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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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Angie Kim, Happiness Falls (Hogarth) “Brilliant . . . amazing . . . the claim that a book will change your life often seems like exaggeration. Here the potential is real.” –Kirkus Reviews Louise Hare, Harlem After Midnight (Berkley) “An elegant, clever murder mystery. This is evocative historical crime fiction at its best with an intelligent, classy voice. Utterly fabulous!” –Victoria Dowd Alice Feeney, Good Bad Girl (Flatiron) “This well-written, fast-paced novel is full of Feeney’s trademark twists and turns. Fans of the author and those who enjoy psychological thrillers…
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The first book I ever got lost in was Sebastian Lybeck’s “Latte and the Magical Waterstone”, a rather obscure Finnish children’s classic. I had borrowed it from the school library, carried it around proudly in my little leather satchel for most of the day, and once I had returned home, promptly disappeared into it all afternoon. When I finally remerged, something in me had changed. I felt happy and bereft at the same time, full of clarity but also a bit dazed. It was my first true reading adventure, and it made me understand what a wondrous thing a story can be. The hero of the book was a hedgehog, brave and bristly, upright and determined in his quest to reclaim the mys…
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Toulouse – aka Ville Rose – France’s fourth largest city sits on the banks of the Garonne River. On anyone’s liveability index Toulouse has to be pretty high – a nice old town, great public transport, a hi-tech centre (Airbus etc) and all in the South of France. Less than 500,000 people on the city proper, a million so in the surrounding area. A university town and a UNESCO World Heritage site. It’s also home to the Polars du Sud literary festival and a couple of specialist bookshops dealing in crime, thrillers, and graphic novels. And, naturally, there’s some local crime fiction. From the 1970s onwards, the “néopolar”, or “new crime novel” was all the rage in France a…
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Second life is a term many shooting survivors use to illustrate the ripple effects or the aftermath of gun violence. This means there is no going back. The life that existed prior to trauma fades as a new one slowly emerges, unfolding with each new day. Hearing their stories of healing, forgiveness, and resilience gave me hope that one day I’d be free from my own trauma, and my body might someday learn to live beyond fear, anger, and distress. My empathy connected me to survivors on a deeper level. During interviews, I quickly learned the most intimate details of their lives, shortly after learning their names. The subject of our conversations immediately took me from st…
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Agatha Miller was born on September 15, 1890, in Torquay, England. By her own account, she “had a very happy childhood.” By 18, she had written her first short story and begun work on Snow upon the Desert, her first novel. She never sold it, but she never stopped writing. At age 24, she met and married Archibald Christie, a British military officer. During the Great War, he fought overseas, and she worked in the Torquay Red Cross Hospital, first as a nurse and later as a dispenser in the pharmacy. Here, she formed a lifelong fascination with poisons, which guided her through many murders over the next 60 years. A fan of detective novels—which had begun in 1841 with “The …
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With the exception of a string of Francis Coppola films in the first half of the 1970s, it’s hard to imagine stronger, back-to-back, and couldn’t-be-more-different films than two directed by William Friedkin in 1971 and 1973, “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist.” The former is one of the seminal crime films of the gritty 1970s and the latter is one of the great prestige thrillers of all time, all the stronger for Friedkin’s willingness to not shy away from the horror and scares often unseen in big-studio releases. (Projectile vomiting has not played into many Oscar nominees.) Friedkin, who died Aug. 7 at the age of 87, had a long career, from early TV work to a ha…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Jamison Shea, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me (Henry Holt) In this ballet horror novel, a young ballerina is given a chance at power after a star of the company takes her under her wing. But all power comes at a cost, and this power derives from an ancient source with its own agenda. I’m not sure what it is about dance that lends itself so well to horror—think Black Swan or Suspiria—but add this one to the list of stories that take the bloody feet and brutal precision of the dance world and turn them into visceral horror. –MO Kyle Dillon Hertz, The…
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Danya Kukafka is the nationally bestselling author of Girl in Snow and Notes on an Execution. I first met Danya a few months back at the Edgars. It was a brief, two-ships-passing-in-the-night sort of moment. Danya had just had her picture taken in front of the Poe-themed backdrop, and I was next in line. We smiled. We nodded. That was it. But then, a few hours later, Danya was up on stage, giving a supremely moving speech as she accepted the Edgar for “Best Novel.” I was already a huge fan of her sophomore book Notes on an Execution (seriously, if you haven’t read this, it’s a genre-bending, transcendent masterpiece), but that speech, the message she delivered — it m…
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No pain, no gain! A common refrain, and the quintessential mantra of those who hustle. While you’ve probably seen this couplet superimposed over dozens of muscular athletes wielding barbells like feathers, there are much smaller, quieter examples of pain as the pathway to a different type of success: healing. Very few people can put in an intense workout and escape the painful bodily backlash the next day, and the process of healing is no different. Trauma hurts and so does banishing it. I write about trauma because I am intrigued by how much our pain shapes us, and by the overall resilience of the human spirit. While the biggest examples of this are usually seen in news…
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I love crime fiction for its versatility, how it can incorporate well-realized characters, a wide range of tones and styles, and social commentary all within propulsive plots. A crime sets up an immediate conflict: a wrong is committed, and someone tries to address it and restore order. Crime fiction can include a wide range of stakes, from “Who stole Grandma’s award-winning pie recipe?” to “How do we catch the Pigface serial killer?” It offers a window into the dark recesses of the human soul while also celebrating the better angels of our nature. As a genre, it’s one of the most accommodating forms of storytelling. That being said, when I look at the crime novels on m…
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Novels, I’ve found in my writing experience, come out of ideas that won’t be denied. They surface from the mind like something primeval climbing out of muck. Once they’re out there, wet and dripping, there’s no putting them back under the black tar. My novel about an apocalyptic cult, Minor Prophets, came out of me that way, a piece at a time, first a head, then a tail, then a confused monstrosity of parts. I had just moved to Chicago after a lifetime spent on the east coast. One rainy night the first week my husband and I arrived, lost in our new city, carrying shopping bags of home goods back from a Target on the Near North Side, we passed a grassy field, a square of w…
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My current series revolves around the Locard Institute, its forensic science focus made of equal parts research, training, and private investigation for clients who need/can afford it. The Locard does not exist, alas. I invented and designed it for flexibility in plotting—but CSI schools are real enough. As labs are accredited and techs are certified, a certain amount of continuing education credits are required to maintain those standings. Forensic training classes might last from a morning to a week. Students include cops, fingerprint analysts, drug lab techs or death investigators with experience anywhere from a few months to a few decades. Most any professional empl…
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The Southern California stretch of the PCT that sits between Warner Springs and the Anza Trailhead runs forty-one desolate miles between two rural highways, State Routes 79 and 74. Despite the long views of barren ridges, the meanderings through fields of strange boulders, and the occasional funky cactus, this isn’t the most scenic section, but it was a convenient place for a trail hopeful named Eric Trockman, who lived in nearby Temecula, to test out his equipment for three days before he began his PCT thru-hike for real. On February 20, 2015, four days after the contentious call between Chris and Min, Trockman hiked north from Warner Springs. Eighteen miles later, h…
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We all love a tradition, don’t we? Whether it’s been passed down to us or we’ve adopted it ourselves, traditions bond us as families, friends or communities. They give us a warm, cosy feeling that we are part of something bigger, doing what others have done long before us, letting us pleasingly sink into a long line of ancestors and future offspring. We are safe in numbers, in tradition; the rules are set and all we have to do is play our part. And traditions are fun, right? Just good old-fashioned innocent fun. Well, that’s what I thought, too, until I actually dug into some of America and Britain’s most heart-warming traditions and followed their history all the way ba…
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From the earliest days, Hollywood and its overseas competitors and wannabes were addicted to Chinatown. In tandem with Limehouse fiction, Fu Manchu series, and Charlie Chan mysteries, the so-called China flicks—or, ahem, yellow flicks—exploited the stereotypical eerie ambience of Chinatown as the cinematic obbligato. With its exotically clad citizenry, crooked alleys, curio shops, opium dens, gambling parlors, brothels, hidden warrens, trapdoors, and an occasional flying dagger in the dark, Chinatown, whether in realist street scenes or carved out of cardboard and fantasy, appeared readymade for film noir. In some ways one may say that Thomas Edison, who had made a short…
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“Put silver in your pockets, walk with dirt in your shoes, or he’ll poke your eyeballs from their sockets, and boil your bones in stew.” (Katherine Greene is the pen name of two women writing twisty thrillers) Our upcoming psychological thriller, The Woods Are Waiting, begins with a morbid nursery rhyme that highlights a very specific set of superstitions that are followed by an isolated community in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. Silver and dirt have a long history of protective properties in many different cultures and the residents of the fictional closed off town of Blue Cliff, Virginia have held onto these beliefs and macabre traditions for generation…
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No serial killer fiction list would be complete without mentioning Red Dragon. Hannibal Lecter probably needs to introduction, but remains the model for the devilishly smart and manipulative psychopath. Of course, Harris gives us not one, but two serial killers within the book’s pages, and “The Tooth Fairy” is a very different kind of killer: one who is troubled, and unstable, and almost finds himself drawn to be kind when he falls in love. It’s a great portrait of the different types of killer, and of how trickery nearly undoes investigator Jack Graham. The Bone Collector has to go on any serial killer reading list too. Jeffrey Deaver’s gripping tale of a quadriplegic…
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You’ve written a great first novel. There’s buzz! There’s praise! The book is flying off bookstore shelves. Even the notoriously finicky and hot-blooded reviewers on Goodreads adore it. They’re throwing stars at you like henchmen in a ninja movie. Your publisher loves the book so much in fact, that they want you to write another one. Pronto. Welcome to the Land of the Sophomore Slump. Many writers spend years crafting their first book in a headspace that’s blissfully free from deadlines, contracts, and fan expectations. Then, when their debut novel is (miracle of miracles!) successful, they’re expected to crank out the next book in the series in record time–often less …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Hugh Lessig, Fadeaway Joe (Crooked Lane) “[This] debut catches fire . . . [For] those who read for intriguing characters.” –Library Journal Jesse Q. Sutanto, I’m Not Done With You Yet (Berkley) “This is a wickedly enjoyable treatise on the dark sides of female friendship.” –Publishers Weekly Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, Dead Mountain (Grand Central) “Down-to-earth action tackles an otherworldly mystery in this devilishly plausible yarn.” –Kirkus Erin Flanagan, Come With Me (Thomas & Mercer) “Edgar winner [Erin] Flanagan (Blackout) explores the dark side of fe…
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“Almost perfect in its playlike purity and delightful prose.” —Barzun and Taylor on The Birthday Murder Lange Lewis was a woman of mystery. She made a splash in 1942 with the publication of her first novel, Murder Among Friends. It was praised in reviews published in the New York Times (“This appears to be Lange Lewis’s first book. Let us have more”), the San Francisco Chronicle (“Salaams to Miss Lewis and a recommendation to any and all fans who like their detective stories literate, civilized, and well-planned”), and the Oakland Tribune (“Devotees of violent demise in literary form have a treat coming at the hands of this young woman, Lange Lewis”). The Chronicle and…
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Beautiful Penang, on the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia, by the Malacca Strait. Its densely populated capital of George Town is a feast of colours and heritage buildings. If geography is destiny then Penang and George Town are evidence of the theory – deemed vital to the East India Company, the navies of a half dozen colonial countries and any number of pirates. The Straits of Malacca remain one of the world’s key waterways, linking east and west, but also one of the most pirate infested too. It’s had some interesting visitors over the years too. Penang-born Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors (2023) is set in 1921 and mixes real and fictional characters and events…
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Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s era-defining debut novel about a load of disaffected men beating the bejesus out of each other in order to feel alive, was first published twenty-seven years ago today. The book rapidly gained a cult following, was adapted into one of the most iconic movies of the 1990s (despite an initial failure at the box office), and, of course, originated the modern pejorative use of the word “snowflake.” Here’s what the very first reviews had to say about “Gen X’s most articulate assault yet on baby-boomer sensibilities.” I don’t want to die without any scars. “A volatile, brilliantly creepy satirefilled with esoteric tips for causing destructi…
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August is Women in Translation Month! So I figured I’d round up some of this year’s best crime novels in translation by women from around the world. Below, you’ll find Norwegian serial killers, Argentinian vampires, French influencers, South Korean lawyers, and so much more (honestly, a lot of French stuff—it’s been a really good year for French noir). A quick shoutout to the amazing publishers and translators who shepherded these works into a language I can read (although I did, once upon a time, read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in French. And some Simenon. Not to brag or anything). Victoria Kielland, My Men Translated by Damion Searls (Astra House) Nasty, brut…
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We fry in Leone summer: while Barbie and Oppenheimer cycle so rapidly through ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and ‘ugly’ so as to feel as plastic as their respective subjects—brands and back-room cowardice)—sundry other franchise zombifications feel like ash off of Eastwood’s cigarillo. And as film production itself stands still as a fake cowboy town erected in the desert, activated towards a fairer world, or even a less-cruel one, other fantasies linger, like the question of hyper-hyphenate Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning Part One. Here is an expensive legacy sequel full of considered action set pieces and interminably incoherent international implications, less jingoistic and ugly…
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A couple years ago, I found myself on a serious Shirley Jackson kick. I devoured as many of her short stories and novels that I could find—including the elusive The Bird’s Nest—Ruth Franklin’s excellent biography A Rather Haunted Life, and of course, the movies. The Haunting circa 1963 was fabulous, to be sure, but my favorite of all was Mike Flanagan’s modern reimagining of The Haunting of Hill House. I remained on tenterhooks for the entirety of the series, but one particular scene at the end of episode five—if you know, you know—had me nearly climbing the walls with sheer terror. One thing you should know: I am what is commonly referred to as a “scaredy cat.” And yet,…
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