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 CrimeReads editors make their choices for the best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Sasha Vasilyuk, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury) Vasilyuk’s powerful debut tells the story of Yefim Shulman, moving between his death in Ukraine in 2007 and his experiences during World War II and its aftermath, when Shulman fought Germany for the USSR but soon ended up ensnared in the KGB plots, hiding his secrets from his family. Vasilyuk manages to capture both the story’s intimate drama and its epic qualities, telling the story of a double life and its reverberations across borders and generations. –DM Sara Koffi, While We Were Burning (Putnam) In…
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Questions of faith are a universal part of the human experience. Why am I here? What does my life mean? Is there a God and if so, what is His role in the universe and in my life? These are big and fundamental questions and how writers and readers tackle them matters. Yet themes of faith, doubt, crisis, and belief are not typically found in the pages of thriller fiction. Recently we had the honor of launching a new thriller series for Tyndale House—the leading Christian publisher in the industry—and the journey has us thinking a lot about the changing face of faith in fiction and in the world at large. In our mind, the new series is not a departure from what we’ve always …
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As someone who stormed through Succession, White Lotus and Big Little Lies with their jaw permanently attached to the floor, I will quite happily confess that I am a sucker for portrayals of ‘how the other half lives.’ Gossip magazines, documentaries, reality tv shows, and, of course, dark fiction: we as a society have an unquenchable thirst for lifting the lid on the lifestyles of the super wealthy, and we tend to have a particular vigour for when those super wealthy behave super appallingly. This is exactly the theme I touch upon in my novel, Out of her Depth, in which Rachel, an unassuming girl from a nondescript London suburb, lands a Summer job in the hills of Flo…
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In 1973, a paperback thriller was published by Pyramid Press, written by an aspiring writer from Southern California. The book opened with an antiquated World War I German Albatross biplane strafing Brady Air Force Base on the Greek island of Thásos, destroying its fleet of F-105 jet fighters. The attack is disrupted by the arrival of a lumbering PBY Catalina flying boat, whose pilot engages in an unlikely dogfight with the Albatross and somehow prevails. The Mediterranean Caper was the debut novel by my father Clive Cussler, and introduced the indomitable character of Dirk Pitt at the controls of the Catalina, along with his fictional employer, the National Underwater an…
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The amnesia trope is a popular one in mysteries and thrillers, and for good reason. It’s a terrifying thought, having a secret locked away in your own head. Often times, the suppressed memory is of a violent event, so not only is the reader unsure if they can trust the character, the character also doesn’t know if they can be trusted! This is what happens in my novel, Listen for the Lie. Due to a head injury, my main character, Lucy, has no memory of the night her best friend died. The evidence seems to point to her being the murderer, and everyone in her small town sure believes that, but she has no idea. I loved writing the amnesia trope, because it means that the rea…
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Having traveled fairly extensively in my life, I’ve garnered quite a slew of past tristes with destinations. Some I ditched after the first date—cutting a trip short as soon as I realized we weren’t compatible—others turned into more long-term connections, even prompting me to move for a few months or, in one case, over a year. But just like any list of past relationships, there’s the ‘one that got away.’ For me, that place is a tiny, secluded island in the Gulf of Thailand. If you’ve seen the 2000 film The Beach, adapted from Alex Garland’s novel of the same name, you can easily picture it: turquoise blue waters, lush mountains that erupt almost directly out of the b…
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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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There ought to be a word for the particular form of melancholy you feel, upon finishing a book you’ve been enjoying so much you never wanted it to end. If there is such a word, in some language or other—I’m looking at you, German—then I experienced the extreme form late last year, as I arrived at the hopeful concluding passages of Silverview, a slim 2021 novel about a seaside bookseller in a small British town who becomes entangled with a former spy in a bad jam. That novel, of course, is by John le Carré, nee David Cornwall, and it was quite good—not le Carré’s best, but le Carré’s best is a very high standard, indeed. What distinguishes Silverview is that it was the…
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What makes an academic institution the perfect setting for fictional crime? Perhaps it’s because there is so much at stake when a child or young adult is exposed to a crime. A campus, whether primary, secondary or tertiary, offers the potential for a juicy closed-room thriller – not to mention a substantial roll of suspects from a pool of pupils, teachers and parents. When I wrote my third novel The School Run, I chose a fictional private high school for my sinister goings-on. St Ignatius Boys’ Grammar was an institution so hallowed and revered that mothers would do anything to get an admissions offer for their sons – including commit murder. It was so intriguing to me…
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It was an introvert’s paradise. Two weeks after Fidel Castro forced Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959, Justin Gleichauf found himself as the one and only employee of the new CIA operation in Miami. Part of the Domestic Contacts Division of the Directorate of Intelligence, the CIA field office (meaning Gleichauf) was tasked with monitoring and reporting on developments in Cuba. Gleichauf missed the fighting in the Second World War because he was too underweight for combat action (he was the water boy in college at Notre Dame because he was so skinny). Instead, he served as a technical advisor in the Office of Price Administration and on the Board of Economic Warfare…
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What really happened? That question lies at the heart of so many crime novels, and yet the answer, that very truth, can often depend on who’s telling the story and the truth they believe. Authors employ various story structures to dole out information in a way that keeps the questions coming and the answers satisfying. When those truths don’t quite mesh, conflict and tension ensue. I love stories that play with perspective, and how different people interpret the same events, so that question—what really happened?—lies at the heart of my latest novel, Who to Believe. The story takes place over the course of a single night, as a group of friends gather in the wake of a br…
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On the first day I joined the Select Committee Investigating the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, I was told to watch my back. An administrative aide and I were walking from Capitol Hill’s main campus to our own intentionally nondescript, off-the-beaten-path office building after collecting my ID. I noted that I would be walking to work every day: an envious 15-minute commute door to door. He advised me to switch up my route. Daily. “You know, in case you’re being followed,” he said. I had come directly from serving as a homicide prosecutor. I had held murderers and gang members to account for years. Made them and sometimes their families upset with me. I had he…
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When you think of Gothic fiction, the image of a woman in a diaphanous nightgown, running from a sinister house might come to mind. A classic feature of paperback novels from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, these iconic covers convey several things at a glance: fear, sensuality, mystery. Words that, in a nutshell, help define Gothic fiction. Often denigrated as campy pulp fiction, these books and their covers, in my opinion, also serve to highlight the heroine’s agency against overwhelming odds. After all, she is willfully running from the haunted house—a powerful metaphor for patriarchal oppression in the genre. It’s no coincidence that Gothic horror enjoyed a renaissance duri…
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I first saw Sliding Doors on VHS in 1999, the year after it released in theaters. I was eighteen and seeking my way back from my first real heartbreak. Mere days after an amicable split with my boyfriend, a slow drifting apart that was more bittersweet than painfully acute, he had called me up to say he was seeing someone new—my best friend. Then the pain rushed in. I slid the tape into my VCR expecting the kind of romantic comedy that would feel bad and good at the same time, like pressing on a bruise. (As it turned out, Sliding Doors was not a typical rom-com, something I’ll return to in a moment.) But it did resonate in unexpected ways. In the opening sequence of the …
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Spring is here, summer is coming, and June is Pride Month. What does this mean? Lots of great new queer mysteries and thrillers to read on the beach or at the park on a lazy Sunday. This season, many beloved characters return: Katrina Carrasco’s queer 19th-century outlaw Alma Rosales, John Copenhaver’s 1950s crime-solving (and—committing) lesbian duo Judy Nightingale and Philippa Watson, Dharma Kelleher’s goth tattoo artist and vigilante Avery Byrne, and Robyn Gigl’s passionate trans defense attorney, Erin McCabe. New characters and scenarios also abound: Leslie Karst and Jack Ori begin a new series set in beautiful Hawaii and on an ominous college campus, respectively. A…
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Crime novels in translation were few and far between for the first two months of 2024, but March brings with it a deluge of mysteries and thrillers from across the globe. Below, you’ll find five highlights from the month in globetrotting literature, including a brutal French noir, a haunting Japanese mystery, and a cynical Scandinavian parody, among others. Tanguy Viel, The Girl You Call Translated by William Rodarmor (Other Press) Viel’s latest demonstrates an acute sense of the imbalance of power and the gradations of control accompanying gendered violence and sexual exploitation. In The Girl You Call, an aging boxer finds his comeback disrupted by revelations abo…
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Those of us who write series novels generally spend a lot of time thinking about our characters’ background—where do they come from, what is their education, their taste in food and music, what jobs have they held? Some writers work out entire biographies of the characters, filled with details that may never make it into a story, but that feel necessary for their creator to know. How can our characters be vivid, we wonder, how can they move and talk and appear in three dimensions, if there are parts of their history that even their author doesn’t know? Thirty years ago, I published The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the first episode in what became the Mary Russell & Sherlo…
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It’s that season again—the time to plan summer vacations. How about touring small towns and visiting some occasionally wacky, but always fun, festivals? In Wisconsin, for instance, where the Deputy Donut Mystery series is set, provides a wealth of summer fairs, festivals, and family-fun weekends. At one gem and mineral show, kids can dig for treasures in an agate pit! Three different festivals provide sawdust piles where kids can grub around looking for things. At least one of these sawdust piles is stocked with money. And speaking of not exactly staying pristine, you could participate in, or merely watch (maybe from a distance), a cow chip hurling competition. There are …
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I may be just a wee bit obsessed with reality TV competition series – or so I’ve been told. Survivor (the OG), The Amazing Race, Big Brother, Alone, and most recently, Squid Game – The Challenge – are all addictive, guilty pleasures to binge-watch with a bowl of popcorn and a glass of wine (awful combo, I know). I even decided to set my latest thriller, Everyone Is Watching, against the backdrop of an over-the-top reality show where secrets, revenge, and the quest to become the one lucky winner turn deadly. I mean, when you think about it, reality TV has all the elements of a great binge-read: A cast of wildly unpredictable contestants, some you love, some you love to ha…
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I often wonder, what is it about a haunted house that truly scares us? Is it the sounds of tapping against window frames, a creaking door, or shadows that seem to dance along the periphery of our eyesight? These are just sounds, aren’t they? These are just sights, right? A noise or the wisp of something rushing past can’t really hurt us. What is it really and truly that generates dread regarding a haunted home? Is it the possibility that a human form can materialize before us? And even if it does, can a ghost harm us? Who knows? I believe that much of what generates fear in a house thought to be haunted is the memories, and the history that lingers, of cruel and awful o…
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My husband, our young son, and I fostered seventeen dogs during the pandemic. Our son cried every time a dog went to their forever home. A couple who adopted one of our fosters was so touched by his devotion that they offered to give him back the dog. When he said no, they sent him a box of toys for his future fosters. I thought it was so sweet, until my thriller mind starting thinking, what if they liked him too much? What if they came back one day and took him right out of the driveway without us knowing? And that was how the premise of my book, What Is Mine came about. Of course, the couple is lovely and would never do that. But how many times have parents found thems…
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