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,
4,122 topics in this forum
-
- 0 replies
- 33 views
In the 2000 film Cast Away, Tom Hanks’ character Chuck—stuck on a deserted island—comes across several FedEx packages left over from his crashed plane. The box containing a dress wasn’t too much help. Neither were the videotapes. The ice skates proved useful: he could fashion into tools for clearing brush and chopping wood. Chuck stops while opening the last box, however, deciding to keep it closed so he can deliver it one day. The unopened box became the symbol of Chuck’s hope he’d one day escape. In an interview promoting the 2000 film, a fan asked director Robert Zemeckis what was in the box. Maybe something Chuck could have used? Yes, joked Zemeckis. In fact, it cont…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 34 views
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Paraic O”Donnell, The Naming of the Birds (Tin House) “The Naming of the Birds is something very special: meaty, dark, exuberant, full of complicated people doing difficult things in terrible circumstances, and gesturing mutely towards love. I recommend it to both those who love Victorian Gothic, and those who usually run a mile from anything described as that but enjoy having their preconceptions confounded.” –Jon McGregor Fiona Davis, The Stolen Queen (Berkley) “Alluring…The action-packed novel brims with Davis’s customary meticulous research and adds insight to debates over whe…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 42 views
You know what a book is, right? It’s three hundred pages of dead tree that begin at the beginning and end at the end. Right? Well, not always, pal. Sometimes a book is a wild little beast that looks all cute and adorable when it knows you’re watching it, but turns feral when your back is turned. Like a Mogwai if you feed it after midnight. Yes, some books start at the beginning then spin upside down and back to front, have three endings one after another, restart again and again and then disappear into a black hole. Trick books like that are something of an obsession of mine, which is why I resurrected the nineteenth-century format of the tête-bêche book for my nov…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 35 views
Landlocked and composed mostly of the Kalahari Desert, the Republic of Botswana borders South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Namibia. The size of France though home to only 2.5 million people, 85 per cent of whom as Tswana. Formally a British colony known as the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Botswana gained independence in 1966. Its capital, Gaborone, has caught out many a pub quiz contestant, though has half a million inhabitants. Strange then perhaps, and also maybe rather amusing, that the way most people come into contact with Botswana is via a series of crime books by a refined elderly gentleman, Alexander McCall Smith, who was formerly Professor of Medical Law at Edin…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 8 views
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 6 views
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 7 views
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 7 views
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 7 views
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 6 views
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 4 views
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 6 views
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 6 views
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 68 views
Dracula is back. Dracula hasn’t been away for very long (last year saw two reinterpretations: the corny comic misfire Renfield and genuinely innovative horror film The Last Voyage of the Demeter), but he’s back again—in Robert Eggers’s long-awaited Nosferatu remake. The lesson to take from this is: no matter how many times he returns, and dies, Dracula will always come back again. We love Dracula. We need Dracula. But more than this, I think, we are curious to know Dracula. I personally doubt that there has been a single character in the annals of our culture who has ever undergone so many different reinterpretations as Dracula, and certainly in little more than a centu…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 38 views
In March, Warner Brothers will release “Alto Knights,” a gangster drama based on the seething feud between mid-century mob bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. Written by the great Nicholas Pileggi, dean of Mafia chroniclers, and starring Robert DeNiro, “Alto Knights” arrives as the latest in a line of splashy Mafia productions dating back fifty-two years to the debut of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” trilogy. More like ninety-three years if you postdate the genre to “Little Caesar,” the Prohibition-era classic starring Edward G. Robinson as an up-by-his-fists Chicago mobster who, like many movie gangsters of the time, took his cues from Al Capone. (G. Robert Blak…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 45 views
“We all have things happen in our past. We all have our burdens to bear. You can choose to allow all the bad things that have happened to hold you back, or you can choose to rise above those things and move forward.” –Robert Crais In Robert Crais’s thrilling, edgy, emotionally intense novels – twenty-four in all, twenty series books and four standalones, from 1987 to 2025’s The Big Empty – white knights come in many forms. A meek chemical production engineer goes to extraordinary lengths to find the terrorist who killed her son in Nigeria. A cop sees his partner gunned down and, assigned to a K-9 unit because of his PTSD, makes it his – and his dog’s – mission to solve…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 44 views
Jane Pek’s The Verifiers, a mystery built around dating apps and AI, established her as a writer to watch when it came out in 2022. In it, mystery-obsessed Claudia Lin and her coworkers at a dating detective agency, the titular “verifiers,” investigate the backgrounds of the dates their clients find through algorithm-driven matchmakers. As they stake out significant others, Claudia and her colleagues uncover a vast AI conspiracy that already led to one murder. In The Rivals, her sequel out this month, Claudia convinces an employee at a matchmaker to share information proving the powerful dating platforms are mining their users’ data to create bots that manipulate their s…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 38 views
My (admittedly very European) take on visiting Houston, aka “Hustle Town”, was that anyone without a car (which included me that trip) was totally scuppered. Houston ain’t no strolling town! Texas’s second biggest city (after Dallas-Fort Worth) and of course a town with plenty of crime stories and not many pedestrians! Let’s start with Attica Locke’s terrific Jay Porter series. Locke was born in Houston and wrote for the TV show Empire. She also writes the “Highway 59” novels, named after the road that runs the length of Texas and through Houston. The novels feature African American Texas Ranger Darren Matthews. In the first book, Bluebird, Bluebird (2017) Matthews inves…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 51 views
You’d have to be living under a rock not to know we are living in the age of true crime. It’s a time where amateur sleuths with a mind to solving cold cases can shine. The internet is a treasure trove for the mystery-minded and social media has proven incredibly effective at raising the profile of crimes that otherwise had been relegated to the deep freezer. People can find any type of media to sate their true crime thirst. From books, to documentaries, to flashy dramas such as Ryan Murphy’s Netflix anthology series, Monsters, the increasing variety of content has brought all manner of horror and bloodshed to the forefront of people’s minds. And the cherry at the top is…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 51 views
Horrifically, the Hammond Circus Train Wreck, which killed eighty-six people, most of them performers, on June 22, 1918, was not the worst train disaster that year. It would be slightly surpassed in July by the Great Train Wreck of 1918 and in November by the Malbone Street Wreck, respectively the worst and second worst train disasters in United States history. Yet it was the circus train wreck which most direfully impacted the people of Cincinnati, Ohio. When death came so dreadfully to the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus in 1918 the concern was the nation’s third largest circus company and the most important one in the Midwest. It employed some four hundred performers and rou…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 68 views
The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best nonfiction books of 2024. * Abbott Kahler, Eden Undone (Crown) In Abbott Kahler’s stranger-than-fiction account of murder in a utopian community, two couples and one throuple flee Nazi Germany to live an idealized existence in the Galapagos Islands. Honestly, the subtitle of the book says it better than I ever could: there is sex! There is murder! And there is utopianism, although it fails to translate into an actual utopia. But the best laid plans, when followed rigidly and put in place by bizarre actors, can’t possibly turn out well. –MO Jason de Léon, Soldiers and Kings (Viking) Jason de León is an…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 502 views
Friends, Romans, countrymen, how’s it going? Yep, me too. Here we are, at the end of another year. This year went by very quickly. I typically like to measure the year in how many things I watched, and in case you do too, here’s a list of the best crimey TV shows you may or may not have missed, this past year. There were many great TV shows in other genres too, like English Teacher, Interview with the Vampire, Fantasmas, and Shōgun! There were a great many new seasons of existing TV shows, too, like Evil, Abbott Elementary, What we Do in the Shadows, Hacks, My Brilliant Friend, and Girls5Eva. But this is a list of crimey shows, as you might expect from a crime website. …
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 66 views
Over the last few weeks in your neighborhood, empty lots and car parking spaces have become temporary spaces where you can buy your own Christmas tree. The supply of them is limited and demand for them sky-high, which can lead to big, fast profits for the vendors. As a result, the Christmas tree business is highly competitive and even dangerous, with criminal enterprises keen to take control, and take their cut. In bigger cities like New York, sabotage, theft and even murder aren’t unheard of, but in 1950, Harry A. Pozner, the “Christmas Tree King” in San Diego, California, faced a very different threat: a love triangle. On April 13, 1950, he drove away after dropping …
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 74 views
Like all writers, I’m great at procrastinating. One of my favorite guilty pleasures is Reddit’s AmItheA**hole thread. If you haven’t yet succumbed to this black hole, random people submit real life hostile encounters to a jury of strangers, who pronounce someone the villain. What’s truly fascinating is how many different interpretations people come up with for the same events. I’m intrigued by what happens when you combine emotional intensity with miscommunication and differing world views. Particularly when everyone involved is fundamentally a decent human being. Black-and-white, hero-and-villain-type battles between good and evil are only so interesting. In fiction, I…
Last reply by Chief Editor, -
- 0 replies
- 72 views
A murderous reunion, a bachelorette disaster, a gender reveal turned tragic . . . what is it about life’s milestone moments gone awry that makes for such great stories? From the popularity of Elin Hilderbrand’s The Perfect Couple to the iconic mysteries like Nita Prose’s The Mistletoe Mystery, there’s something about the alchemy of special events and catastrophe that keeps readers turning pages. Maybe it’s the glamorous locales or all those emotions charging through those exotic venues, but for much the same reason we love True Crime, psychology always plays a part. For many people, it’s that combined desire for control and new experiences that event-gone-wrong books sa…
Last reply by Chief Editor,
ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
What should you accept as credible?
Where it All Began
