’t be m…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 57 views
Most of us have experienced a bad neighbor or two in our lifetimes. From dorm life to 20-something apartment life, I remember a lot of neighbors with loud music, pot wafting through the halls, wild parties, and some squeaky bed frames I’d like to forget, but those were simply slight annoyances compared to the bad neighbors in these spine tingling thrillers. In my new novel, The Vacancy in Room 10, I had loads of fun creating sinister neighbors keeping dangerous secrets. So if you’re also a fan of scary neighbors you won’t want to miss these. From gaslighting, kidnapping, betrayal of all kinds, and even murder, this list of thrillers is guaranteed to give you the chills a…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 57 views
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, A Fire So Wide (Harper) “Ruiz-Grossman’s captivating debut chronicles a wildfire’s impact on a diverse set of residents of Berkeley. . . . It’s a gripping page-turner with a surprising twist, as a set of disgruntled survivors form an unlikely alliance and take drastic action. The complex characterizations and realistic scenarios converge to deliver a satisfying punch.” –Publishers Weekly Leah Konen, Keep Your Friends Close (Putnam) “[A] fast-paced, plot-driven novel that manages to poke fun at millennial parenting and the culture of wealthy Brooklynites . . .…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 57 views
A look at the month’s best new releases in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers, via Bookmarks. * Ben H. Winters, Big Time (Mulholland Books) “A weird and wonderful cautionary tale … It features the month’s most engaging investigator, a schlumpy bureaucrat roused to action.” –Sarah Lyall (New York Times Book Review) Colin Barrett, Wild Houses (Grove Press) “Barrett’s dialogue, spiked with the timbre of Irish speech and shards of local slang, makes these characters sound so close you’ll be wiping their spittle off your face … The craft of Wild Houses shows a master writer spreading his wings — not for show but like the stealthy attack of a barn owl. Despite m…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 57 views
Over the past few decades, we’ve seen exponential growth in both creative writing programs and the true crime storytelling industry, so perhaps it should come as no surprise to find so much beautiful writing about terrible events. Just so, as true crime has matured, those who tell such stories have learned essential lessons in how to avoid exploitation and bring in appropriate context and empathy (the anthropologists in the list below are especially notable in their sensitivities). The works on this list are about complicated situations, torn individuals, delayed or denied justice, and a world in which those who bear the most responsibility for harm are not the ones who …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 57 views
For more than three decades, Don Winslow has written bestselling novels about everything from the War on Drugs (with his sweeping Border trilogy) to police corruption (“The Force”) to mafia hitmen (“The Winter of Frankie Machine”). Yet even as he produced these books at an astounding rate, his muse kept directing him back to a sweeping epic set among the gangs of New England in the 1980s and 90s. That epic eventually manifested as a trilogy, concluding with the imminent release of “City in Ruins.” When this latest book begins, protagonist Danny Ryan has become a major power player in Las Vegas. He’s a long way from the Rhode Island gang war that powered “City on Fire,” …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 56 views
I didn’t set out to write a crime novel. I mean, I did. Obviously. A book isn’t the sort of thing that just happens by accident. But I never thought this would be the genre I found a home in. I’ve loved crime fiction ever since a bookseller put a copy of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River into my hands and I learned it is more than just hardboiled cliches and overwrought metaphors describing women’s legs. Crime fiction is a dark mirror, painting the world’s flaws in stark relief. It is a genre of desperation, where the iniquities of civilization drive men and women to the brink. It asks what we are truly capable of when everything is on the line. Its facets reveal the hidden…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 56 views
August brings with it a tense, twisty crop of compelling new thrillers exploring the ways our most intimate relationships can go terribly awry—or become the shield we need to cover up our worst transgressions. From terrible teachers, to even worse friends, to all kinds of family, the types of connections explored in the novels below are the kind that are so ordinary that their wrongness can easily be ignored, but domesticity has always been the provenance of danger, and these psychological thrillers remind us that those closest to us are also the ones who hurt us the most. (Angie Kim’s thriller is the outlier here. That family’s going to be alright. I won’t say more lest …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 56 views
“Pull over,” Allan shouted from the passenger seat. The rain was blinding. I refused to stop. My daughter was working the late shift and needed a ride home. “She can take an Uber,” he shouted. I couldn’t trust a random driver to bring my daughter home to safety. That was my job, her mother. With my hands clutched to the wheel, I drove fifteen miles an hour on the highway, the speed limit was 55, passing the dozens of other cars that had pulled over. In 1982 Angela Cavallo lifted a Chevy Impala off of her teenage son. We may not have heard the name Angela Cavallo, but most likely we have heard the story about the mother who saved her child’s life by lifting a car. Th…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 56 views
May 1932 Charlie Chaplin was visiting Japan with a group that included his brother Sydney Chaplin, and Chaplin’s Japanese personal secretary, Toraichi Kono. Chaplin had been to Japan a decade earlier for work, when he and Fatty Arbuckle performed in a silent comedy show. This time, the purpose of the trip was purely pleasure. The group spent their time in Japan seeing traditional Japanese art, attending performances of Japanese dance, observing traditional craftsmen at work, and viewing the natural beauty of locations such as Miyanoshita and Mount Fuji. Japan’s prime minister, Tsuyoshi Inukai, had arranged for his son to take Chaplin and his party to watch a sumo wres…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 56 views
In my new novel Sleeping With Friends, a woman wakes from a coma with only her memories of movies to guide her through the mystery of her injury. Writing it, I discovered that films live in the same half-remembered place as our dreams. But films are also made by real people, like Marianne Rendón. A mesmerizing and fearless performer, her screen debut was in the black comedy series Imposters in 2017. The following year she played Susan Atkins alongside Matt Smith in Charlie Says, from American Psycho’s directing and writing team of Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner. Marianne was most recently featured in the series In the Dark, and Scott Z. Burns’ Extrapolations. As I’ve g…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 56 views
I often wonder when reading mysteries such as the first of its kind The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins or the groundbreaking Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, what would I do if I was wrongly accused of a crime like certain protagonists in these novels? Would I vigorously proclaim my innocence or would I be so shocked that I’d be incapable of speaking up at all? Knowing myself and my inability to remain quiet in general never mind while being accused of a heinous crime I didn’t commit, I’m betting on the former. However, I can’t really know, can I? Unless it happens, and I really don’t want it to. Still it fascinates me, wondering how I’d handle such a fraught situation, which le…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 56 views
A look at the month’s best reviewed books in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Lea Carpenter, Ilium (Knopf) “While Carpenter knows how to dish out the dread that a spy story needs, what makes Ilium intriguing are the characters … This is the sort of moral ambiguity that seems to fascinate Carpenter, the way living a double life and every day making your cover, that critical and deeply embedded lie, feels real to everyone around you. It’s also what makes Ilium such an unexpectedly moving novel.” –Chris Bohjalian (New York Times) Kate Brody, Rabbit Hole (Soho) “Teddy is a complicated heroine whose ill-advised decisions and self-destructive tendencies make her l…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 56 views
Growing up in a middle-class family in Mumbai, I wasn’t surrounded by luxuries, but there was one thing our home was never short of – books. My love of mysteries began with the first Famous Five novel my dad brought home and immediately, I was hooked. As an adult, thrillers and mysteries continue to be my favorite genre, but I wish there were more novels written with main characters who looked like me. When I started writing my own novel, following the advice, ‘write what you know’, I centered my locked room novel on a multigenerational South Asian family. The main character is Jia, an Indian single mom who is invited by her married sister, Seema to take shelter in her …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 56 views
Write what you know—it’s a piece of advice you hear a lot. I’m not sure how useful it is. My first novel opened with a mysterious man buying a shovel so he could help a friend dig a grave in the woods. My latest begins with an eleven-year-old girl sneaking out her bedroom window for a walk under the stars and stumbling across the body of a serial killer’s victim. I’ve never found myself in either of those situations. But when it comes to choosing a setting for a story, writing what you know has its benefits. For my new novel Don’t Turn Around, I wanted to use a small college town as the setting—somewhere rural and remote. A place where my serial killer, known as Merkury…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 55 views
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 55 views
At its best, religion can help and encourage. At its worst, it can be used to manipulate, control and abuse. Such is the case in my upcoming thriller In a Quiet Town. The story centers around Tatum whose husband Shane is the lead pastor of the only church in their small town. On the outside, they appear to be the perfect couple, but things are not as idyllic as they seem. Years earlier, Shane all but disowned their adult daughter Adrienne, destroying the relationship between she and Tatum. Now, Tatum is determined to reconnect with her daughter. She sneaks out every Wednesday evening to meet up with her, until one night Adrienne disappears. As Tatum desperately searches f…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 55 views
So here we are – The Detective Up Late, the seventh book in the Sean Duffy series… and so some evil rumourmongers say, the last. But it’s the 2020s – everyone has a comeback tour now, so no reason to think Duffy’ll be any different I reckon. For Duffy it’s 1990 – a new decade, the same old grinding “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. ‘The grim, greasy, seedy seventies had bled into the violent, neon, awful 80s…’ – a decade that saw 1,200 Troubles-related murders. Nobody in Carrickfergus Police Station is overly hopeful about the new decade, least of all our man, Detective Inspector Duffy. He’s still that rarest of things – a serving Catholic officer in the Royal Ulster Con…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 55 views
One time my brother almost saw a ghost. He was in New Orleans, in an ancient bar, during a bachelor party weekend, I think. To be honest, I can’t quite remember all the details because this story was very long and he clearly didn’t have an ending in mind when he began telling a room full of people about this spooky situation that culminated in a bathroom where he almost saw something. Something invisible, it turned out, almost became visible by the urinal. But in the end, he didn’t see it after all. The ghost. This payoff was met with derisive laughter, which is the normal response in my family if someone squanders your time with a bad story. I have three middle-aged br…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 55 views
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Abigail Dean, Day One (Viking) “A gripping examination of a community devastated by a school shooting and the “truthers” who deny it ever happened. Within that story is a girl who’s hiding what she knows about what happened that day. A chilling, thought-provoking read. Brilliant.” —Shari Lapena Scott Carson, Lost Man’s Lane (Atria/Emily Bestler Books) “Lost Man’s Lane is masterful story-telling — a heartfelt, deeply creepy tale of lost innocence and the evil that lurks beneath even the most placid American surfaces.” –Justin Cronin Jesse Q Sutanto, The Good, The Bad, and the …
Last reply by Admin_99,