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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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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After J.D. Salinger published his story “Hapworth 12, 1924” in The New Yorker in 1965, he decided to stop publishing his works. Although he had resigned from his nearly twenty-year-long stint in the literary spotlight, retreating to a home in Cornish, New Hampshire, and beginning a reclusive lifestyle, he assured The New York Times in a rare interview in 1974, that “publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” Salinger’s most famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye, has sold more than 65 million copies. His self-imposed exile was hardly acceptable to many among the throngs of readers lon…
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CrimeReads is pleased to host the cover reveal for Blessed Water, Margot Douaihy’s second novel to feature the chainsmoking, tattooed, lesbian, celibate, nun detective Sister Holiday, set in New Orleans and featuring another signature combination of the metaphysical and the mysterious. Douaihy was kind enough to answer a few questions about her most unusual detective to accompany the cover reveal. Blessed Water is forthcoming in March from Zando Books. Can you tell us a bit about Blessed Water and Sister Holiday’s journey to becoming a detective? Margot Douaihy: I wrote Blessed Water as a blistering, breakneck sequel to Scorched Grace, the first book in the Sister Holi…
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I first noticed something wrong with dad one Sunday during a visit. We were watching a football game. I sat on the couch, and he crooked one leg over the padded arm of an easy chair. I don’t recall discussing the game or who was playing. But he suddenly asked a question that hit like a bolt from the blue. “Is it three downs or four?” Dad and I had watched football together for more than 40 years. He knew teams had four downs, but I could see he wasn’t kidding. At that time, he was in his mid-seventies, a former truck driver, a star baseball player back in high school, a U.S. Marine who came home from Okinawa after World War II. He was a quiet and kind man who enjoyed re…
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Two old friends currently visiting, one from London and the other from Berlin, are making serious inroads into my chicken coop for the soft-boiled eggs they now consume each morning. They cannot get over their surprise at the deep yellow colour, or the variety of size and shapes that my hens, of various breeds, deliver. Most of all, they are surprised when I tell them they are eating second-hand leftovers because when it comes to the diet of free chickens in the French countryside, anything goes. All plums, pears and apples that get bruised, when they fall to the ground before I can pick them, go to the chickens. And so do all potato peelings, onion skins, tops and tails…
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When I sat down to write a murder mystery set in Harlem, from my desk in London, I somehow felt a familiarity with this neighbourhood across the Atlantic. I’ve visited Harlem in person before, but most often I’ve travelled there through the pages of some of my favourite novels. There’s a rich history to Harlem that is explored through the vision of great authors. It also strikes me that many of the social issues that are discussed in these novels are still with us, even when they were originally written eighty or ninety years ago. These are some of my favourite books that capture the essence of Harlem and combine it with compelling stories and vivid characters that will s…
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Coming of age in the 1970s I was an aficionado of all things visual: from comic books on newsstand racks to paintings on museum walls to paperback covers on the shelves of my favorite bookstores. Gazing at the beautifully painted covers in the science fiction and fantasy sections, it wasn’t long before I became a fan of various cover artists including Frank Frazetta, Leo & Diane Dillon, Jeff Jones and numerous others. Though considered commercial art, many of the illustrators were as visionary as Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dalí, and deserved to be taken seriously. Decades later I stumbled across the wonderful site 70s Sci-Fi Art, a Tumblr curated by writer Adam Rowe…
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Teens on vacation with their big, messy families. Teens on vacation without their families. What could go wrong? In two words, a lot. “An idyllic vacation takes a dark and deadly turn” is one of my favorite thriller sub-genres, and this longstanding literary tradition has made its mark in YA over the past few years. The genre is all about escape: the vacation itself, and the thrilling story that unfolds from a picture-perfect beginning. The vast majority of teens never take the kind of luxe or parent-free vacation imagined in these thrillers. I was lucky to take several memorable family trips as a teen, but we were not a posh resort or private island family, and I was d…
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Feeling an itch to cool down in the (literally) lower temperatures of yesteryear? Look no further than the list below, featuring 9 upcoming works of historical fiction, each speaking to the anxieties of the present through the lens of the past. Notably present on the list below are quite a few lovable con artists and criminals (because this is a crime fiction site) but also because crime has always been the dark mirror of capitalism, and we are living in a new era of unfettered accumulation in which the con artist is king, and the sucker is merely to be pitied. We especially saw this in last year’s biggest historical novel, Trust, and the books below should please any fan…
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