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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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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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…
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Whenever I’m asked about my favorite reads, my go-to recommendations are almost always YA mysteries. I have an expensive habit of auto-buying any and every new release in the genre and devouring the books the moment I get my hands on them! My own YA mystery, This Is Why We Lie, is set to be released September 21st with Inkyard Press. The story follows Jenna and Adam as they race against time to solve the murder of a local teenager. With prep school sandals and small-town secrets, someone will take the fall. In the lead up to the release of This is Why We Lie, I thought I’d take a more in-depth look at some of the YA prep school mysteries that I’ve been binging lately . …
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I grew up in a small town on the west coast of Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island. In the mid 80’s, Waitara’s short main street had two thriving, independent bookstores, with a well-stocked local library just around the corner. In this rural town of roughly 6,000 people, we were never far from a good book, and I always had a jumbled stack of novels next to my bed. If reading was an accessible, essential part of my childhood, the idea of being a writer was as remote as our geographical location at the bottom of the world. By the time I got to high school, I knew of local women who had become sports stars, politicians, even famous actresses. But, with the exception of Boo…
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Yepoka Yeebo’s rigorously researched, beautifully written first book takes its title from a folk story familiar to generations of Ghanaian children. The fictional Anansi, she writes, “is a trickster” who “uses stories to deceive.” In Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World, the title role goes to a voluble con man named John Ackah Blay-Miezah. Even as he was served prison time in the U.S. and Ghana, Blay-Miezah carried out “one of the largest frauds of the twentieth century.” Blay-Miezah’s Oman Ghana Trust Fund—Oman, in this case, means “our nation,” not the Middle Eastern country—was founded on a lie. From the 1970s until…
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Warning: potential triggers ahead. How about that? A warning at the beginning of this piece; I’ve never done that before. I’ve killed off a decent amount of folks in my thrillers—hell, even crucified a few of them—yet none of my books contains a trigger warning. I added one here because I saw a review on Goodreads for my new book, The Dead Husband, that stated, “There are a couple instances of animal torture/death, which deducted half a star from my final rating.” (To be fair, there was only one instance (that I remember) and the death was quick and off-camera. I say give me my half-star back!) The reviewer went on to mostly praise the book but warn of potential triggers…
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Okay team! It’s time for us to round up crime movies which also happen to be set during the Christmas season but are not really, technically “Christmas movies.” As I explain EVERY year, when I make another one of these lists, these aren’t movies like Die Hard or Bad Santa or Lethal Weapon or the new Violent Night: famously crimey and obviously seasonal for having a “Christmasy” backdrop. NOPE! These are the movies you don’t always remember are even set at Christmas. In December 2018, our editor Dwyer Murphy assembled ten thrillers that might surprise you with their holiday settings, and in December of 2019, I added ten more. And then in December of 2020, I added another t…
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As the holidays approach, we’re all looking forward to those big family gatherings. You know what I mean, right? When your large, adoring, boisterous family gets together in love and good will, and it’s all laughter, acceptance, and joyful support. Oh, wait. What’s that? Your family gatherings aren’t like that? They’re fraught with dysfunction, seething with buried secrets and lies, and hidden rivalries? Well – join the club. When we first meet the Maroni clan at the beginning of my twentieth novel SECLUDED CABIN SLEEPS SIX, on the surface everything is glittering and idyllic. Wealthy and successful Hannah and Mako have the perfect sibling relationship, loving and suppor…
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A family room adorned with couch and a coffee table, the aftermath of a disturbing sequence of torture so fresh the blood is still pooling into the fibers of the rug. The body left behind is that of a child, his father dripping wet of sweat and tears crumbled on the floor. The silence, most of all, hangs there, punctuated by gentle sobbing. The boy’s body hidden; he’s no longer in pain—the games that culminated in a bag over the child’s head, devolving into suffocation and strangulation… it’s over. It’s all left to the father to deal with. The father looks up and calls out his wife’s name, suspicious of the dead silence. He gazes over at the lit-up hallway and receives n…
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When you think of the British agent with a license to kill, seducing his way around the world, keeping the rest of us safe, you likely don’t think of children. This is probably a good thing since the source novels are most definitely of their era, rife with casual sexism, racism, misogyny, homophobia and rape. While the films do a little better in some of these areas, they’re not exactly blameless. It’s for these reasons that perhaps the idea of a teenage Bond isn’t something that instantly springs to mind as a great idea. Yet, as you’ll see, it’s been a long sought after market that the keepers of the Bond legacy have repeatedly tried to reach, with varying degrees of s…
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When I first sat down at the keyboard, I enjoyed inventing all sorts of characters. A little red-haired girl who can tell the future a in bowl of popcorn. A beautiful half-Chinese, half-Black divorcée who decides to revenge-date every guy she’d turned down before she got married. As author Charles de Lint says, “Why not use the whole palette?” Then I saw a survey of actors appearing on-screen in big American movies the year that the first Avatar came out, and it was #sowhite. A few Black and Latinx actors were allowed in, but Asians were so rare that the chance of glimpsing us on-screen was statistically equal to spotting a blue-skinned alien. And I’m guessing the aliens…
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In the greatest TV news since this announcement, probably, the streaming service Peacock has announced that there will be a Monk movie! Yes, a Monk movie! It is to be called Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie and written by original series creator Andy Breckman. The release date is currently unknown, which is a blessing… and a curse. Here’s what happened. Apparently, this mystery will be, according to the official announcement, “a very personal case involving his beloved step-daughter Molly, a journalist preparing for her wedding.” The great Tony Shalhoub will be returning as the brilliant obsessive-compulsive detective, as well as producing. And everybody else will be …
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Young Man, It Starts Here Almost all the people I called my peers were second-generation township dwellers. When my father said he was going home, he embarked on an exhausting, bumpy drive to the rural south coast, past Umzumbe and beyond, to dusty villages where youths still greeted elders. I went there too from time to time. There was nothing lavish about the place. When I said I was going home, I meant Umlazi—a township. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were of the last generation that lived in the same place for their whole lives. Times changed fast. Even I, bush mechanic that I was, vowed not to die in a township, let alone in my father’s house. My father …
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You are here because you love mystery stories. I understand. I am like you. I enjoy them so much that I write them, and I’ve just written one that takes place at an English country manor house. Everyone loves a manor house! And wouldn’t it be fun to go! After all, they aren’t really full of murders and dead bodies. Those are just stories. Visiting a manor house would be fun! If you hold these naïve views, you fundamentally misunderstand the manor house and its occupants. The manor is not a house or a home; it is an extension of a biological line, a symbol of dynastic power. Now it stands—barely—a shell of its former glory. The manor is too expensive to maintain in the m…
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This spring is so packed full with new and returning crime series, we decided to lay out a viewing guide to help you keep track of all the dates and streaming services. There’s almost no way you’re going to be able to watch all these shows, so plan carefully. The Staircase HBO Max – Premieres May 5th I honestly don’t know who watched Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s docu-series about Michael and Kathleen Peterson and thought it needed to be a dramatized miniseries, but somebody must have because they went and made the thing. And they went and cast Toni Collette, Colin Firth, Juliette Binoche (Binoche!) and Rosemarie Dewitt (Dewitt!) in the thing, and damn if they didn’t dra…
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To be perfectly frank with you, August is not a banner month for crime series on TV (except for one very bright spot, the first selection below, which isn’t really a crime series). Why? It’s hard to say. Traditionally it was a dead time on the TV calendar but that’s not really the case anymore. Maybe there’s a drought in productions, but then why did the streaming services all run their best stuff in the same three week period in April? If I had to guess, the current gap is down to the juggernaut series coming at the end of the month: the Game of Thrones spinoff on HBO and the Lord of the Rings project on Amazon. So, a good month for fantasy fans. Let’s try to be happy fo…
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There’s a lot of good crime tv happening right now. In the interest of helping you sort out viewing schedules, we bring you a monthly guide to what’s coming next. We Hunt Together Showtime – Premieres July 3rd (season 2) The British detective series returns, after a bit of a hiatus, for its second season to air in the States. Serial killers, emotional traps, sexual attraction – all still at the center of the series, which has a bit of style and wit to it, setting it apart from the usual fare with an interesting perspective and a charismatic detective pairing. Black Bird Apple TV – Premieres July 8th One of the year’s most anticipated crime shows, this one comes …
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While June isn’t quite so packed with urgent new series as, say, April and May, there are still some very choice selections coming your way soon, led by a Tony Hillerman adaptation and closing out with your goodbye to the Shelby clan of Birmingham. Dark Winds AMC – Premieres June 12th The long-awaited adaptation of Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee series is finally here, brought to the screen by Graham Roland, with a starry executive producer corps that includes Chris Eyre, Robert Redford, and George RR Martin. Zahn McClarnon and Kiowa Gordon take on the iconic leading roles, which keeps its original 1970s Southwest setting and navigates a web of corruption and c…
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This spring is so packed full with new and returning crime series, we decided to lay out a viewing guide to help you keep track of all the dates and streaming services. There’s almost no way you’re going to be able to watch all these shows, so plan carefully. Slow Horses Apple TV – Premieres April 1st Based on the widely acclaimed Mick Herron novels, Slow Horses follows the exploits of Slough House, where the bottomed-out agents of MI5 are sent to shuffle through the rest of their careers in quiet disgrace. But then, of course, something happens that brings them back into action. A compelling thriller bundled up with grace notes of dark humor, this adaptation boasts …
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Professor Dr Dr (honoris causa) (mult.) Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld came from a distinguished family about whom little is known, other than they had existed, as von Igelfelds, for a very long time. The obscurity of their early history in no way detracted from the family’s distinction; in fact, if anything, it added to it. Anybody can find their way into the history books by doing something egregiously unpleasant: starting a local war, stealing the land and property of others, being particularly vindictive towards neighbours: all of these are well-understood routes to fame and can lead to immense distinction, titles and honorifics. Most people who today are dukes or earls ar…
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