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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Imagine an idyllic, sunny Greek island surrounded by a deep blue-green Aegean sea, bordered in long sandy beaches, filled with vast fertile plains, sporting a backbone of rugged green mountains, and peppered everywhere with villages, towns and ruins running back to antiquity. All that, plus terrific locally raised food, warm and welcoming people, reasonable prices, and a history predating Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece. Question: Would you like to visit? Answer: Who wouldn’t? I think it’s safe to say that in response to observing that brief Q&A a famous Danish Prince would say, “There’s the rub.” Of course, dear Hamlet is right, because it is within the irresis…
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The man stood on the crumbling road. Green grass grew through its many fissures. Old, faded symbols with long-forgotten meanings stretched into the distance down its center and near its edges. To the man’s right, the boy rubbed his eyes, blond hair tousled and pillow-matted. He stood nearly as tall as the man, his father, though he had not yet seen twelve summers. To the left, the girl shielded her face against the rising sun, her curly red hair billowing in the breeze. Soon they would follow the road down the hill to the graveyard where, among monuments great and small, dew sparkled on the grass, though not for long; the air already felt warm. A scorching late June, port…
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Saturday, 8 October 1814 Molly Maguire hated the fog. Hated the way it reeked of coal smoke and tore at her throat. Hated the way the damp, suffocating blanket could turn even the most familiar lane into something ghostly and strange. It was always worse at night, when the temperature plummeted and folks lit their fires. That’s when the mist would drift up from the docks, swallowing the dark hulls and tall masts of the big ships at anchor out on the river and creeping along the mean streets and foul alleyways of the part of East London known as Wapping. Sometimes Molly would dream of a different life, the life she’d once known, when cold, wet nights were spent safe and…
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We’re ranking Sherlock Holmes performances. One hundred of them. Not Sherlock Holmes adaptations, but the representations within them of Sherlock Holmes himself. Now, you might think that you know the best Sherlock Holmes, but as the man himself has said, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” I have just watched one hundred different portrayals of Sherlock Holmes. I have the data. And now it’s time to theorize. Even, to deduce. There are so many excellent and varied takes on Sherlock Holmes. Please know that ranking them was very, very hard to do, and while I took lot of pleasure in researching and writing this piece, I took no pleasure in making any…
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When I spoke with the legendary Marilyn Stasio, she planned to spend her afternoon working on review of Femi Kayode’s debut novel Lightseekers. Her editor wanted to know why she chose that particular book. “Well,” she said, “I’ve never been to Nigeria.” At eighty-one, Stasio still wants to be surprised, though getting one over on someone who reads more than 150 books a year is no easy feat. Stasio began her reviewing career as a theater critic for the now defunct Cue magazine and eventually wrote a syndicated column, Mystery Alley, for newspapers throughout the country. In the 1980s, she became the designated Crime Columnist for The New York Times, soon emerging as the…
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Last summer, two women from Northern Ireland were arrested after a long spy operation. An undercover MI5 agent, posing as a sympathizer, had managed to infiltrate the inner circle of the new IRA. Audio and video recordings were taken of secret meetings that covered, among other things, cyber attacks and bombing Shannon airport. The two women arrested in August, alleged leaders of the new IRA, will stand trial later this year in one of the largest terrorism cases of the decade. Women have been part of the IRA from the start, but their stories remain largely untold. Their roles—their radicalization, training, combat, and varying levels of conviction or remorse—form a hidde…
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Let me be up-front about this: I am a story nerd. I love words and books and storytelling, and I gush about them with the energy level of an excitable first grader who just saw the Best. Movie. Ever. So when CrimeReads asked me to talk about balancing worldbuilding and action, I jumped at the chance to revisit a subject that’s near and dear to my heart. After all, I write noir with a twist of magic and a disco chaser, and I know firsthand how important it is to find that precarious balance. Because worldbuilding without action is boring, and action without worldbuilding is confusing. I don’t know if I always get that balance right. But I do know that I spend an almost …
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The most famous cryptic manuscript of the medieval period is—as far as we know—written in a unique language that to this day remains understood only by its author. It was found in 1912 by a Polish rare book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich, hidden among a pile of manuscripts in the Villa Mondragone, Italy. Voynich was immediately captivated by its unknown language and the strange illustrations of mostly non-existent plants and groups of nude bathers, and purchased it along with twenty-nine other items. (During more than thirty years Voynich sold the British Museum more than 3,800 books, many of which were so unusual that they were given their own ‘Voynich’ shelf mark.) The…
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Recently I came across a message on a Facebook Book Club, of which I’m a member, that read, “Hi bookworms, I am looking for thrillers/mysteries with likeable protagonists. Although I love this genre, I feel there is lots of books where characters are just unpleasant human beings. In lots of cases, I cannot empathize with them.” I followed the thread with great interest. I was intrigued—and, I will admit it, somewhat surprised—by the number of other people who commented that they too struggled to empathize with various killers, extortionists and sexual predators. They commented, in the same posts that they felt that in thrillers where they disliked characters they found th…
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Recently, I was talking with a friend who was excited to hear I had a new book coming out soon. “But is it scary?” she asked apprehensively. I told her a little about it: a woman returns to her old family home after her sister drowns in the spring fed pool—oh, and the pool is rumored to be bottomless and her sister believed there was something lurking in the water. So yeah, it’s a little creepy. My friend apologized and said that she just couldn’t read unsettling books because of how unsettling the world is right now. I would argue (and did!) that that is exactly when we need these books the most; they take us to dark places and help us explore our fears from the relative…
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While I was still trying to figure out what to do with the mystery animal I’d rescued from the dumpster, cops were working my door like a speed bag, eager as hell to tell me my wife had been found dead in a guitar case. I opened up to stop the pounding and found three righteous knuckleheads perched on my porch, rocking back and forth on their shoes. One big, one small, with a medium-sized buzzcut standing in the middle. The two bookends were bright blue, wringing the hats in their hands real noble, while the middle guy was the porridge that was just “white” apparently, wearing the sharp suit, bright shirt with a starched collar, and a blood-red power tie that divided him …
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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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I rush out of Broadcasting House and turn north toward the police station. If I were to run in the opposite direction, toward her flat, Marian might answer the door. She might stand there, under the yellow paper lantern in her front hall, and say, Tessa, what are you doing here? I sway on my feet, trying to make a decision. Her house isn’t far. Marian lives in south Belfast, on Adelaide Avenue, a quiet row of terraced houses between the railway line and the Lisburn Road. I could be there in twenty minutes. The pedestrian light flashes and I force myself to cross the road. Her flat will be empty, she’s meant to be on the north coast through Friday. She isn’t answering he…
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June 2017 The baby is starting to grumble. Kim sits still in her chair and holds her breath. It’s taken her all night to get him to sleep. It’s Friday, a sultry midsummer’s night, and normally she’d be out with friends at this time. Eleven o’clock; she’d be at the bar getting in the last round for the road. But tonight she’s in joggers and a t-shirt, her dark hair tied up in a bun, contacts out, glasses on, and a glass of lukewarm wine on the coffee table that she poured herself earlier and hasn’t had a chance to drink. She clicks the volume down on the TV using the remote and listens again. There it is, the very early outposts of crying, a kind of dry, ominous chirrup…
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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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When I was a newspaper reporter, one of my colleagues on the advertising side of the operation was as much a fan of the TV series “Justified” as I was. My family hails from Tennessee, so I was attuned to the southern sensibilities of “Justified,” which was about flawed law enforcement agents and flawed criminals in modern-day Kentucky. My family knew many of the cities and wild places and types of people in the series. We recognized the truth and smiled at the exaggerations and appreciated how Kentucky tourism officials would feel when their state, on a weekly basis, was depicted as a place full of trashy rednecks and meth heads. My coworker, on the other hand, was an …
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“From the purely tactical point of view, women were able to move about without exciting so much suspicion as men and were therefore exceedingly useful to us…” —Maurice Buckmaster, They Fought Alone: The Story of British Agents in France While researching my latest novel, The Invisible Woman, about Allied spy Virginia Hall, I made a surprising discovery. Nazis largely didn’t think women were as brave, intelligent, and even devious and vengeful as men. Because of this, women were often overlooked in the hunt for resistors and spies. German propaganda at the time depicted a feminine ideal of woman as mother, preferably of four or more children, tending home quietly and …
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I’ve been poisoned with arsenic trioxide. Well, technically, “treated” with arsenic would be a more accurate portrayal. In the summer of 2011, for nearly three months, five days a week, arsenic trioxide dripped from a bag hanging on a pole beside me into an IV tube that connected, through a butterfly needle, to one of my veins. Throughout those infusion visits as an acute promyelocytic leukemia patient at the age of 31, I often thought about Agatha Christie’s adoration of arsenic as a murder weapon. My uncle Bobby was equally intrigued by the “toxin” that would save my life. He bought me a copy of Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Me…
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You don’t need a long weekend in April to enjoy a good international thriller binge, but it helps. In some corners of the world, there’s an Easter break right about now, which if memory serves was the traditional weekend to watch Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, not an activity people indulge in too often these day, though that’s not going to stop me from doing my Yul Brynner imitation all weekend. The point is, some of us are already programmed for a good long binge this weekend, preferably one that spans continents and involves some interesting clothes, so let’s dive in and see what the new offerings are for all your international thriller needs. If you watched…
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
What should you accept as credible?
Where it All Began
