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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Locked-room mysteries are the type of mystery in which a crime looks impossible. (Not to be confused with a “closed circle” mystery, in which the characters are stranded in an isolated setting.) Why are these mysteries appealing to so many readers? I’ve been a fan of locked-room mysteries for decades, and more recently I’ve become an author in the genre. Here are the three reasons why it’s such an enticing type of mystery. First, you know you’re getting a “fair play” puzzle. Many mysteries include clues that are fairly presented, but readers don’t always know which of the many terrific mystery novels they’re picking up includes a puzzle as part of story. In a locked-room…
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Why are imaginary friends so creepy? What is it that’s so unsettling about the sight of a child confidently babbling away to thin air? Stephen King wrote, “The root of all human fear is a closed door, slightly ajar.” The things we can’t see that are almost always more frightening than those we can. The idea of a threat that the child can see but the adults around him can’t is recurrent in the horror genre because it’s so effective: think The Others, The Sixth Sense My debut novel, The Woman Outside My Door, owes a lot to horror. It’s situated firmly in the psychological thriller and domestic noir genres, with themes of mental health, motherhood, and homemaking and dark…
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Who doesn’t love Candy Crush? Well, me, as I’ve never played it—but I was a fan of Bejeweled back in its day, I used to spend an hour every night playing Mah Jong Tiles and currently, escape room puzzle games. My sister posts her Wordle scores. My brother spends hours in SimCity 2000. Oh, time suck extraordinaires, why do we love thee so? Because their makers want us to. In my new book Red Flags, a kidnapping is set against the backdrop of a controversial Senate vote on video game regulation. I picked this topic, more or less, on a whim. Note to self: next time use a subject that isn’t sprawling, amorphous and ever-changing. But learning how those games keep you playin…
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I’m standing on a concrete slab in the middle of a deserted park. This is no ordinary slab, though. It’s about fifty feet long, twenty feet wide, and twenty feet high. It’s also covered in moss. Fifty years ago, dirt was piled around the whole thing to try and make it look like a hill, yet even now this mound sports only a few leafless trees despite the lush forest all around. There is a lone wooden picnic table in the exact center, black with mold. If I allow history—and a little imagination—to paint the rest of the picture, then it’s safe to assume that directly below my feet there used to be live missiles aimed at Russia. That’s right. A missile base once occupied t…
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The average victim of a kidnapping is dead less than 48 hours from the point of abduction. Captivity is an unusual choice for a murderer, both in life and in fiction. It requires resources, introduces variables, and produces a bizarre form of intimacy. What scares us most about captivity-centered narratives is that they break the immediacy and predictability of even the grisliest murders. The corpse is to be expected, the shock is rote. Captivity spools out endless time, interstitial between the disruption of normal life and the end—whatever the end may be. Captivity breaks the clock, and renders horrors we couldn’t have dreamt. I was working my way through college at a …
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I’ve always been a huge fan of the young adult dystopian fiction of the early twenty-first century – The Hunger Games, Divergent and their ilk. I loved these new, feisty representations of young female protagonists who were determined to take on the injustices of the world. However, when I began analyzing what was making them so popular, I began to notice a pattern. Surprisingly often, the characters’ mothers were absent figures in their daughters’ lives. The more I looked into this, the more questions arose. I found that the reasons for this maternal absence varied: from mental breakdown (Katniss’s mother in The Hunger Games), to disinterest (the Uglies series by Scott …
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Psychopaths lie, manipulate and they kill. We’re unlikely to invite them into our homes and offer them a seat at the dinner table. Our families are unlikely to be jumping up and down and planning their wedding outfits if we announced our engagement to a Hannibal Lecter wannabe. We indulge in True Crime documentaries and the serial killer memes are rife on our social media timelines. Psychopaths are everywhere. They infiltrate every moment of our lives. Our demand for the psychopath’s story on our tv screens, bookshelves and group chats shows no signs of abating. Psychologists have given our love for psychopaths a name. Hybistrophilia is a sexual interest in and attractio…
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It’s the not knowing, really, Isn’t it?. When we read mysteries and thrillers centered around solving a murder, we know the person is dead… but a missing persons case opens up a slew of psychological aspects to explore. There is no closure in cases of people disappearing. There is never an ability to mourn and move on because there is still a lingering flicker of hope. A character holding onto hope and simultaneously torturing themselves with endless possible worst-case scenarios is what really draws us into missing persons stories and what makes us resonate with them–empathize with the pain and grief of the family. Not only can we deeply sympathize with the character se…
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As my dad tells it, he was a third-year graduate student in Lubbock, Texas (my birthplace) interviewing a candidate for a faculty position. The candidate: a woman from Pennsylvania. The setting: not Pennsylvania—with Lubbock’s two-dimensional landscape, a blue sky stretched out until it is cellophane thin, and a deep deep dark come a moonless night. Not long into the interview, the woman paused before asking my dad: How are you not afraid to live out here? You can see everything. She’s right—you can see everything in west Texas, just like you can see everything if you stand in the middle of some stark open plain across much of the West. And while I can’t know the source …
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I love domestic thrillers, wine, and Kristen Bell with bangs, so you can imagine how excited I was to watch The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, a send-up of all the tropes that delight me the most in books and movies. But part way through the first episode, something felt off to me. In The Show with the Ridiculously Long Title (part of the joke, of course), Bell plays Anna, who’s entombed in grief over the death of her daughter three years earlier and the subsequent breakup of her marriage. She spends most of her days reading a book—The Woman Across the Lake—in her wine-soaked chair with a comically large glass of red, as she spies on th…
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In 1977, the New York Daily News published an article about a beautiful young con woman named Barbara St. James. (At least, that was one of her names.) “If you meet her, you will like her,” ran the article. “She will draw out your life story, your troubles and triumphs. She appears wealthy, a woman of substance and class. She drips with sincerity.” Appears was the second-most important word in the paragraph, but the first was like. You will like her. Beautiful Barbara’s life story has long been forgotten, but that line could be used to describe almost every con woman before and after her. If you meet her, you will like her. The con woman’s likability is the single most…
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What is it that draws suspense authors to Texas settings? In a word: variety. From the sunbaked desert to the shadowy piney woods, from the rugged Chisos Mountains out west, to the sugary sand beaches down south, authors of Texas-based stories have a wide variety of dramatic settings to choose from. As America’s second-largest state, Texas encompassing nearly 270,000 square miles, offering storytellers an array of interesting places to set their adventures. And the people are just as varied as the topography. Across the sprawling Lone Star State, many different people and worlds collide, creating conflict and tension—two key ingredients in suspense fiction. The list of…
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The Silence in Her Eyes is a book I wasn’t supposed to write. The first time I told my editor that I was thinking about writing a psychological thriller, she was taken aback. She responded with a groan: “Why do all my authors suddenly want to write thrillers?” If my historical novel The German Girl sold more than a million copies, she said, why would I suddenly want to switch genres? A fair question. But even though it came out of the blue to her, it was actually something I’d been thinking about for years. The very day I finished writing The German Girl, I began fleshing out a new story. I was fully aware that I needed to write the two historical novels I already had…
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At first glance it seems self-evident that valuable artifacts that were looted as spoils of war or plundered by our colonial ancestors should be sent back to where they came from. No one would argue with the notion that art stolen by the Nazis from countries they occupied during World War Two should be restored to its rightful owners, so why not treasures snatched by colonial powers? Repatriating the cultural heritage of nations that were robbed is part of a long process of restorative justice for past wrongs that Western powers are approaching in a variety of ways. Morally, it has to be the right thing to do. But where do you draw the line? In the mists of antiquity, or…
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In my new thriller, Reputation, my protagonist, Emma Webster, fears she is being followed as she cycles home from work one night. Her apparent stalker is a teenage boy who loops behind her, leering, then cycles past while bestowing a dead-eyed stare. The boy’s fourteen at most, but the sense of threat is so acute that Emma panics as she races up the steps to her front door and fumbles to get in. Once inside, she fears he’s listening outside; that he’s primed to post something unwelcome through the box; and – when her phone pings – that he’s sent an abusive text. Of course, she suspects – as many a protagonist of a psychological thriller does – that she’s being irrationa…
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No city has been a deeper well for espionage fiction than Berlin. There is a long and growing list of novels that contribute to the city’s image as a hotbed of spies and conspirators. The fifty-one years bookended by Kristallnacht in 1938 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provide the rich historical dramas that continue to excite writers’ imaginations. Berlin has preserved the iconic symbols of those years in the Stasi museum and at Checkpoint Charlie’s hop-on, hop-off tourist bus stop, but it is the canon of Berlin spy fiction that excites the popular imagination. Two novelists, Joseph Kanon and Paul Vidich, have published Cold War novels this month and both are se…
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Let’s talk body horror. The Death of Jane Lawrence has a lot of it. Gorey surgeries, tissue growing out of place, mortification of the flesh in pursuit of magical attainment. And the remnants of past horrors are everywhere: preserved medical curiosities, abandoned medical equipment, wedding rings made of human bone, and on and on it goes. It’s gross, and creeping, and bloody. Too much, for some readers. Probably not enough for others. Body horror is, in some ways, the easy option. It hurts. It disgusts, by definition. We all have bodies, and the entry fee of being embodied is the certainty—not the risk, the certainty—that eventually, something will go wrong with it. We …
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I return again and again, in my writing, to the same well—family, love and survival. In my latest book, ‘Sundial,’ I wanted to explore, in particular, the bonds between women in families—sisters, mothers. I think there can be a temptation to sentimentalize or sanitize these bonds – make them pretty. But they’re powerful, atavistic connections and powerful feelings come with them. In so many ways, family is the source of who you are. The novel asks questions about nature and nurture—those age-old questions that have haunted us throughout our species’ existence. How much of me is me? How much is predetermined by genetics, how much dictated by environment? ‘Sundial,’ is set…
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I am obsessed. I can’t escape it. My thoughts are dominated by the evil, the mystery, the cruelty of one eccentric episode in modern history: The Cold War. It’s what I read. It’s what I write. It’s my lens for the world. And, even though the Cold War was pronounced dead with the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of 1989, I see evidence of the Cold War around me daily, lurking like some half-seen figure in the shadows. The war in Ukraine? The daily propaganda messages from the Kremlin, amplified by China’s supportive posturing against the West, is the mirror image of events from the Korean War of the 1950s, when China was the combatant and the Soviet Union was the supp…
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I’ve often likened the writing of a crime novel to a stand-up comedy performance and I still believe that they have much in common, for me, at any rate. As a writer of commercial fiction I need to engage my reader quickly. I feel compelled to strive for this, largely because I require that same early engagement when I am reading a novel. It doesn’t need to be a crash-bang-wallop bit of action, a killer hook or an irresistible cliffhanger. Sometimes it’s just a voice or a character; something that teases and draws me in. But there needs to be something in those first few pages demanding that I read on. The same is certainly true when it comes to performing stand-up. Back w…
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There’s nothing quite like a cozy mystery novel for me. From the charming small-town settings to the quirky cast of characters, there’s just something about this sub-genre that always leaves me feeling warm and fuzzy inside. But you know what my absolute favorite thing about cozies is? The amateur sleuths. That’s right, forget about your typical hard-boiled detectives and seasoned police officers. In a cozy mystery, everyday people are the ones who take action to solve crimes in their hometowns. Whether it’s a talented baker, a curious librarian, or a spunky grandmother with a knack for trouble, these characters bring so much heart and personality to the stories they inh…
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I’ve always liked stories where people go to Hell. Because I like Hell. Because that’s where the angels are. Angels come from Hell. All angels are fallen angels. Angels know how to fall and rise at the same time. Every Russian literary work is a crime novel and it’s about this, more or less. Hell or angels. Same thing. Anglo-Saxon culture is consumed with morality. Latin culture with mortality. But Slavs, we are melancholic fireflies in your summertime. We know we are bad, bad, bad. And how to be good, good, good. But we don’t want to play that game. We are damned and transcendental. We are a cracked basin hit by a shard of sunlight. See: Tarkovsky. Remix with some Jewis…
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We all know the power of fiction to do some good. It’s cover for forbidden facts. It can shine a spotlight on corruption. Ars gratia artis has it’s place, but not for me, not today. We’re living in a world of teenagers too young to drink or drive, sporting AR-15s. Of Putin and Xi assembling an all-star team of autocrats to take on the world. Fiction has a job to do. And one genre in particular is up to the task. “Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic,” Raymond Chandler begins his iconic essay on the crime writer’s craft, “The Simple Art of Murder.” The father of American noir goes on to rip apart the British cozy and most detective fiction as too improb…
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In July 1945, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis docked at a tiny island east of the Philippines. There, it delivered its top secret cargo: parts for two atomic bombs the allies hoped would end the war. Four days later, a Japanese U-boat intercepted the Indianapolis and fired two torpedoes. Both hit their mark. The ship sank in less than twelve minutes. Three hundred of its 1,200 crew accompanied it to the sea floor. For the 900 survivors, the nightmare had only just begun. Hundreds of tiger sharks, attracted by so much spilled blood, closed in. They started on the dead and dying. Once those were gone, they attacked healthier prey. By the time help arrived four days lat…
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If you’ve ever been stuck on a bad date, you might have found yourself looking at your watch and considering if there’s any way you can escape through the bathroom window. As a single man, I became slightly addicted to dating. I downloaded every app going and went on literally hundreds of dates. And while I never had to squeeze through any bathroom windows, or slip through any fire escapes, I did have my fair share of close calls. I spent many, many hours conducting small talk over a game of mini-golf, or trying to flirt while badly salsa dancing – and even getting brutally dismembered at an improvisational murder mystery theatrical experience. It was there, gurgling o…
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