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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It was night, and darker than I had ever experienced. I was alone and outside, awake at 4am while everyone else slept, the Milky Way a dusty cloud above me and the moon yet to rise. The air was warm that close to the equator, even in the quiet black hours, and I was comfortable in just shorts and a T-shirt. Below the soles of my feet, the deck of the yacht tilted and rolled as kindly winds pushed us on towards our destination; behind me the ocean rushed, churned by the rudders into a creamy, frothy wake. A surfacing dolphin, puffing up a fishy sigh into the night air, was the only sign of life. We—myself and the five near-strangers who made up the crew of this sailboat—w…
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Twenty-one years ago. That’s when Craig Clevenger’s debut novel, The Contortionist’s Handbook, came out. That’s when I read it. The book, about a young forger constantly reinventing himself to avoid the authorities—which, if you’re into labels, you could call neo-noir—was like a bolt of lightning in my hands. Stark and gritty, thoughtful and ever so carefully-crafted. If I had to make a little pile of books that pushed me to knuckle down and make a career as a writer, Handbook would hold a place of esteem near the top. A short time after I read it, I wrote Clevenger—just tracked down his e-mail somewhere—and asked him if he had any advice for an up-and-comer. He came ba…
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Clothes are a storyteller’s dream when it comes to showing, not telling. In Patricia Highsmith’s 1950s novel, The Price of Salt, Therese Belivet describes what Carol is wearing even before she mentions her future lover’s eyes, or mouth, or languorous walk. (“She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with her hand on her waist.”) Carol’s appearance as a centre of stillness within the frantic atmosphere of a Manhattan department store has a lot to do with her fabulous coat, and the way she models it, and yet her poise, though striking, is not durable. That’s how it goes with coats: they are easily removed, lost, stolen or damag…
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Sienna and Prez arrive together in the Astro van outside EditedPets’s 6th Avenue building. It is Saturday, December 24, 5:57 a.m., 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Empty offices await them upstairs. Prez holds a cardboard cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Sienna hasn’t drunk alcohol since Prez plucked her from the Midnight Lounge, but caffeine would be counterproductive; she wants a buffer of dullness today. For ten seconds, they look up at the building while New York rises from sleep. “You ever heard of Phineas Gage?” Sienna asks. “Who hasn’t? Backup QB for the Giants, 1980–1985.” Sienna smiles to show appreciation for the joke, any joke. “I read up on him last night. He was this …
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My latest novel, An Honest Man, is set in Maine and was written in Maine. This might make one think it qualifies as Maine fiction – and I respect your confusion. I’ve lived part-time in Maine for eight years now, and there are two disqualifiers in there. You can’t be a Mainer if you live in the state for “part” of a year (waivers may be considered for natives) and if the word following the number eight is years rather than generations, don’t even think about it. It was in Maine that I became aware of the acronym P.F.A., which stands for “People From Away.” This is one of the great terms for outsiders I’ve ever heard. There is Maine, and there is Away. The End. My wife, …
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It’s a full slate of authors from across genres. Crime writer David Swinson and his new coming-of-age tale, City on the Edge. Best selling horror writer Josh Malerman (BIrdbox) with his new novel, Goblin. Joani Elliott and her humorous novel, The Audacity of Sara Grayson. Eli Cranor and his upcoming novel, Don’t Know Tough. And Stephen Mack Jones with his latest August Snow novel, Dead of Winter. From the episode: JOSH MALERMAN: Goblin is the book that back when I had written 9 or so books, and I wasn’t looking for an agent or a publishing house or anything, I was just writing. A friend of mine from high school called and told me that he knew a lawyer that represents…
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Any study of Aphra Behn is really a study of shifting disguises and political guesswork. She is remembered in history as the first woman to make a living by writing in English, all the way back in the seventeenth century. Few know that she became a writer while exploring her first intriguing career: Spy for the British crown. Fittingly for a spy, Behn was secretive and her reputed garrulity among friends did not extend to anything autobiographical for future generations to rely on. Most of what we know of her is uncertain, gleaned from the literature she left us. Her espionage career might have begun in 1659, when she was about nineteen years old. The death of Oliver Cr…
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What if Jessica Fletcher was your grandmother? That was the spark of an idea that turned into my second YA murder mystery, Pretty Dead Queens. Technically. It was hardly that simple, or linear. Crafting a book, and a mystery especially, is a circuitous process. Collating and meshing multiple inspirations, tweaking and twisting ideas to provide the most fun ride for the reader possible. But you’ll be hard-pressed to read Pretty Dead Queens and not see the winking references to Cabot Cove, murder capital of the U.S., or to a bygone era of mass market paperbacks and TV movies of the week. If you’re catching a whiff of nostalgia in the set-up, you wouldn’t be wrong. Isn’t…
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All reporters have to learn to deal with sources who lie. Lies were at the heart of my last book, I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad (co-written with Brandon Soderberg). The story centered around a group of plainclothes cops who lied on warrants, in arrests, and on the stand, robbing from drug dealers and selling the drugs. They lied to each other—about how much money they found, what happened to the drugs, and on overtime slips that allowed them to fleece the citizenry as well. When all of this came tumbling down with a federal RICO indictment in 2017, those with reasons to lie proliferated. Each of the eight cops initially arreste…
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Is there that big a difference between falling in love and solving a murder? Um, yes, there is, especially when writing about love and murder. For me, it’s not just about content but about the craft and process of writing in those separate genres. I find it fascinating that although I’ve been writing for over twenty years, my beginning process for writing cozy mysteries is vastly different than it is for writing in the romance genre. I started writing romances because I love to read them. It’s not a billion dollar industry for nothing! Comprised of formulaic and original plots, as well as a guaranteed happily ever after (HEA,) the genre breeds voracious readers who wa…
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As a child growing up in the middle of the Daniel Boone National Forest I spent an inordinate amount of time alone. Most of those hours I wandered the woods. Half of what I know, I learned there alone. Most of the rest I learned from reading. A bookmobile trundled up the dirt road of my home hill once a week. On those slanted shelves I discovered my love of crime fiction by falling in love with Nancy Drew. Next I read the Hardy Boys, the Dana Girls, and the Three Investigators. The nearest town established a public library where I made the big jump to Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe. There was a four-book limit per person. I circumvented that—an act of minor crime—b…
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My first encounter with the Russian mob occurred two-and-a-half years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in Istanbul. My new husband and I had traveled to Turkey and spent a week in a gloriously historic neighborhood, the Blue Mosque visible from our hotel windows. On our second night, we wandered across Galata Bridge, descended the steps to the waterfront, and chose a restaurant with a perfect view of the Golden Horn. Docked directly in front of this restaurant and sporting the tricolor Russian Federation flag floated a gigantic but peeling cruise ship, the name “Odessa” painted under a red star on its side. A single Russian family occupied nearly every table ins…
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― “I tried to find my own edges again, tried to remember the shape of my own body, repeating the same words out loud as I tried to keep myself from disappearing―I belong to no one.” When I first set out to write a piece of fiction that explored some of the murkier depths of consent and personal agency, I knew the first treacherous step would be to untangle my own story from the one I was building in my head. I knew, though, that no matter how aware I stayed of the sixteen-year-old version of myself that still moves through the rooms of my memory, she would end up on the page. Her pain, her fear, her complete lack of understanding of what had been done to her and just how…
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I’ve always had a weakness for stories that defy categorization, especially if they happen to include fantasy and romance. Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars is an excellent example; Tamsyn Muir’s captivating and beautifully strange Gideon the Ninth is another; Naomi Novik’s fabulous Scholomance series is a third. When I began writing Payback’s a Witch, I originally intended it to read as a more traditional rom-com, primarily a romance that just happened to revolve around two bisexual witches falling in love in a magical, Salem-inspired Halloweentown. The magic was initially intended to be a background element rather than a focal point of the plot. Something to add a little s…
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How difficult it seems, gazing back just seventy years to the late 1940s and 50s, to truly appreciate what a confusing and fraught era it was for our grandparents. The Soviet Union, recently an ally in the Second World War, was increasingly viewed as a threat with Stalin’s imposition of the Iron Curtain and acquisition of an atomic bomb. While on the home front, and quite suddenly—or so it seemed at the time—congressional inquiries and headline grabbing confessions of ex-Soviet spies were turning up KGB agents everywhere. Spy fever, it was called, especially after the “Red Spy Queen” Elizabeth Bentley went to the FBI in 1945 and named nearly 150 agents working for the Sov…
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I write books set in the South, and it’s always interesting to hear readers ‘not from around here’ describe my leading ladies. To some, the women I pen are ruthless. To others, they are misguided. To a few, they are unimaginable. To most, they are strong, for better or worse. To me, they are simply writing what I know. My family from north Alabama speaks in a southern drawl so thick you’d think they’d just eaten a spoonful of sorghum syrup at any given moment. They are the women I know best: my grandmothers, my aunts, my sisters, my mother. Like the stereotypes of Southern women, they can serve you hot banana pudding right out of the oven and at the same time tell you o…
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Here is a short list of things that are easy: –Brunch. –Turning on the television for your children instead of reading to them. –Looking at your phone and checking some vacuous app some deem crucial. –Sleeping in. –Eating too much. –Making love. And so on and so on. The “easy” list is extensive and if done in excess becomes boring. As the saying goes: everything in moderation. Here is a slightly longer list of things that are not easy: –Going to brunch and pretending to enjoy yourself. –Turning off the television and convincing your children that reading is better. –Not looking at your phone for an hour (try it, prove me wrong). –Awaking early to be productive…
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There’s a reason the romantic subplot is a mainstay in mystery/thriller. It can give the reader a break from the non-stop death-defying action, and it lets us see another side of our hero. Or maybe there’s no real relationship involved – our Jane Bond might just be picking up a hunky henchman for a quick roll in the hay, or two characters have more of a prickly love/hate connection going on. Either way, a sex scene is a chance to mix up the action and add new stakes. “Sex scenes are devised to nudge a character in a different direction and change the trajectory of their journey,” says Tessa Wegert, author the Shana Merchant series of mysteries – and yes, Tessa says we’ll…
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I wrote Our Best Intentions, a novel anchored in the suburbs of the Northeast and featuring a fifteen year old protagonist, while 7,900 miles from New York and two decades after my own freshman year of high school. It was only after becoming an expat and approaching middle age that I was able to articulate an honest, at times nostalgic, at other times critical, perspective on living in “progressive” American suburbia and the agony of being an adolescent girl. I’d moved to Johannesburg, South Africa in 2015, having lived in the Northeast (Connecticut, Boston, New York) for most of my conscious existence. The reasons for my move, how I navigated a different country and new…
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Pharaoh Ramesses II was an unrepentant warmonger and slaver, but he is also credited with building the earliest known library in the 1200s BCE. To paraphrase the equally problematic Walt Whitman, he contained multitudes. Inscribed in stone over the sacred library doors was a Greek phrase meaning “healing place of the soul.” Rather elegant for a man who almost certainly married at least four of his daughters, but I can’t argue the point. Stories heal. Books save lives. I’m proof, and odds are, some of you are too. The first book I remember finding myself in was Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Like Jonas, I had seen things I could never unsee, things I could not explain to other k…
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We all thought everything was going to change didn’t we? There was a moment back there, when more and more women started standing up and saying, ‘yeah it’s happened to me too’, when Harvey Weinstein went to prison, when women starting talking publicly about what it’s actually like for us to exist in a man’s world, when marches happened, when the media got behind the hashtag. But, let’s be honest, when you look at your life and the life of the women you love, fundamentally what has really changed? To be sure, no longer can a predatory boss make advances without fear of a tribunal. Coercive control is a recognized offense. Equal pay is at least discussed. Most companies a…
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Authenticity is a big issue in literature. Who wants to read a fake? Nadie. Nobody! Now, when discussing English texts, the topic of authenticity tends to focus on how to express in this language events or dialogues that happen in another. My previous piece, “Writing with an Accent,” was precisely about how I used a foreign language (Spanish) to preserve authenticity without compromising understanding in my novel Death under the Perseids, which takes place in Havana. But I have also encountered the opposite problem—how to write realistic-sounding scenes from the point of view of an American character, considering that I am not American myself and English isn’t my first l…
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Writing about Havana, the city where I was born and lived until my thirtieth birthday, is a pleasurable but sometimes daunting task. I want to use the rich palette of the English language to portray our rhythms, flavors and unique landscapes. A sense of place can be established by describing locations and conjuring sounds and smells, but crafting a dialogue that happens in another language is a balancing act between authenticity and clarity. My dilemma has always been to convey my characters’ Cubanness without boring, annoying, or worse, losing the reader. A few chosen words in Spanish add a more realistic touch to the narrative. Indeed, a dialogue peppered with Spanish …
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The human urge to uncover hidden things is behind the enduring appetite for crime fiction, where we turn the pages to search for the truth. The impulse to solve clues and find buried treasure explains the success of everything from The Da Vinci Code to The Goonies, and hatched a sub-genre that sparks the kind of obsession you’d find in the pages of a psychological thriller. Literary treasure hunts, word-and-picture books containing clues to buried treasure, literal or figurative, inspired my latest suspense novel, THE SKELETON KEY. In my fictional treasure hunt, a golden skeleton is scattered across England, the clues hidden in a storybook called The Golden Bones. What s…
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When I was young, I spent Friday afternoons at my maternal grandmother’s house with the pages of supermarket tabloids spread out in front of me on the living room floor. You know the ones: The National Enquirer, The Weekly World News, The Weekly Globe, and others of that ilk. Some had stories just unbelievable enough to feel true to a child of the Christ-haunted South, where we felt the supernatural lived with us cheek-by-jowl, close enough to smell the sharp tang of sweat mixed with Aqua Velva on a preacher’s neck as he spoke in tongues on a Sunday morning. With those pages splayed out before me, I was subject to a slew of adult-oriented advertising. Virginia Slims cigar…
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