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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Travel through time and space with October’s best international thrillers, some set in the past, and some concerned with fractured memory and never-solved crimes. Whether you’re interested in picking up a Nordic noir, immersing yourself in a French gothic thriller, or staying up late with a South Korean thriller, these international crime books are the perfect pulse-pounding reads to warm you up this fall. Kjell Ola Dahl, The Assistant Translated by Don Bartlett Orenda Books Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but in Europe in the late 1930s, a cheating spouse is never just a cheating spouse (especially when a PI gets involved). In this historical Scandi noir set dur…
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So, let’s talk about sex. One of the things editors and readers often say about my novel Arya Winters and the Tiramisu of Death is that there is rather a lot of sex and swearing in it, darling. Yes, it’s a crime novel. Yes, the crime has something to do with sex. No, the crime-related sex is never graphic. Up to here, everything is fine. Even for a village-y, (dare I say it?) cozy mystery. What’s not such an easy sell is that there is fun sex in it. A young, single mixed-race woman quite enjoys sex and she gets to now and again have quite enjoyable sex in the novel, some of it on the page. Herein lies the problem. There are sex tropes in crime fiction. The alcoholic, m…
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Whenever I think of the fall season, I always think of thrillers. Yes, there is football, and pumpkin-flavored coffee drinks, and hay rides, and all those fun things, too, but the moment the air turns crisp and the nights begin to get longer—and darker—as Halloween approaches, I find myself gravitating toward the darker pleasures, especially in my books. Ghosts. Vampires. Witches. Zombies. You name it, I read it. The supernatural element in stories always gives a great scare, but sometimes what I find most terrifying are the dangers lurking here in the real world. What happens when Mother Nature—and us humans—become the monsters? If pushed to the limits, to what lengths w…
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At ten o’clock on Tuesday, June 23, 1981, three FBI agents arrived at Hughes Aircraft’s headquarters on East Imperial Highway in El Segundo. A corporate security officer had been expecting them. He summoned Bill Bell. The agents spoke with Bell for two hours at Hughes, then suggested lunch. Bell agreed. After sandwiches at a deli, they asked Bell to accompany them to a room at the Holiday Inn on Century Boulevard where they could talk more. Bell agreed again. The agents interrogated Bell throughout the afternoon. It was all very civil and businesslike. Special Agent James Reid showed Bell a translation of a Polish newspaper article on a Polish diplomat assigned to the…
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Since the publication of Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale” in 1953, James Bond has been synonymous with a particular brand of escapism. A naval intelligence officer during World War II, Fleming leveraged his experience to create an idealized version of a spy, one who wore great suits and drove fast cars while he rendered the West safe for freedom and commerce. The James Bond films doubled down on the character’s fantasy potential, boosted immeasurably at the beginning by Sean Connery’s magnetism in the leading role. Who wouldn’t want the glories of saving the world from unambiguously dastardly villains, all while possessing boundless sex appeal and an array of cool gadgets? …
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I came to horror the same way I came to Rihanna—later than most, but with the commensurate fiery passion of a true convert. Crime and horror have, after all, been slowly converging for many years, as domestic suspense transformed into the New Gothic, and psychological thrillers took over from procedurals as the dominant trend in the genre. And yet, despite my newfound fandom, I’m about as poorly informed a horror reader as one could be (I’ve only read one Stephen King novel and it was Mr Mercedes). So I invited a whole bunch of authors with horror novels out in 2021 to join me for a roundtable discussion on the genre and its appeal to crime fans, and in which I could stea…
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After mom confessed to binging on Creature Feature/Chiller Theater flicks when she was pregnant with me, I realized that my passion for horror was in the blood. By the time I was seven I’d already seen Night of the Living Dead, which gave me nightmares for a week, and was a regular viewer of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, One Step Beyond and horror/monster movies on Saturday nights. As a comic book fan since I was a six year old New York City kid, my tastes eventually swayed from Marvel’s Manhattan-based superheroes to spooky four-color supernatural strips. While comic book shopping in 1972, I spotted The House of Mystery #204. The cover featured a disgusting multi…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Erin Mayer, Fan Club (MIRA) If Catie Disabato and Amina Akhtar had written the screenplay for Josie and the Pussycats, it might read something like Fan Club. In former Bustle editor Erin Mayer’s blistering debut, her millennial narrator is bored out of her mind working at a women’s magazine, obsessing over the beauty editor’s many freebies and taking as many coffee breaks as possible. “One day, she finds new purpose in the hidden meanings of a pop star’s new hit, joining a devoted group of superfans whose dedication to their diva knows no bounds. What’s the true meaning behind the …
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“Jordan, we’re live in sixty,” said Tracy Klein, my favorite field producer, nudging me to get into place. “Okay, hang on,” I said, distracted by a rush of butterflies and the sudden urge to pee, which happened every single time I was about to go on the air. I guess it was my body’s way of preparing me for the moment that never got old, but soon panic struck. My earpiece was in, but the anchors’ voices sounded like Charlie Brown’s parents. “Hey, you guys. I can’t hear. You’re not coming through very clearly. The echo is killing me,” I said. I looked up. Please, not today. In an instant, the sky darkened over historic Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side, a sign of the…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Thomas Perry, The Left-Handed Twin (Mysterious Press) “Perry seasons the fast-moving chase narrative with engrossing details about becoming a new person, from constructing a false identity to relearning how to move through daily life in an unrecognizable way. This time, though, there is a stunning extra: with the mobsters closing in, Jane hopes to lose her pursuers by hiking Maine’s Hundred-Mile Wilderness, the most arduous stretch of the Appalachian Trail…Another stunner from a modern master.” ― Booklist (starred) Kevin Birmingham, The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentl…
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Michael Koryta is a machine. He published his first book at twenty one and went on to become the New York Times-bestselling author of 14 novels. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has won or been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Edgar Award, Shamus Award, Barry Award, Quill Award, International Thriller Writers Award, and the Golden Dagger. I came to our “Shop Talk” as a fan of Michael Koryta’s. What I didn’t know, though, was the process behind his staggering production. I didn’t realize just how much of a machine this dude really was. All I knew was that he’d written The Prophet, one of the best crime novels about high school f…
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The latest Jack Reacher novel begins just as you would wish it to: Reacher, walking west through the desert, no particular destination in mind, poised for the fates. There’s a border nearby, and a border town. Before all that he finds a car accident and a woman with a strange story about a wayward brother. As much as any Reacher novel, Better Off Dead is a western, brooding and brutal and sunburnt in that fine tradition. In anticipation of the book’s release, I caught up with Lee Child and Andrew Child, brothers and now co-authors of the Reacher series, to ask them a few questions about borders, villains, and how a Reacher novel comes together in 2021. Dwyer Murphy: Ther…
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There is a widespread misconception that the heroes and villains in life will be marked clearly for all to see; to easily distinguish who we should listen to and who is trying to con us. Media doesn’t help. Just look at superhero films. Captain America and Iron Man wear bright colors, have their identities known to everyone, and are always around to protect innocents despite sometimes causing massive destruction themselves. The villains they fight, on the other hand, are what we’d expect from the truly evil and vile. The Red Skull is a literal Nazi with an almost comical skull for a face. Thanos was a massive purple alien who thought the only way to save the world was to …
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Anti-heroes are the assholes of literature. But they serve a purpose: they teach us something about morality, about nobility, about the line between right and wrong, good and bad. They challenge our own moral compass and get us to think: “What would I do? How would I act? How can I do better?” In my thriller, Do No Harm, my protagonist, Dr. Emma Sweeney, isn’t your traditional anti-hero. She isn’t cool or a bad ass. She isn’t a maverick or some sort of epic mess up. She is no Walter White, cooking up meth and breaking the law with style. She’s just a mom who wants to save her son’s life. And she’s willing to take the law into her own hands to accomplish this goal. She s…
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I just wanted to remind you all of the time, in 2016, when a Norwegian organization called Kongsberg Maritime sent a high-tech robot down into Loch Ness to scan the depths, and it sent back sonar scans of a creature that looked exactly like the Loch Ness monster. Sadly, very sadly, this turned out to be a model of the Loch Ness Monster built for Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which had accidentally sunk into the Loch during filming in 1969. The survey, which BBC’s Steven McKenzie reports was supported by VisitScotland and expert Adrian Shine’s “the Loch Ness Project,” reported that they were positive that the sonar scan had detected the prop a…
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It’s a perennial question: do spies write the best spy novels? It’s the business of secrets, after all; you can’t help but wonder how much authors get right. Surely, the only authentic spy books are the ones written by people on the inside, right? As a retired intelligence professional and a published novelist, and now the author of a spy novel, I’m here to set the record straight: Even when you’ve been in the espionage business, it’s hard to write a good spy novel. The heart of a good spy novel is not the caper but the personal or moral issue facing the protagonist. In a nutshell, that is the spy business, particularly on the clandestine side. You’re constantly asking…
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The idea for my latest novel, You’ll Thank Me For This, came from an article in The New York Times about a Dutch tradition known as “droppings” in which tweens and teens are blindfolded and left in the woods and expected to find their way back using only rudimentary tools such as compasses, maps, the wind and the stars—obviously no smart phones or modern GPS devices. Although I’ve lived in the Netherlands for 15 years, I had never learned about droppings, and although I do contribute regularly to the Times (about art and culture) from here, the article was written by a colleague, Ellen Barry. I asked around and lots of my friends had done a dropping in their youths; thei…
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Before I embarked upon my first ever fiction, I was a writer of non-fiction, of articles, essays, and anything else I could think of to get published. To keep a roof over my head, I also had a day job in outside sales, which gave me an income and a framework to my day, and to be honest, I had the job where I wanted it—I could work my own hours provided I met my targets. The bonus of hard work and good results was more writing time each week, though a magazine assignment sometimes meant clambering out of bed at three in the morning to interview someone in a far-flung country. One day, stuck in traffic on the way to work, waiting for the cars ahead to move, I had an idea f…
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Novelists are not prophets or psychics, clairvoyants or descendants of Nostradamus. They are not supposed to be, at least. But over the years, some have seemed pretty damn close. Dean Koontz once wrote a thriller called, The Eyes of Darkness, which predicted a global pandemic started by a lethal virus called the “Wuhan-400,” originating in Wuhan, China. True, in the original edition published in 1981, the virus was produced in the Soviet Union and it was called the “Gorki-400.” In 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Koontz put out a new edition in which he changed the villain to the Communist Chinese government. Plenty of naysayers say Koontz didn’t get it exa…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Nicole Glover, The Conductors (HMH) Glover’s debut is a captivating blend of genres, tapping into strands of historical fiction, mystery, and fantasy. The Conductors tells the story of Hetty Rhodes, a former conductor on the Underground Railroad, now settled in Philadelphia, practicing magic and taking on unsolved cases the police won’t touch. A new job takes her through some mysterious corners of postwar Philadelphia and offers up startling revelations about the city’s new order and the lingering effects of community trauma. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief Alexandra An…
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When U.S. Coast Guard cutters shelled and sank the Canadian rumrunner I’m Alone in the Gulf of Mexico in March 1929, one of its crewmen perished. Meet Captain Jack Randell, the scrappy smuggler whose daring exploits turned deadly—and sparked an international incident. ___________________________________ Rifle and machine-gun bullets ripped through the sails and rigging of the booze-laden Canadian schooner I’m Alone on a March morning in 1929. Shells from the deck gun of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter blasted holes in the rumrunner’s hull and it began to sink, bow-first. Skipper Jack Randell, struggling to stand on the sloping deck, remained defiant. “No, damn you!” he shout…
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By ten a.m. on the morning of Saturday, October 18, 1947, the awful word had gotten round among the other fifty-nine first-class passengers sailing aboard the Durban Castle, an ocean liner situated off the coast of equatorial Africa that was en route to the English city of Southampton from Cape Town, South Africa. Gay Gibson had disappeared! Gay Gibson, the vanished young woman, was an enchanting auburn-haired, milky-skinned stage actress, only twenty-one years old, who had left her home in South Africa aboard the Durban Castle in order, she told people, to find her fame and fortune strutting upon the boards in England, where she had originally resided with her peripatet…
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HUGHIE MCLOON WALKED OUT of the speakeasy at a quarter to two in the morning with a hoodlum on each arm. Here he was, the most recognized and popular little guy in Philadelphia—hadn’t they asked him to hold up the round cards at the Dempsey-Tunney fight with 130,000 people in the stands?— and now he was running his own café at Tenth and Cuthbert, five short blocks from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, and life should have been, as they said in those days, the berries. McLoon was serving sandwiches, “light lunch,” and bootleg ale and whisky ladled from buckets secreted behind the counter when two wise guys with names off a Hofbrau menu, Meister and Fries, imposed …
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new nonfiction crime books. * Dirty Gold: The Rise and Fall of an International Smuggling Ring By Jay Weaver, Nicholas Nehamas, Jim Wyss, and Kyra Gurney (PublicAffairs) Dirty Gold is an eye-opening, compulsively readable investigation into the world of illegally-mined gold and the business networks that prop that system up. From a team of Miami Herald reporters who first exposed the South Florida businessmen trafficking in gold taken out of illicit Peruvian operations, this book will change the way you look at the precious metal, which fuels an underworld trade more lucrative than cocaine, with devastating humanitarian c…
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Revisiting The Anderson Tapes, Sidney Lumet’s Wisely Paranoid Heist Film, 50 Years Later
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The Anderson Tapes is a heist movie, there’s no doubt about that. It depicts the typical thrills and shenanigans of the genre, beginning when a charismatic ringleader assembles a colorful crew of criminal masterminds with varied skills, to pull off one last job. It is, to say the least, a good time at the movies. When it was released in 1971, it did quite well at the box office, grossing $5 million. But it received mixed reviews, and if it is remembered today at all, it is for presenting the world with the first mainstream film performance of Christopher Walken. But, if you really listen to The Anderson Tapes, then you will learn that it is bolder than a traditional heis…
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