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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With the benefit of hindsight, the 1920s seem like an odd reprieve from the rest of that century. After the most devastating war the world had ever known, and before a global economic cataclysm and a second world war on top of it, the U.S. and western Europe saw a brief golden age of glamorous parties, economic prosperity and flourishing arts and culture. Soundtracking it all was what has been called the first American art form, jazz, a preview of the century’s American cultural hegemony. The truth, of course, was not quite as simple. Even as the music they invented came to define the decade, Black Americans had to contend with the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. And even b…
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It’s a sensible writer who pays close attention to the clichés of their chosen genre, however untrue or outlandish they might be. If you want to go off-piste, even for a few pages, you first need to know what on-piste looks like—you need to know the location of the flags that mark the route most commonly taken. In the case of espionage, what are those flags? That spying is a dirty game played by gentlemen. That agents roam the world dispensing a violent justice. That they operate with near-total independence from the agencies that employ them, agencies that are all-knowing and all-seeing, uncoupled from any legal framework and with access to frontier-busting technology (…
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“Yo Pipes, my cousin’s friend thinks you’re hot.” Piper glanced up from her phone, her eyes glazed over. She was texting, but when Dupont didn’t go away, she slid her phone into the back pocket of her jeans and sighed. “What now?” Her eyes bounced off of him and to the crowd of students making their way out the front doors. The burden of having a popular sister… I rolled my eyes. Dupont stepped in front of her, blocking her view so he could have her full attention. “My cousin’s friend. He wants to know if you want to hang out at the mall sometime.” I finished loading my books into my backpack and slammed my locker making them both jump. I gave Piper a look, and we sta…
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My latest book, Just Another Missing Person, is about Julia, a police officer. On the first night on a new missing person’s case, she gets in her car, exhausted, looks up, and in the rearview mirror sees a man in the back wearing a balaclava. He says only one word: ‘Drive.’ After this, he hands her a note, which says he knows her worst secret, and she must do everything he tells her to do on the case she’s on, starting by planting evidence. Julia, who covered up a crime for her daughter the previous year, has no choice but to comply. Writing it got me thinking about this theme in crime novels and how it really ratchets up the stakes — what parent wouldn’t protect their o…
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There is comfort in reading a whodunnit led by a talented detective. We know what we’re getting with a Sherlock or a Miss Marple—the next moment of genius is a few paragraphs away, and the villain will be unmasked in the end. But I’m not here to talk about that sort of book. I’m here for the reluctant detectives, the unlucky souls dragged toward clues kicking and screaming. They have better things to do with their time than chasing wayward criminals, but are given no other choice. This dilemma delivers an edge of adventure, wondering what crazy thing they’ll do next, either willingly or by force. The reluctant sleuth is not usually a genius, and often is a bit of a mess…
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Here are 25 of the best novels to come out in paperback over the past three months, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. Alaina Urquhart, The Butcher and the Wren (Zando) “Dark, twisty, full of authentic detail, it’ll have you listening to the night in an entirely different way.” –Neil Nyren, Booktrib Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age (Berkley) “This Golden Girls meets James Bond thriller is a journey you want to be part of.” –Buzzfeed Winnie M. Li, Complicit (Atria) “Writer, producer, and activist Li draws on her experience in the film industry to bring authenticity and raw honesty to her second novel, a timely page-turner that explores the emot…
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Details leaked onto the front page, saturated global consciousness. The inaptly named Titan, a 22-foot deep-sea sub had gone missing. The world was enthralled. Pernicious questions arose. How could we navigate ships to Mars, but lose them in our own oceans? Most pressing, what fate did the frigid North Atlantic hold for those onboard if time ran out? An oxygen supply window of roughly 96-hours. Torquing the mystery was a spectrum of paradox. Packed inside the Titan, a white minnow with no seats and a single view-port, were mostly very rich people on a voyage to the wreckage of what was once the largest vessel in the world. The aptly named Titanic. An ‘unsinkable’ …
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It’s been an amazing year for historical fiction (just like every year is an amazing year for historical fiction!), so I thought I’d round up some of the best, most richly textured tapestries of history that the fiction world has to offer. As always, I noticed a bit of a 20th century bias when putting this together, so please put older settings that you’ve enjoyed recently in the comments! As a funny note, there are not one, but two books on this list set in Los Angeles in 1981, one featuring the preppies and the other following LA’s burgeoning punk scene. There are alas no crossovers, although I imagine the characters in the punk novel could easily beat up the character…
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Prophet is a mystery, a sci-fi adventure, a spy thriller, a queer romance, a military horror story, and satire about the weaponisation of nostalgia in our present cultural moment. It’s made from all the things we love, inspired by a lifetime of books, movies and tv shows, internet fanfiction and video games. We aimed to write a page-turner with a philosophical heart and a big damn love story at its core, building it from the familiar tropes that course through those media, from Bond films and spy stories to popular procedural TV mystery shows. Here are some of its literary inspirations: ANNIHILATION by Jeff VanderMeer There is something so utterly soothing about ho…
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Note: I’ve expanded the definition of ‘locked-room’ to include closed-set. AND THEN THERE WERE NONE by Agatha Christie – The original. Ten strangers receive invitations to a solitary mansion on a windswept island off the British coast. Then they begin to die off, one by one. THE WOMAN IN CABIN TEN by Ruth Ware – An excellent locked-room mystery set on a luxurious yacht. Lo Blacklock, a journalist working for a travel magazine, spends a week aboard. She sees a woman thrown overboard, yet all the passengers are accounted for? Dark and exquisitely tense. MISERY by Stephen King – A locked room, literally. I saw the film before I read the book. Both are superb. Write…
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At its best, religion can help and encourage. At its worst, it can be used to manipulate, control and abuse. Such is the case in my upcoming thriller In a Quiet Town. The story centers around Tatum whose husband Shane is the lead pastor of the only church in their small town. On the outside, they appear to be the perfect couple, but things are not as idyllic as they seem. Years earlier, Shane all but disowned their adult daughter Adrienne, destroying the relationship between she and Tatum. Now, Tatum is determined to reconnect with her daughter. She sneaks out every Wednesday evening to meet up with her, until one night Adrienne disappears. As Tatum desperately searches f…
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William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director of the masterpieces The French Connection and The Exorcist has died at the age of 87. Born in Chicago on August 29, 1935 to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, Friedkin worked on documentary film crews and TV shows in the 1960s, rising to prominence in the early 1970s among a generation of creative and resourceful young filmmakers who would create the New Hollywood movement. He directed a handful of highly theatrical films in the late 60s and early 70s—musicals or adaptations of stage plays. But it was The French Connection, his gritty, low-budget neonoir set in present-day New York City, that catapulted him to the big-time. The fil…
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Yepoka Yeebo’s rigorously researched, beautifully written first book takes its title from a folk story familiar to generations of Ghanaian children. The fictional Anansi, she writes, “is a trickster” who “uses stories to deceive.” In Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World, the title role goes to a voluble con man named John Ackah Blay-Miezah. Even as he was served prison time in the U.S. and Ghana, Blay-Miezah carried out “one of the largest frauds of the twentieth century.” Blay-Miezah’s Oman Ghana Trust Fund—Oman, in this case, means “our nation,” not the Middle Eastern country—was founded on a lie. From the 1970s until…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Lisa Jewell, None of This Is True (Atria) “Lisa Jewell is on top-form with this pitch-black fever dream of a book – darker, twistier and more compelling than ever.” –Ruth Ware Will Dean, The Last One (Atria/Emily Bestler) “A true adrenaline rush, The Last One by Will Dean will have you trembling with anticipation from the very first page.” –Bella Media Halley Sutton, The Hurricane Blonde (Putnam) “Is a tragic death the only way to cement one’s legacy in Hollywood? Halley Sutton delivers a twisty rumination of this question.” –PopSugar Adrian McKinty, The Detective Up L…
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August brings with it a tense, twisty crop of compelling new thrillers exploring the ways our most intimate relationships can go terribly awry—or become the shield we need to cover up our worst transgressions. From terrible teachers, to even worse friends, to all kinds of family, the types of connections explored in the novels below are the kind that are so ordinary that their wrongness can easily be ignored, but domesticity has always been the provenance of danger, and these psychological thrillers remind us that those closest to us are also the ones who hurt us the most. (Angie Kim’s thriller is the outlier here. That family’s going to be alright. I won’t say more lest …
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There’s a lot of Irish female crime-writers. Liz Nugent, Jane Casey, Andrea Mara, Andrea Carter, Amanda Cassidy, Catherine Kirwan, Sam Blake—to name just half of the Irish crew who assembled in a town in the north of England last month for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival or ‘Harrogate’ to its friends. We met at the entrance to the Old Swan Hotel, festival HQ and the spot where Agatha Christie hid out for eleven days back in 1926, to take a group photo. I count fourteen faces in it, but that wasn’t even all the Irish female crime-writers at that particular festival, let alone sitting on the bookshelves today. Ireland is a country of five million people,…
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Fictional characters are immortal, their creators, not so much. Authorial death be damned: fans, both longtime and new, often want more. And the truth is, in excavating crime fiction’s O.G.’s there are more cases to solve, more dirty deeds to dig up and more gimlets to drink before the day is done. To The Second Murderer, Mina brings Philip Marlowe’s congenital truth telling, his disregard for convention, and his acceptance that he is a man not of the times. In contrasting Marlowe to the other lost souls one character says “they’re broken. You’re sad.” Equipped with his intrinsic integrity, Marlowe can live with that. Like the Second Murderer in Macbeth, “I am one/whom …
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Noir, both fiction and film, is built on a foundation of fear, and no fear grips us quite like the specter of our world ending at any second in a white-hot blast of nuclear fire. The Cold War had barely started when noir began using nuclear paranoia as a theme and a plot point—sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes as overtly as a shockwave destroying a town. Here are four movies and one book that exemplify the facets of what we might call “nuke noir.” Notorious (1946) Alfred Hitchcock began work on “Notorious” in 1944, more than a year before the first nuclear explosion at New Mexico’s Trinity Site officially kicked off the nuclear age. As pre-production on the film pro…
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I grew up with Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, both on the page and the screen. Raymond Chandler had an early and enduring influence on my writing; my novel The Exiled, published with Mulholland Books in 2016 under the name Christopher Charles, was intended in part as an homage to the noir master. I was ecstatic to see it hit the shelves, especially under the aegis of a Little, Brown imprint, but my ecstasy was short lived. The novel didn’t sell a lick, and a TV deal that seemed an all-but-sure thing fell through. Literary post-mortem is an inexact science; there could, of course, have been any number of factors contributing to the book’s poor sales, but one of those fact…
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It is fair to say true crime is having more than a “moment.” According to a recent YouGov poll, a third of Americans consume true crime at least once a week with shows on Netflix regularly trending in its top ten. While on TikTok, the hashtag #truecrime has nearly 20 billion views. True crime is not simply the largest subcategory of documentaries, it is also growing at a faster rate than all other genres. With the explosion of public interest and the emergence of true crime into the mainstream, what are the responsibilities of authors and program makers when fictionalizing or dramatizing real-life cases? How do we ensure we do not become titillating in our re-telling? …
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In TV, film, and books, both on our screens and on our bedside tables, con artists are rife. This year alone, four novels (“The Guest,” “Counterfeit,” “Scammer,” and my own “Sun Damage”) feature grifters as central characters. A slew of new TV shows, such as “The Dropout,” “Fyre,” “Inventing Anna,” and “The Tindler Swindler,” have emerged. Even the second season of “White Lotus” centres around a scammer. What is it about con artists that consistently captivates us? And how has our perception of grifters evolved in the realm of social media? From “The Sting” via David Mamet’s “House of Games” to the long-running BBC drama “Hustle,” it’s the tradecraft that draws us in. Th…
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It’s a small bugbear of mine that gothic and horror are so often lumped together as the same genre. Many would argue that gothic is a subgenre of horror, but as a reader and writer of gothic fiction, I would have to disagree. There is, of course, a blurring of the lines between the two, as is the case in most genres, but they are quite distinct in the reaction they instill in the reader. According to the Cambridge University Dictionary the definition of horror is to ‘create a strong feeling of fear and shock,’ for gothic—once you get past all the bits about Gothic architecture and Gothic tribes of yore—it says ‘writing or films in which strange things happen in frighteni…
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More than once, I’ve found myself sitting around with other parents of no-longer-small children, all of us telling stories in hushed voices about the times our kids went missing. It goes without saying that we only tell these stories because we are past the point where we might be tempting fate, because our children are older now and our fears for them are of a different sort. And of course we can only recount these tales because, in the end, they had happy endings; the children were returned to us. My husband and I once lost the oldest of our three children in a busy Washington, D.C. hotel during Barack Obama’s inauguration. Then an always-on-the-go three-year-old, our …
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When it comes to fraught, intense bonds, it’s hard to top the twisted ties between some mothers and daughters. For my new thriller, Gone Tonight (On-sale August 1), I wrote about a mother and daughter who are isolated in their little family of two— which is just the way Ruth, the mother, likes it. She wants to keep 24-year-old Catherine by her side because a menace is closing in. But is the danger coming from the outside, or from one of them? A thin, jagged line separates maternal protection from unhealthy control. There are no blueprints or hard-and-fast rules for where it lies—every family gets to chart its own emotional topography—but when it is crossed, daughters im…
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Whether it’s Felix Unger and Oscar Madison or Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, we love a good odd couple. Watching two opposite personalities clash while they try to reach a common goal is one of life’s finer reading pleasures. Crime fiction lovers in particular have a banquet of unlikely teams to root for, whether they are law enforcement, private investigators, or amateur sleuths. The Lou Norton Series by Rachel Howzell Hall LAPD Homicide Detective Elouise ‘Lou’ Norton serves the ever-changing border of gentrifying Los Angeles. In the first book of this outstanding series, Land of Shadows, Lou is assigned a new partner, Colin Taggert, and the two couldn’t be m…
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