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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Once a place of movie-making fantasy, a decaying movie set became the starting point for vengeance on Hollywood. Known as “Spahn Ranch,” this crumbling and deserted Western soundstage was the ramshackle home and headquarters for what eventually became known as “The Family.” The moniker represented the delinquent and motley crew of outcasts who abandoned their suburban and city lives to follow the scripture according to Charles Manson. There, living away from society and hidden away in the San Bernadino Valley, Manson and his Family came to commit the unthinkable in the summer of 1969. The carnage started on August 8 when the clan brutally killed pregnant actress Sharon …
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In the world of crime fiction (and fact) Adam Plantinga is an authority figure. A twenty-two-year veteran of law enforcement, he began his career with the Milwaukee Police Department in 2001 and has spent the last fifteen years with the San Francisco PD, where he is a sergeant assigned to street patrol. Drawing on that specialized knowledge, he authored two non-fiction books on policing and procedure—400 Things Cops Know and Police Craft; the former won a 2015 Silver Falchion award, was nominated for an Agatha, and has been called a bible for crime writers. This month, Plantinga made his debut as a novelist with The Ascent (January 2, 2024; Grand Central Publishing). Wh…
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The publication date for my debut novel, The Devil’s Daughter is days away. In a sense it’s the apotheosis of my writing career. I’ve spent decades as a working Hollywood screenwriter, which turns out to be something of a mixed blessing. The money is good. The creative experience, not so much. After years of being critiqued by studio and network executives, The Devil’s Daughter was finally my chance to write exactly what I wanted to write. The noir hero, Jack Coffey, lives in 1950s New York, a city of great jazz clubs, glamorous women, big city corruption and mob violence. It’s written in a style very much my own, but influenced by the time I spent working with Michael Ma…
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You can tell me anything. When you’re in this room, and we’re sitting across from each other, and your mind is reeling with all the bad things you’ve done to people, and all the bad things they’ve done to you, you can let it all out into the air between us. All the weird sex stuff, the compulsive jerking off, the period blood staining the gym shorts when you were thirteen, the infidelities, the regret about having kids or not having kids. You can tell me about the time you did mushrooms and made out with a window for three hours, or that time with your dad’s friend, that time you felt a stranger’s boner press against you on the subway, how you wish your mother would just…
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When I was writing The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, a novel of haunting love and loss set in an Indian community on the east coast of South Africa, it didn’t immediately occur to me that it was a gothic novel. Looking back, it seems obvious—it had all the conventional genre tropes—the haunted house on the hill, the wild landscape, odd characters, ghostly elements and the disjointed rhythm of unease. It didn’t occur to me because these were simply features from my life growing up in my South African Indian home. It was only when I started to pick at the origins of the genre that I realized how much of the gothic existed not only in my life, but also far beyond the western …
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People sometimes ask me why I write cozy mysteries. It’s not a hard question to answer. At least I didn’t think so the first time I was asked. My response was I wrote cozies because that’s what I read. Yet that’s only partially true. I also read other types of crime fiction. But in the end, I always return to cozies. In writing cozies, whether historical or contemporary, I want the reader to be able to leave the real world behind. In Deadly to the Core (January 16, 2024), I take the reader into the world of Orchardville, Pennsylvania. Apple orchards, a café, a candle shop, a tea shop, and the somewhat mysterious, handsome owner of a neighboring orchard—who wouldn’t want …
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From the beginning of my writing journey in 2000, I have always written sleuths with moxie and plenty of spunk. As Misty Simon I started with Ivy Morris, who was working hard to not be a door mat. Then I moved on to Mel Hargrove, who was corralling a junkyard full of ghosts while making sense of her life. Next came my big break at Kensington with Tallie Graver, who was looking for a second chance while making amends for her past. Moving back into paranormal, I wrote The Magically Suspicious Mysteries, where we ride along with Verla Faeth and her friends at a Renn Faire. Now, as Gabby Allan, I’m writing Whitney Dagner, who is finally where she belongs, solving nautically t…
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So, you got locked up? No wonder you look like shit,” said Paul. “I better fix that,” said Bimbo. “Don’t want folks thinking I’m related to you.” The crew was back together, and so was the banter. We were sitting under some red paper lights and an AC vent that had been collecting dust for a decade. El Paraíso Asia was Bimbo’s favorite restaurant. A Chinese joint that was somehow the best place for Chinese food and also the best place if you were in the mood for Puerto Rican fare like tostones al ajillo. The joint had been in business for generations, and everything they made was great. I was digging in to my plate of fried chicken with fried rice and a side of tostone…
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Hercule Poirot hasn’t been brought to the screen as many times as Sherlock Holmes has, but he’s certainly had his fair share of portrayals, throughout the years. He’s been everywhere, from radio to the big screen to the small screen to the stage. The rules: as usual, with these things, I can only rank performances that I can actually watch. So, no radio (VERY sorry not to include a Poirot adaptation with Orson Welles in multiple parts), no theater, no video games. But that’s okay. That leaves us with 20 performances to assess. It wasn’t an easy job. I relied on most of my little gray cells to pull it off. Now, normally, when making these lists, I have to put together th…
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A look at the month’s best debuts in crime fiction, mystery, and thriller. * Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made (S&S/Marysue Ricci Books) In one of the best espionage novels I’ve ever come across, a bored Malaya housewife lets a Japanese spy charm her into giving up the secrets necessary for her nation to be invaded; later, as the war continues, her guilt grows monstrous as her children suffer. –MO Nishita Parekh, The Night of the Storm (Dutton) Houston during a hurricane is the setting for this thriller featuring a South Asian family trapped in a fancy suburban home with a dead body and a lot of petty resentments. Along with various other storm-set novels com…
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Most people know that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a result of trauma, but unless you’ve lived with it, it’s hard to really understand what it’s like. Everyday experiences and objects become terrifying. Having PTSD is like living in a haunted house, but the ghosts are your trauma and they follow you everywhere. The house I grew up in was haunted. There were strange noises, like creaking and footsteps. There were occasional cold spots or feelings of being watched, especially from the woods behind my house. While I loved that forest during the day, I wouldn’t go anywhere near it once the sun went down. I just knew something bad would happen if I went there at n…
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For a character whose screen adventures always end with, “James Bond will return,” it’s interesting how much of a struggle it has been to try to make the literary character undertake a new adventure on the page. In many ways, the fact that Bond ever graced the page again after the death of creator Ian Fleming in 1964 is surprising. Fleming’s widow, Ann Fleming, was more than happy to let Bond die with his creator. But, of course, fans were loathe to do such a thing. Literary star Kingsley Amis was the first to pick up the golden pen, penning two books that were more celebration of Bond than continuation. (1965’s James Bond Dossier, under mis’s own name and The Book of Bo…
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It was the summer I left rehab. I was officially six weeks “clean” of alcohol and was taking my first baby steps back into the real world, when I looked down at my phone to see 11 missed calls. My heart sank. The number listed was an ex-addict from my former rehab—a brilliant young doctor named Liz* who had checked in for alcohol and cocaine addiction. This couldn’t be good. Dread pooling in my stomach, I called her back. She answered on the first ring. “I’ve relapsed,” Liz sobbed. “I’m devastated.” I listened sympathetically, as she outlined her shame and despair. In a society where children are taught to pass or fail, Liz’s take-home was clear. She had failed at recov…
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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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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 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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‘Laughter is poison to fear,’ said George R. R. Martin in A Game of Thrones. ‘To laugh is to dispel the darkness,’ agreed Isobelle Carmody in The Gathering. Both insightful quotes that speak to a universal truth. Fear is allayed the instant we laugh at the source of it, and what better way to cope with the inevitable horrors of life? Unfortunately, if you’re a writer of mystery thrillers and you like to blend a dark, creeping sense of terror with humor, the fact a single laugh can cancel out the tense anticipation you’ve built up over thousands of words, is one huge bummer. This dilemma stalked me while I wrote my latest novel The Mysterious Case of The Alperton Angels.…
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As it does for many, my obsession with Agatha Christie started young. I was ten or so when I picked up my first Christie, fresh off a self-prescribed course of Greek mythology. Had someone asked me then to explain why reading a murder mystery from the heart of the twentieth century felt like a natural transition from the world of gods and monsters, I’d have been at a loss. Now, I can recognize that Christie has the rare ability to write “large,” making use of stock characters who interact in grownup ways amid life-or-death stakes—and rarer still, to do so by way of accessible prose. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s this “adult fairytale”-like quality that first drew me t…
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The dark months call for dark stories. There’s nothing more delicious than to curl up under a blanket with a hot cocoa (or hot toddy!) and read a fast-paced thriller, twisty mystery, or creepy psychological thriller. If this Queer Crime Writers* round-up is any indicator, 2024 is looking to be a banner year for great LGBTQIA+ crime fiction. We’re highlighting the return of beloved characters, like Greg Herren’s Scotty Bradley, Marshall Thornton’s Henry Milch, and Joseph DeMarco’s Marco Fontana, the second installment of newly beloved characters like Margot Douaihy’s Sister Holiday and Rob Osler’s Hayden McCall, not to mention new characters like Nicholas George’s Rick “Ch…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Janice Hallett, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels (Atria) “[M]any-layered, highly complex, and imaginative… Hallett shocks readers with satisfying twists and a dark, unpredictable ending… True crime tackles angels and demons in this devilishly good tale.” –Kirkus Reviews Elizabeth Gonzalez, The Bullet Swallower (Simon and Schuster) “Gonzalez laces magical realism into her vivid epic of the Texas-Mexico border and the violence that shapes a family for generations. . .The novel’s striking centerpiece follows Antonio and fellow desperado Peter Ainsley as they cut a swath ac…
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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 characters boarding the SS Varuna, the location of the opulent locked-room mystery universe conjured in Death and Other Details by writers, executive producers, and showrunners Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss, have a lot of baggage—literal, figurative and emotional—to unpack. In their kit bags (and steamer trunks) are lifetimes of secrets, lies, sex and, yes, some video footage. Someone on board the celebratory cruise—organized and paid for by Lawrence Collier, who is retiring from his eponymous company—is going to be murdered. And, as Rufus Cotesworth, the “World’s Greatest Detective,” played by Mandy Patinkin, intones after the body is discovered, “The murderer …
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When I began this series for CrimeReads, I imagined myself reading a lot of Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, and Chester Himes. That was fine with me; other than a brief Agatha Christie phase in middle school, I’d never spent much time on the classics of crime fiction, and I looked forward to hearing what writers I admired had to say about them. What I didn’t anticipate is that I’d also be introduced to novels from the past five or ten years that I’d somehow missed or overlooked. Descent by Tim Johnston—a tense, complex, and beautifully written literary thriller—is one of these. And who could be a better guide to the classics of the modern day than Megan Miranda, auth…
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This month’s best psychological thrillers have a wide variety of settings and a focus on characterization. There’s also several on this list concerned with upending and evolving tropes in the genre, a valuable goal as the psychological thriller’s heyday continues. Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits 100 Years (Viking) Shubnum Khan has written a lush, romantic gothic novel set in a crumbling seaside estate in South Africa. A century before, the house bloomed with an doomed romance; now, a young girl wanders its halls, finding ways to bring new joy to the strange residents, and getting closer to discovering the secrets that first shattered the home’s happiness and led to its…
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Tracy Clark is the two-time Sue Grafton Memorial Award-winning author of the highly acclaimed Chicago Mystery Series featuring ex-homicide cop turned PI Cassandra Raines. The protagonist is a hard-driving, Black private investigator who works the streets of the Windy City while dodging cops, cons, and killers. Gregg Hurwitz is the New York Times, #1 internationally bestselling author of 24 thrillers, including the Orphan X series, and two award-winning thriller novels for teens. Currently, Gregg is actively working against polarization in politics and culture. To that end, he’s produced several hundred commercials which got over a hundred million views on digital TV plat…
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