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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So there you are, sitting in a cozy café in Odense, the hometown of the great fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen, enjoying a flaky Danish pastry and a strong coffee. As you gaze out the window at the old, charming city streets, an unsettling thought pops into your head: What sinister secrets might lurk behind the storybook scenery of rural Denmark? You’ve heard the rumors of creepy country manors, isolated islands shrouded in fog, and bone-chilling Scandinavian folklore. Suddenly that sweet Danish sausage you had for lunch is sitting like a rock in your stomach. The idyllic countryside transforms in your imagination into a haunting landscape filled with mystery, men…
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If you’d told me thirty-one years ago that the Los Angeles backpacking hostel I was living in would one day become the centerpiece of a bestselling thriller—written be me—I doubt I’d have believed you. In fact back then, at the age of 21, I’d probably have been too drunk or stoned to have been listening to you anyway. My travel thriller The Vacation, which gets its American and Canadian release this month (December) is based loosely on my own journey around America. I stayed at the hostel in question in Venice Beach for the best part of six months. Back then, it was a shabby, run down building whose best days were behind it. But it was so vibrant and full of life that it…
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Even if the temperatures are still high, the start of the school year and the first wave of Christmas promotional gift guide emails have combined forces to indicate that fall has now arrived (I’m not kidding about those gift guide emails. They start early). No matter that the brown leaves poetically falling from the branches were killed by the heat waves…They are still falling! And while I’m talking about the cycle of life, disrupted or otherwise—time to recommend some murderous fiction. Below, you’ll find a host of horror, a smorgasbord of psychologicals, a murmuration of mysteries, and a cabal of crime novels…Or, to put it more succinctly: 75+ books, all very good, and …
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“A literature that cannot be vulgarized is no literature at all, and will not last.” Frank O’Connor laid it out. He wrote the words at the cusp of the 20th century. Said words prophesied the hard-boiled novel. Hard-boiled scorched its artistic debut on February 1, 1929. Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, hit bookstores. Hammett’s narrator, the Continental Op, goes in strong: “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.” Hammett slammed the tonal chord for the entire hard-boiled canon. The vulgarization of American Literature tapped Art. Hammett was our first great hard-boiled artist. He v…
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The following is an excerpt from Nathan Ward’s new book about Charlie Siringo: Son of the Old West, now available from Atlantic Monthly Press. ___________________________________ Along the snowy road from Cheyenne toward Fort Douglas, the roundup season was well finished. This was the time of year when the Round-up Number 5 saloon held on to what few paying customers strayed in. It was a low-ceilinged country bar on the Douglas road that made most of its year’s money off seasonal cowboys, and so lavished attention on winter visitors like the guest who called himself Charlie Henderson. Looking disheveled but approachable, less like a killer than a common outlaw, he wore…
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Sure, island vacations can be fun, relaxing, and restorative. But that’s if you’re reading a book in a different genre. In the world of crime, island vacations can be murder. Ever since Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley headed to Italy to bring Dickie Greenleaf back home, the allure of something sinister taking place on an island destination is unquenchable, for authors and readers alike. My latest, out September 5th. In Beneath the Surface, on a weekend voyage on a yacht to Catalina Island off the California coast, the power-hungry children of an aging billionaire are unprepared for a storm of deceptions. May Cobb calls it “Devious, twisty, and completely unputdownable .…
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Of mythological figures of antiquity, none are more monstrous than harpies, furies, gorgons—Scylla and Charybdis, Lamia, Chimera, Sphinx—nightmare creatures representing, to the affronted male gaze, the perversion of “femininity”: the female who in her physical being repulses sexual desire, rather than arousing it; the female who has repudiated the traditional role of submission, subordination, maternal nurturing. Since these fantasy figures have been created by men, we can assume that the female monster is a crude projection of male fears; she is the embodiment of female power uncontrolled by the male, who has most perversely taken on some of the qualities of the male he…
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I’ve always been fascinated by families and what drives their unique dynamics. I think perhaps it’s because mine is so small; both my parents are only children and I have only one sibling. But what fascinates me even more than the family we’re born into, is the family we marry. After all, we choose our spouses, but their families come as a package deal. This is probably the moment I should caveat that I have a mother-in-law I adore. But I know that not everyone is as lucky. We all know of a mother-in-law from hell: controlling, conniving, always there to nitpick on the tiniest thing. And so, when I needed a villain for my next thriller, Her Sweet Revenge, I knew just wh…
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There’s a reason domestic thrillers are perennially popular: fearing the person sleeping next to you every night, realizing too late that the call is coming from inside the house, is enough to send chills up anyone’s spine. But to me, the idea that your closest friends might be the real threat is easily as terrifying as a villainous partner. Friendships can be just as important as romantic relationships, forming a trusted support network and shaping your core identity. If you’re wrong to trust your friends… what else might you be wrong about? In my new thriller, Scenes of the Crime, a group of former friends reconvene at the luxurious winery where Vanessa—their college…
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Dorothy L Sayers was my gateway author to the world of crime fiction. I’d read the Sherlock Holmes stories earlier on, but that superlatively singular creation of Arthur Conan Doyle did not lead me any further. Holmes was unique, existing in his own universe, and there he remained. Not so with Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey. The Wimsey family motto is “As my Whimsy takes me,” and Sayers’ whimsy took me right through her books and then onto Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, and other authors writing in that great tradition. My Billy Boyle World War II mystery novels are often set in Great Britian, but it is not the Great Britian of the Golden Age of crime…
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NOEMI I’d just given the rolling paper a twist when I thought I heard a knock at the door. My eyes shot to the window. Sure enough. He looked confused when I pulled the door open, as if he’d expected someone else. His lips moved. I held up a finger, telling him to wait while I went to lower my music. “You sure like it loud,” he remarked upon my return. “Drowns shit out,” I said. “Lookin’ for my mom?” His lips moved again with no sound coming out. And then he said, “Yeah. And you, too.” I felt my forehead wrinkle, my upper lip coming up as my eyes examined him. Short gray hair that matched the patchy stubble on his chin and cheeks. Heavy lines beneath his eyes. Skin …
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When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid finally came to my boyhood mall, I saw it three times, wondering in the dark about the unnamed lawmen chasing the Wild Bunch outlaws around the West, the drumbeat of their horses’ hooves drawing Butch’s exasperated line, “Who are those guys?” One who chased the gang, I would learn, was a cowboy detective named Charles Siringo, who logged four years and 25,000 miles in pursuit. The film’s relentless riders can seem symbolic –standing for time running out on Butch and Sundance and their outlaw era or for the forces then changing the West itself. But it was for the pleasure of following along with one of the gang’s hunters, Siringo, th…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephen King, Holly (Scribner) “A tour de force. Creepy as hell but full of heart, too.” –Linwood Barclay Craig Johnson, The Longmire Defense (Viking) “[A] standout . . . The whodunit, which presents a dizzying number of red herrings, is one of Johnson’s trickiest, keeping readers deliciously off-balance throughout. Series newcomers will have no problem jumping into the action, and longtime readers will relish the dive into Longmire’s family history.” –Publishers Weekly Kaira Rouda, Beneath the Surface (Thomas & Mercer) “When the wealthy patriarch of a family business …
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There’s something fascinating about horror. The darkness that hides darker monsters. The creaks and gore and jump scares. The jokes. The unearthing of fears. Whenever I’m in the mood for a campy, scary movie, I’ll go for a man-eating shark or a haunted house, or any of the Scream movies. For the longest time, it didn’t matter what movie I watched, if there were Black people in the film, they were usually the first to die, quickly and mercilessly dispatched and with dramatic effect. It became a well-known horror trope and running joke. Deep Blue Sea was one of the first movies I saw where a Black person, LL Cool J, makes it to the end of the movie (and a shark movie at th…
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Have you ever seen those Progressive Insurance commercials about becoming your parents? Would you be surprised if I told you they inspired a horror novel? Specifically, my new novel BLACK SHEEP. It wasn’t so much the commercials themselves that got me thinking, but the message behind them. Are we destined to become our parents? Can we ever truly separate ourselves from the people and the environment we were raised in? Sever blood ties? It’s terrifying to wonder how much of ourselves is ours, and how much is determined by DNA. Who among us has not asked ourselves at one point or another (on Thanksgiving, always Thanksgiving) “Who the hell am I related to?” But the horror …
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I recently reread Donna Tartt’s Dark Academia classic The Secret History—published 30 years ago this month—for the first time since I was a young identity-less Classics student myself. On the whole, I found the book as enjoyable as I remember (and was also struck by the degree of the homage in Tana French’s The Likeness). One thing I noticed on this read that did not occur to me once the last time is just how little fun the group is, even at the novel’s beginning. Here’s an early description: All of them, to me, seemed highly unapproachable. But I watched them with interest whenever I happened to see them: Francis, stooping to talk to a cat on a doorstep; Henry dashing…
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Long before the doors opened, a crowd gathered outside the theater. Noisily, they bustled in, country folk and urban dandies alike, to find themselves good seats. The old mansion’s walls reverberated with their footsteps on the hardwood floors, spirited greetings, idle gossip, and talk of politics. The playhouse had once been the country home of Aaron Burr, who nearly thirty years earlier returned across the Hudson River to his Richmond Hill estate from the New Jersey palisades after his notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton. As Burr’s fortunes waned and the growing city encroached from the south and east, John Jacob Astor purchased the mansion, lifted it and rolled …
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I am not the kind of writer who finds every plot twist, detail of setting, and character description in my imagination. I am like a magpie when it comes to developing a story, shamelessly borrowing from and building on whatever I see and hear. Here’s an example. As I was beginning to work on the 14th book in the Key West food critic mystery series (no title yet, but coming next summer), I had an email from a fan. She said: “I recently finished your new book and enjoyed it very much. Especially the part where you talked about the hippies living down in the Keys in the past. I was one of those people that ended up down there in 1978.” Immediately I was interested in her s…
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The CrimeReads editors make their picks for best new fiction in the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Angie Kim, Happiness Falls (Hogarth) Angie Kim once again combines an intense character study with a searching mystery, this time after her narrator’s husband disappears, and police are interested in quickly pinning it on her nonverbal son. Kim uses the parallel investigations of police and family to explore the complex dynamics of interracial marriage, Asian and biracial identity in America, and the nuances of raising a child with special needs. You’ll want to savor every word as Kim plunges the depths of human action and finds love at the center.–MO Lou…
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I didn’t know what to expect from a novel called Miami Purity. Was it about nuns, or one of those creepy abstinence-only pledges for teens? I had no idea that the novel was a neo-noir cult classic, one that Megan Abbott in her introduction lauds for “its audacious and subversive play with a tradition it clearly both savors and lays bare.” Nor was I prepared for the voice of Sherri Parlay—former stripper, recovering good-time girl, and one of the horniest women in the history of American fiction—who bursts on to the scene declaring, “Hank was drunk and he slugged me—it wasn’t the first time—and I picked up the radio and caught him across the forehead with it.” I should ha…
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What pop culture figure of the 1970s had his own board game, guest-starred on “The Six Million Dollar Man” and terrorized backwoods campers with his screams in the night and his skunky smell? You know him, you love him … Bigfoot. In the 1970s, Bigfoot was a pop culture thing that kids were unduly worried about, like quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle. A genre of movies and TV shows sprang up around the legend and it persists to this day. I even had a brush with the Bigfoot legend a couple of decades ago – not with Bigfoot, I should add, but with Bigfoot hoaxers, which are as much a part of the Bigfoot mythos as the sometimes-amiable, sometimes brutal cryptid himself. …
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A twitching curtain conceals a pair of prying eyes. A friendly smile belies a litany of terrible sins. And eventually, someone is going to find a dead body on their well-manicured lawn. The small town is a mainstay of cozy mysteries, and for good reason. Readers flock to the genre precisely because of the juxtaposition between violence and placidity. There’s something undeniably compelling about a quaint and wholesome façade that conceals the darkest of human impulses. No matter how grim things get, though, we know that our small town will have returned to its charming self by the end of the book—until the next murder, at least. In the best mysteries, these towns are t…
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True crime writers hold the state of Texas in special regard, not so much for the volume, or even variety, of newsworthy crimes committed there, but for the often strange character of Texas lawbreakers, their quirks, their gruesome excesses and the sometimes striking originality of their offenses. “Texas doesn’t have more crime than other places,” the late Mike Cochran, an Associated Press reporter and true crime author (Texas vs. Davis: The Only Complete Account of the Bizarre Thomas Cullen Davis Murder Case and others) in Ft. Worth, used to say. “We just do it better.” Here’s a representative, though hardly exhaustive, look at what Cochran meant. * In 1991, Wanda We…
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A look at the best reviewed fiction from June, July, and August. * Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Doubleday) “Crook Manifesto is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There’s an element of crime here, certainly, but as in Whitehead’s previous books, genre isn’t the point. Here he uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time. He has it right: the music, the energy, the painful calculus of loss. Structured into three time periods — 1971, 1973 and finally the year of America’s bicentennial celebration, 1976 — Crook Manifesto glee…
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A look at the best reviewed fiction from June, July, and August. * Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Doubleday) “Crook Manifesto is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There’s an element of crime here, certainly, but as in Whitehead’s previous books, genre isn’t the point. Here he uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time. He has it right: the music, the energy, the painful calculus of loss. Structured into three time periods — 1971, 1973 and finally the year of America’s bicentennial celebration, 1976 — Crook Manifesto glee…
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