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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I am a pony. But not just any pony. I am a pony who is bent on revenge. I am the Iago of ponies, a furry Fury. I am both adorable and devious, and, until I get what I want, I’m going to make every human I meet pay for your collective crimes. I am a tiny, mop-topped demon, and I am coming for you. Picture a riding stable. If you haven’t been in one, a row of horses hang their heads over their stall doors, gently bobbing to escape the flies, pricking their ears when a human appears who might have a carrot or a peppermint in her pocket. In the riding arena, a sandy rectangle outlined by a white wooden fence that could use a coat of paint, there’s a small dapple gray pony n…
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Aya de Leon interviews Breanne McIvor about her debut novel, The God of Good Looks, which has recently been nominated for an NAACP Image Award. The God of Good Looks features a rivals-to-lovers romance between two beauty influencers against the backdrop of shenanigans and high-jinks in the Trinidadian fashion industry. McIvor’s lush descriptions are informed by her background as a professionally trained makeup artist. Aya de Leon: Although The God of Good Looks is positioned as a literary novel, and the writing has all the lovely craft a reader desires in literary fiction, I also see it as part of the conversation in crime fiction. Do you see the book in connection with …
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In June of 2022, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law known as The Sullivan Act which made it a felony to carry a concealed weapon without a license. Sullivan, ruled the court, violated the Second Amendment by making it “virtually impossible for most New Yorkers” to possess firearms unless they could demonstrate a specific need to own a gun. Writing the majority opinion for New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas insisted that going forward, gun regulation must be “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition.” Never mind that the law had been in place for more than a century. The end of Sullivan might not have s…
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Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not – or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague – want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client. –Dashiell Hammett, 1934 One of the few parts of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Fal…
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In 2015 I decided to write a magical realism western despite knowing nothing about magical realism or westerns. I wanted to fictionalize the story of my great-grandfather, Antonio Gonzalez, who was a bandido in the late 1800s, was shot in the face by the Texas Rangers and left for dead, but lived and was henceforth known as “El Tragabalas,” or, “The Bullet Swallower.” The date and setting of my great-grandfather’s story dictated that I write a western; I decided to make it magical because that sounded cool. (Budding writers are generally steered away from making major authorial choices on the basis of “it sounds cool.” And yet I think a lot of us get into writing becaus…
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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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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 …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Tana French, The Hunter (Viking) “Tana French has become her own reliable industry of top-shelf crime thrillers.” –The Washington Post Elizabeth Brooks, The Woman in the Sable Coat (Tin House) “Secrets, betrayals, and compromises abound as these very different women navigate treacherous relationships to find safe harbor in Brooks’ taut novel.” –Booklist Brendan Flaherty, The Dredge (Atlantic Monthly Press) “In this accomplished debut mystery, Flaherty revitalizes the familiar trope of old secrets threatening to resurface with sinewy prose and well-tooled suspense . . . The…
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One night in 1970, Rena Pederson, a young wire-service reporter organizing news bulletins printed by the Dallas office’s teletype machines, came across a dispatch about an audacious crime. The so-called King of Diamonds was at it again, absconding from a local mansion with jewels worth an estimated $60,000. “That,” Pederson recalls, “was ten times what I made a year at UPI.” The clever crook, it seemed, had been active for years, stealing from dozens of homes owned by Texas tycoons whose new money came from oil wells and retail empires. Pederson would spend the next several decades amassing an impressive journalistic resume, but even as she climbed The Dallas Morning Ne…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed books in crime fiction, nonfiction, mystery, and thrillers, from Bookmarks. * Michael Wolraich, The Bishop and the Butterfly (Union Square & Co.) “Wolraich’s account of the murder and the ensuing investigations, helmed by the former judge Samuel Seabury…is brick-dense yet propulsive. Unlike the sensationalist reporters of the era, Wolraich manages to handle even the seediest of underworlds with reportorial spareness and elegance, treating his material more as a nonfiction political thriller than a true-crime whodunit … The book also provides a fascinating portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then New York’s governor, as he n…
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You ever watch a TV show or a movie and the characters are watching something that only exists in that universe? Like Rochelle, Rochelle in Seinfeld or M.I.L.F Island from 30 Rock or The Alan Brady Show in The Dick Van Dyke Show or Mock Trial with Judge Reinhold from Arrested Development? Remember when Stanley Tucci plays an actor studying Adrian Monk to play him in a movie on Monk? They’re adapting the Nikki Heat books in that one plotline of Castle. That kind of thing. Well, creating a fake show or movie within a show or movie is an art, and today, we are here to celebrate that art. For your fake watching pleasure, we present the ten best fake crime movies and TV show…
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Mickey Cohen walked under the drooping fronds of a large palm tree toward the Clover Club at 8477 Sunset Boulevard with a shotgun tucked under his coat. The place was owned by restaurateur Eddie Nealis, and its management catered to film studio executives and Hollywood’s top stars. The Clover Club was located along a sparse stretch of the road, just beyond Los Angeles’s city limits. From the street, the place looked uninviting and fortress-like. Inside, however, the Clover Club was outfitted with hidden gambling rooms where celebrities could bet against the house. Producers like David O. Selznick lost vast amounts of money on a weekly basis. The club also had one-way mi…
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When Prohibition came into force in 1920, it was meant to end the production, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages. Instead, it was the beginning of perhaps the most infamous criminal period in US history because, very simply, most Americans liked a drink – and many didn’t care where it came from. At the time many wineries were based in downtown Los Angeles, which was surrounded by agriculture, and was the center of the wine region’s trade. There were more vineyards in the valleys just a few dozen miles away too. Barely a dozen of them made it to the end of Prohibition in 1933, and some merchants paid a higher price for their barrels and bottles than falli…
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We get by with a little help from our friends—right? But what if those friends don’t really have our best interests at heart? What happens when a friendship veers into enemy—or frenemy—territory, leading to secrets, betrayals, maybe even murder? My upcoming novel, Keep Your Friends Close, follows Mary and Willa, two moms who meet at a Brooklyn playground and become fast friends … for awhile, at least. Only then, Willa ghosts Mary, disappearing from her life without so much as a trace. It all comes to a head later that summer when Mary sees Willa up in the Catskills. Or she thinks she does: Willa is calling herself Annie now, and she’s got an entirely different family i…
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On August 10th, 2023 I was given a small metal chip to celebrate a year of sobriety. It was the first full year of sobriety I’d experienced since 1977. I’d gotten high for the first when I was ten, courtesy of a lung-busting hit off a device called The Neutron Bong. Despite that name, it was not Cheech and Chong who served up the opportunity. An older cousin and my big brother were the ones who turned the matching keys that armed the aforesaid nuclear bong. In this situation, both “older” and “big” are relative terms. My cousin was in high school and my brother was only two-and-a-half years older than myself. While some months shy of his thirteenth birthday, my brother …
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It’s spring. It’s officially spring in New York, where CrimeReads is based. Maybe you, like me, wear sunglasses year-round. But maybe you are just busting yours out for the season. There can be no denying that accessory’s association with warm weather. Nothing elevates a look like a pair of sunglasses. And there are many, many slick shades in the annals of crime film and TV. There are cool sunglasses in lots of movies (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Top Gun, Risky Business, Lolita… though Dolores wears cat-eyes, not the heart-shaped glasses, in the movie itself). But the crime genre has them in spades. So does the sci-fi genre; hey, it’s also a thing that sometimes CrimeReads c…
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April 2024 It is springtime in Paris. I am in Paris. I know now that this, what I am experiencing, is the perfect combination of a time and a place, a season and a city. It rains a lot, but only a little. The sun is chilly but the wind is warm. At lunchtime, I walk to the Place Dauphine, a shady courtyard on the west side of the Île de la Cité, the island in the Siene that bears up Notre Dame, listening to the hurried French of elderly couples. In the evenings, I stroll through the Latin Quarter, weaving around clusters of American students on study-abroad. I’m staying with a friend in an apartment in the 20th arrondissement, near Père Lachaise, the old cemetery. In a f…
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With the benefit of hindsight, the 1920s seem like an odd reprieve from the rest of that century. After the most devastating war the world had ever known, and before a global economic cataclysm and a second world war on top of it, the U.S. and western Europe saw a brief golden age of glamorous parties, economic prosperity and flourishing arts and culture. Soundtracking it all was what has been called the first American art form, jazz, a preview of the century’s American cultural hegemony. The truth, of course, was not quite as simple. Even as the music they invented came to define the decade, Black Americans had to contend with the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. And even b…
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A better world is a near future story told through the perspective of a doctor, mother, and wife, who moves with her family to a protected company town where she thinks they’ll all be safe. She soon discovers that this town is hiding secrets about how it was founded, and upon whose backs that safety is won. It was great fun to write, inspired by Atwood, Jackson, and Levin. It looks ahead while nodding to those fun stories from the 1970s that were both more mainstream and more jaundiced, because of the era that made them popular. The nascent idea for A Better World was founded on an unwelcome repetitive thought I developed as a new mom and it was that thought that infor…
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When I first picked up Matthew D. Lassiter’s groundbreaking new text, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs, I knew I had to interview him and bring the book’s essential reframing of an oft-misunderstood history to our readers. Lassiter makes a profound and necessary case against both criminalization and coercive rehabilitation, and time and time again, highlights the gap between white fears and white behavior. I was able to send Lassiter some questions over email, what follows is a lengthy and fascinating discussion that sheds light on many previously (may I say, deliberately?) ignored facets of the decades-long war on drugs. Also, we talk about how bad…
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“You have a magic lamp,” Bunny began, taking a pull on her cigarette. She exhaled and squinted through a ribbon of smoke. “And you have one wish. What is it?” “One wish?” Amanda’s gaze swept across the moon-bathed rooftops in contemplation. She laughed mirthlessly. “Just the one?” “Not easy, is it? See, most people would say they want to be rich, but you already know what that’s like. Or someone might say they want to be famous, but you already know what that’s like too, don’t you?” “Not anymore,” Amanda said, turning to face her. “There,” Bunny pointed her cigarette at Amanda. “That’s it. Money is money, it comes and goes, and it never really makes anyone happier. Do…
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I started writing my second novel, Like It Never Happened, at the beginning of 2020. It started, as all stories do, with a handful of characters and an inciting incident. In this case, four eighteen-year-old boys get in a fight with two strangers in a parking lot. They kill one boy and incapacitate another. They get away with it, but they argue about what to do next. Their friendship shatters, and they lose touch. It usually takes a fair distance into a story—after I learn what happens—before I start to get a sense of what it’s about. As I churned out words and pages and chapters, Covid crept toward us and then engulfed us, and my story that began with violence drifted to…
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It’s another great year for historical fiction, as many of my favorite trends from the past few years continue; in the list below, you’ll find con artists and queens, spies and spiritualists, nurses and ne’er-do-wells, vagabonds and vigilantes, and marginal characters of all kinds fighting to stay afloat in a cruel and inconsiderate world. The works below have a bit of a 19th and 20th century bias, in particular focusing on the mid-1800s and the Interwar Period, as well as several set just after the end of WWII. You’ll find the familiar within the strange, and the strange within the familiar, in each of these works, for the job of the historical novelist is to walk the ti…
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