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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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Flynn Berry, Northern Spy (Viking) “Thrillingly good . . . Flynn Berry shows a le Carré-like flair for making you wonder what’s really going on at any given moment . . . Berry won an Edgar for Under the Harrow in 2017. Here comes another contender.” –The Washington Post Erik Hoel, The Revelations (Overlook Press) “Erik Hoel has crafted an audacious literary thriller. The Revelations is hilarious and deeply serious, heady and carnal and intellectual, all at once.” –Catherine Chung Wallace Stroby, Heaven’s a Lie (Mulholland) “Tough and touching…Blue collar grit meets noir, then…
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Brisbane, capital of Australia’s state of Queensland and the country’s third biggest city. Sitting on the banks of the Brisbane River (which has been known to seriously flood the town) and the northern end of the Gold Coast of long sandy beaches and surfing spots, it’s home to over two million people. Now Brisbane is an architectural mix of low rise colonial era buildings with cooling verandas and glittering new central business district skyscrapers. You get the contrast if you watch the hit Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) show Harrow, about a Brisbane forensic pathologist with a healthy disregard for authority and an uneasy relationship with the city’s cops. Of…
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A cold rush of air traveling over your bare skin despite the warmth of the room. Something waking you in the still of the night, a footstep, a whisper of words, a slight pressure on the end of the bed, but nobody is there. Walking into an empty room but feeling as though you’re not alone. Signs of an active imagination or a ghost protagonist? For me, creating a dead protagonist was not what fueled me to write my novel What You Never Knew. It was necessary for me to kill off a character within the first few pages of the book, as it’s this event that sets everything else in motion. My only problem was that I still needed the perspective of the deceased character throughou…
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Dr. Laura Hobson: “This is Oxford.” Detective Inspector Robbie Lewis: “Don’t I bloody know it.” From “The Quality of Mercy,” Lewis, Season 3, Episode 2 ____________________________ Ian Pearce was the Assistant Location Manager for the ITV mystery series, Lewis, for eighteen episodes, from 2012 to 2015 and for the pilot of Foyle’s War. Pearce has had a long career as a Location Manager for many British films and TV series. Currently he is the Managing Director for the film company Supply 2 Location in Scotland. Lewis was an off-shoot of the original Inspector Morse TV series, based on the novels of Colin Dexter. Lewis ran from 2006 until 2015 and followed the police i…
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Way back in the dawn of time, I worked for a couple of years for the cookbook company of Beard, Glazer, Wolf (James, Milton, and Burt) as a typist at first, then a fact-checker and copy editor. It was interesting work and introduced me to a greater appreciation for food and cooking. I had always been good at cooking eggs—both boiled and scrambled—but after a short time with the firm I was whipping up omelets, and happily basting, poaching, and baking. I still couldn’t afford much more than eggs, but at least there was some variety in my life. Jump ahead four decades and I am still a bit of a foodie. All of my books, and most of my short stories, feature a well-researched…
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Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays. (Friedrich Schiller) *** I used to play cards for a living. For almost a decade, on the virtual tables of disreputable gambling outfits or celebrity-endorsed multinational behemoths; in glass-partitioned exclusive rooms in casinos in Las Vegas, Montecarlo, and Macau, and in mob-run back-alley joints in my hometown of Rome, Italy. The game of poker dominated my twenties with the intensity of a first love. It played out, for the most part, against the expressionistic backdrop of the late aughts Great Financial Crisis. And like all first loves, it left…
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A dead body at the start of a book is interesting not because of its titillation — so inured are we to this image it barely affects us anymore — but because of the promise of a cognitive puzzle that can be solved. When one thinks about it, it’s astounding that the murder mystery genre is as rich as it is. After all, it doesn’t have the variety of alien landscapes like sci fi or fantasy, nor the diverse frights of the horror genre; its plot is highly constrained in that there must be a death, there must be an investigation, and, almost universally, there must be a final reveal. Yet this structure works. Something in our brain responds to it; just like how we are geneticall…
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I was 22 when I was shot in the leg by the IRA in 1976. I was an officer in the Ballymurphy IRA and, as a volunteer army, we didn’t always get paid, so money was scarce. One day I was drinking in a pub with another volunteer and we ran out of money. So we went to my friend’s home, grabbed his son’s toy Lone Star gun, and robbed the first place we came across. Our take was something like thirty pounds, which we had drunk up in no time. Needless to say, the IRA knew within an hour or so that my friend and I were the culprits. Rather graciously, they waited until we had sobered up before addressing the matter. Now, the IRA doesn’t really do “mitigating circumstances,” and w…
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Cherry Street ran between Main and Harvard, a short, narrow street clogged with police vehicles, fire trucks and an ambulance, painting the night red and blue. Sam parked a good hundred yards up from the call address — a blue-and-white two-story clapboard. However dissimilar they might otherwise be, the two detectives reflected professionalism in their dress, the department requiring “business casual” but the partners going well past that. Today they were accidentally a matched set in sharp gray suits, differentiated only by Sam’s crisp tie and Taylor’s silk blouse. The somewhat chilly evening had them both in very traditional trench coats with the lining in. They badged…
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I confess to the almighty reader, and to you, my friends and colleagues, that I have sinned through my own faults, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do with my novel, and I ask, blessed reader, and you, my friends and colleagues, to pray for me to the deities of writing. I confess that at first I was reticent to write a detective novel, but that I overcame that hesitation quickly and confidently, so confidently that I embraced every detective fiction trope in existence with the audacity only the unenlightened possess. I confess that in my novel there is a beautiful corpse, and that she is female. I may have chosen not to cr…
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The pandemic derailed pretty much every aspect of regular life – office jobs moved home, shutdowns and social distancing became standard, and a sense of chaos and insecurity permeated those early months. The comic book industry was no different, and acclaimed writer Ed Brubaker found himself turning to a certain kind of crime novel for comfort – which, in turn, provided him with a bit of inspiration. “When the pandemic and the lockdown hit, I found myself turning to old favorite pulp and detective books for comfort reading. Parker novels, Lew Archer, Travis McGee, and I had this realization that American comics and graphic novels never really had anything like that,” Bru…
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From MURDER BOOK: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR OF A TRUE CRIME OBSESSION by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell. Copyright ©2021 by Hilary Davidson Campbell. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Andrews McMeel Publishing. All rights reserved. View the full article
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At long last, December is upon us, and so, too, are the slow, creeping days of winter, ready to be filled with crafting, mulled wine, and of course, mystery novels. Few novels are released in December, so this is always a nice month to draw attention to subgenres we don’t as often explore, including supernatural thrillers and some sexy, sexy suspense. Get ready to wait out the rest of the holiday season/surge with these 10 entertaining and moving takes on the crime genre. Robert Justice, They Can’t Take Your Name (Crooked Lane) In this moving race-against-time thriller, an innocent man faces his impending judicial murder by a state that refuses to examine new evidenc…
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In the first few moments of the black-and-white pilot episode of Get Smart, the camera hangs over an audience in a concert hall—Symphony Hall, the narrator tells us, in Washington D.C. Somewhere in the city is the headquarters for a secret counter-espionage organization known as “CONTROL.” And as the camera moves around the audience, capturing the group in evening dress, watching in rapt silence as the orchestra plays, the narrator informs us, that somewhere in the audience “is one of CONTROL’s top employees, a man who lives a life of danger and intrigue, a man who has been carefully trained never to disclose the fact that he is a secret agent.” At that very moment, in t…
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On Florida’s Gulf coast near Fort Myers lies a sparkling island named Sanibel with about 7,000 residents. The island is known for two things. One is the dazzling array of seashells that wash ashore on its gleaming white beaches. For more than a century, shell collectors from around the world—including such big names as Thomas Edison, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Raymond Burr—have visited Sanibel to search the sands for the finest coquinas, lightning whelks and lion’s paws. The locals joke about the popular tourist “dance” move, the Sanibel Stoop. Sanibel’s other claim to fame is as the home of novelist Randy Wayne White and his hero Marion “Doc” Ford, a marine biologist …
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Before he created Winnie-the-Pooh at the age of forty-four, English author A. A. Milne had a varied writing career. Born in 1882 in London as Alan Alexander Milne, he grew into his love of writing as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, writing articles for Granta and occasionally collaborating on projects with his brother. His work drew attention from the well-known humor magazine Punch, and after graduating in 1903, he contributed articles, eventually becoming an editor in 1906. For the next few years, Milne wrote various pieces for Punch and elsewhere, including the novel-length works The Day’s Play and Lovers in London, until he enlisted to fight in World War I. A…
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It’s not easy playing second-fiddle. Think about this for a moment: is there a character in all of Western literature more misunderstood, more defamed than Doctor Watson, the erstwhile sidekick of detective Sherlock Holmes? So often, in twentieth-century film and television adaptions, Dr. John Watson is represented as a blithering idiot—often old, always naive, and perpetually astonished. He exists in a constant state of amazement; at the very most, providing a contrast that makes Holmes seem even smarter. This is strange, because, as he is written in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Watson could not be more different than this scurrilous remaking. Holmes and Watson meet i…
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By the 1890s James was confronting the painful reality that his serial and book sales were modest and his finances needed bolstering. In 1891 he confided to Robert Louis Stevenson, “Chastening necessity has laid its brutal hand on me and I have to try to make somehow or other the money I don’t make by literature. My books don’t sell, and it looks as if my plays might.” This turned out to be a vain hope. “I mean to wage this war ferociously for one year more,” he wrote William in December 1893 of his efforts in the drama field, and then “ ‘chuck’ the whole intolerable experiment.” A little over a year later, on January 5, 1895, the dismal premiere of James’s play Guy Domv…
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Here are the starting points of two movie thrillers we recently watched: a low-level group of crooks rob a small town bank and come away with vastly more money than they expected. It turns out they’ve mistakenly stolen Mafia money. What do they do now? (This is Don Siegel’s terrific 1973 movie, Charley Varrick, improbably—but wonderfully—starring Walter Matthau.) Second example: a serial killer has massacred two entire families in different cities who seem to have nothing in common. (This is Michael Mann’s 1986 movie Manhunter, based on Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon.) By comparison, this is how we got the idea for our 1999 book, Killing Me Softly. We were driving to visi…
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I grew up in a haunted house. It was a plain red brick 1890s farmhouse with 12-foot ceilings, an attic I never went into, and a basement that the family from “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” would have loved, complete with floor drain. We would hear pounding in the walls and overnight guests told us they’d been visited by friendly, inquisitive figures who opened their bedroom doors to peer in. Well, the mysterious figures were usually friendly: To this day, one of my cousins who stayed overnight is certain she saw an old woman standing over her bed, brandishing a knife. She closed her eyes, sure she was dreaming. When she opened them, the old woman was still there. My cousin …
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How do you begin writing a book? In the case of my debut collection of fiction, you walk out onto your front lawn in the midst of trying to decide between two book ideas that are stirring inside of you—one eerie, one less so—and find a dead hare on your lawn, then, viewing it as a sign, pack up your possessions and pets and move from your cottage on a gentle hillside in the south west of England to part of a remote looming farmhouse on top of a northern almost-mountain above an infamous 17th-century plague village where, snowed in during the most ferocious winter in recent memory, you let the ghosts of the landscape and the building take over your mind until, as the first…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. John le Carré, Silverview (Viking) Silverview, the final completed novel by the master of spy fiction, John le Carré, arrives 10 months after his passing, like light from a dead star to illuminate nothing less than the slippery nature of truth and the very concept of loyalty … In many ways Silverview is a fitting conclusion to the long career of a writer who redefined an entire genre with the deceptive ease of pure genius … In this final work le Carré has lost none of what made him remarkable: here are characters operating at the very limits of their own endurance, confronting fundamental tr…
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I love to feel unsettled while I’m reading. My favorite books leave the reader teetering in the precipice of certainty, wondering what’s real. I think of them as “fever dream” novels—books that you read in a mad, sweaty dash and that make you feel dazed and disoriented when you turn the last page. Thrillers and crime novels are especially well-suited to this style because they thrive on ambiguity. It’s one of the reasons I chose to leave the narrator of my debut, Fan Club, unnamed. Who, exactly, is she? The reader knows her intimately, yet not at all. And as she slips deeper into her obsession with international pop star Adriana Argento and a group of her enigmatic super…
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Defining genre is a notoriously dirty business, and no genre is murkier than literary fiction. Any attempt to pin down this slippery creature will naturally descend into mudslinging, no matter the intentions of the intrepid definer—the very name ‘literary fiction’ implies a smug, little jibe. Whereas the ‘crime’ in ‘literary crime’, of course, is easy enough. A reader must find at least one crime within the book’s pages. And it’s likely that this reader will encounter said crime in one of the ways they have previously encountered fictional crimes—through mystery and suspense, through red herrings, jaded detectives, the uncovering of clues. Whether it begins with a dead b…
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The CrimeReads editors pick the month’s best new books out in paperback. * Marie Benedict, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie (Sourcebooks Landmark) “A stunning story… The ending is ingenious, and it’s possible that Benedict has brought to life the most plausible explanation for why Christie disappeared for 11 days in 1926.” –The Washington Post Brian Selfon, The Nightworkers (Picador) “Electric, surprising, and tightly plotted . . . A compelling writer to watch.” –Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire emily m. danforth, Plain Bad Heroines (William Morrow) “Full of Victorian sapphic romance, metafictional horror, biting misandrist humor, Hollywood intrigue, and multipl…
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