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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The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best crime anthologies released in 2023. * Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (eds), Never Whistle at Night (Vintage) “Spine-tingling and suggestive storytelling. . . . Entertaining and thought-provoking, especially in its highlighting of the lurking terrors—from intergenerational trauma to environmental destruction to toxic allyship—confronting Indigenous peoples today.” –Kirkus Reviews Molly Odintz, Scott Montgomery, Hopeton Hay eds, Austin Noir (Akashic Books) “With the common thread of Austin, Texas, Austin Noir is a new compendium of original short stories, each of which are showcased gems of noir …
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It’s that time of the year again, and, no, I’m not talking about the holidays. I’m talking about year-end-list time. Just like the holidays, year-end lists can be anxiety inducing, especially for authors. So, as a reprieve from everybody and their Uncle Bob’s “Favorite Books of 2023,” I’d like to offer you something a little less stressful. Something that might help you become a better writer. Over the course of this last year, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing eleven outstanding crime writers for “Shop Talk.” We’ve covered everything from haunted office spaces to the importance of daily naps. If you happened to miss one of the entries, you’re in luck. Below yo…
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Bonnie MacBird is regarded as one of the top Sherlock Holmes writers, and her five Sherlock Holmes Adventures for HarperCollins have developed a following. Frank Cho is a top Marvel artist whose cover illustrations are legendary. Together they have collaborated on WHAT CHILD IS THIS? – a Sherlock Holmes Christmas novella. A Holiday pick by both the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, WHAT CHILD IS THIS? is newly out in paperback for Christmas 2023. It is a delightful and unique entry into the Holmesian world – written by Bonnie and beautifully illustrated by Frank. Bonnie and Frank explain how the collaboration came about. BONNIE: The Baker Street Irregulars (B…
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What I told her was this: “Read Once Upon a River.” Let me explain. I was at an event promoting my own new novel, Once These Hills, when a woman approached me and asked me where I got the idea to write about my main character, a fierce mountain girl, good with a bow and arrow, who roams the hills of eastern Kentucky, killing game . . . and sometimes men. “The whole idea for it, the genesis of the entire book,” I answered, “comes from Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel, Once Upon a River.” I think she expected me to say more. I didn’t. Not because I intended to be rude, but because that was the whole of it. I simply said, “Read Once Upon a River.” I could go on and talk about …
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I’ll say it again: I actually can’t believe I found another ten crime movies that take place at Christmas. I really, really thought I had scraped the bottom of the barrel last year, rustling up things like “Psycho because there are Christmas decorations in Phoenix while Marion Crane drives away with the money.” But no, thanks to two new movies this year, I’ve assembled another list of ten. In December 2018, our editor Dwyer Murphy assembled ten thrillers that might surprise you with their holiday settings, and in December of 2019, I added ten more. And then in December of 2020, I added another ten more, and in 2021, I added another ten more, and last year I added yet ano…
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At its heart, Blood Betrayal is a novel about fathers and how they shape our sense of belonging. Two separate police shootings take place in the novel: that of Duante Young, a Black graffiti artist, and the killing of Mateo Ruiz, a gifted Latino musician who is shot during a drug raid. As my detectives, Inaya Rahman and Waqas Seif, dig into Duante’s life, they discover that his father’s early death unraveled him. He was angry in his grief, trying to adjust to a new life in Colorado where no memories exist of the father he cherished. Mateo Ruiz’s father, Antonio, grieves the loss of the son who was the pride of the family. Mateo was at home in his pluralist identities, gro…
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The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the year’s best true crime books. * Jillian Lauren, Behold the Monster (Sourcebooks) This startling new book uncovers the crimes of serial killer Samuel Little. Through her many conversations with Little and meticulous research, Lauren begins to uncover the reasons why so many murders, now tied to Little, were once overlooked. The book is built out of Lauren’s long correspondence with the killer, but never sidelines the victims. Lauren’s interrogation of her own obsession with these cases adds an extra level of insight to a story that contains endless nuances, all of them artfully unfolded by a precise and powerful w…
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The inspirations and concerns informing this year’s historical mysteries and thrillers may be grim, but the fiction crafted to explore them is luminous. The 1920s continue to loom large, as do their preoccupations with inequality, excess, and grief (including a great number of novels featuring seances and spiritualists, peaking post-Pandemic as a way to access historical methods of reaching loved ones as both comforting and deceitful). You’ll find multiple titles on this list split between the past and the present, or the further recesses of history spliced together with the more recent past, emphasizing that historical tales are, like all culture, an ongoing conversation…
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On Oak Island, everybody gets up early. By dawn, with the fog turning into a drizzle, the crew is hard at work. I’ve taken refuge inside the rusted hulk of an old tank car, where I can take notes without the ink smearing. Up the hill, men cluster around a drilling rig that is pounding its way into the island’s interior. Shouts and curses echo through the fog. “Sand!” someone yells. “We’re in sand, damn it!” All around me lies the evidence of the hunt: big Ingersoll-Rand air compressors, enormous pump heads, piles of steel casing, acetylene tanks, strange infernal machines, and bright aluminum ducts snaking their way across the ground. The chill September rain is slowly…
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It was a very good year for movies. It seems like everyone made a movie, this year. We got new movies from veteran auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Michael Mann, Sofia Coppola, Paul Schrader, Todd Haynes, Kelly Reichardt, Christopher Nolan, Alexander Payne, Ava DuVernay, Wes Anderson, Hayao Miyazaki, Greta Gerwig, David Fincher, Frederick Weisman, Ira Sachs, Nicole Holofcener, and Rebecca Miller. We got a slate of masterpieces from new-in-town filmmakers like A.V. Rockwell, Celine Song, Nida Manzoor, Cord Jefferson, Kitty Green, Daniel Goldhaber, and Juel Taylor. We were, in a word, blessed. But we didn’t get Richard Linklater’s Hitman movie, and that’s because …
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Growing-up in upper Manhattan, on 151st Street between Broadway and Riverside, I always thought of my neighborhood as Harlem or Sugar Hill. Mom, who’d lived in the area since the mid-1950s, referred to it as Hamilton Grange, named after the post office located on 146th between Broadway and Amsterdam. Decades later others, especially real estate agents, referred to that section of New York City as Hamilton Heights. Though we may not always agree on the section’s name, for certain when you get off of the subway at 145th and Broadway you’re uptown. While the community has a rich history that includes former resident Alexander Hamilton, for whom the territory was named, the …
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Looking for a gift for the mystery lover who adores a smart heroine whose adventures will viscerally transport the reader somewhere else? Someone who loves the Miss Marple mysteries as much for their doilies as detection, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski books as much for their tough protagonist as their evocation of the gritty underside of Chicago? Look no further; I’ve got recommendations that will take a reader from the gas giant Jupiter to the bike lanes of Brooklyn, all driven by ladies who could give Sam Spade a run for his money. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde Charles Yu wrote “Every book of Fforde’s seems to be a cause for celebration,” and The Eyre Affair i…
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Vivian Parry, the main character of Alexis Soloski’s Here in the Dark, is a perceptive theater critic for a New York magazine. She’s tough on hammy actors, but even harder on herself. Despondent since her mother’s sudden death, Vivian is a self-proclaimed “abyss where a woman should be,” one who dulls “any genuine feeling with casual sex and serious drinking and rationed sedatives.” When a grad student asks to interview her about the life of a working critic, Vivian reluctantly agrees. Her meeting with David Adler seems unremarkable. She’s nearly forgotten the encounter when, a couple weeks later, his fiancée phones her at work. David has disappeared, the woman tells Viv…
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If you like fiction featuring spiritualists and their brethren, then you’re in for a treat, as 2023 has brought a host of new crime novels exploring ghostly visitations and otherworldly knowledge. Some of the books below feature straight-up con artists, using the cards or a seance or two as a means to an end, while others truly believe in their own connections to the spirit world. Most of the following titles are historical fiction, clustered during the late 19th century and early 20th, but some are contemporary, speaking to both a current surge of interest in spiritualism and the tragic historical circumstances that tend to serve as a prelude for wanting to contact ghost…
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Monk has returned! That’s right! An original Monk movie, entitled Mr. Monk’s Last Case, has just been released. And to mark this momentous release, our editor Olivia Rutigliano sat down with star Tony Shalhoub and series creator Andy Breckman, who also wrote the new film. Mr. Monk’s Last Case is now streaming on Peacock. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision, and contains spoilers for Mr. Monk’s Last Case and light spoilers for Monk. Olivia Rutigliano: Had you been planning on bringing back Monk and found that the pandemic offered a good narrative to do so… or was living through the pandemic and perhaps wondering what Monk would do all the inspiration…
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Those familiar with Game of Thrones will recognize the hallmarks of “grimdark” storytelling. In a grimdark world, morals are flexible. Dark aesthetics and gritty details dominate. Today’s hero could be tomorrow’s villain, if external circumstances change. Given the headlines of the past few years, the moral uncertainty of such stories has a “ripped from the headlines” feel that seems appropriate for our chaotic era. On their face, grimdarks are everything cozy mysteries are not. Grimdarks are gritty and explicit where cozies are saccharine and romanticized. Cozies are fluffy and escapist. Grimdarks are meaty, heavy, real. But the more time I spend reading and writing co…
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The CrimeReads editors make their picks for the best noir fiction of 2023. (As is our annual tradition, we decline to define ‘noir’ even for the purposes of this exercise, because who knows, it’s just sort of a feeling, don’t you think?) * Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace (Zando, Gillian Flynn Books) Margot Douaihy’s chain-smoking nun Sister Holiday may be the most original character you’ll come across for quite some time. Douaihy wanted to reclaim pulp tropes for a female protagonist, and I have to say, Sister Holiday is punk AF. Set in New Orleans, Scorched Grace takes place at a Catholic school where an arson attack has harmed several students. Sister Holiday, a …
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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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