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 is a flea-market in Oldsmar Florida – “Largest in the South” it claims – that I visit when I am in the area. At the end of one of the many outdoor aisles of the flea-market is a used bookstore. I have been to the flea-market, and this bookstore, often enough that the owner knows me, although I don’t know his name, nor the name of his store – there is no signage – and he gets oddly secretive when I ask for a business card — “Darn, I just ran out.” Hardcore booklovers can have their quirks, so I don’t press him on this, but as I said, he knows me and when I walked into his shop recently, he greeted me with: “You’re back. Looking for more of them, are you?” “If yo…
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‘A traumatised person does not remember the trauma, but experiences it over and over again,’ writes the author and psychologist Paul Verhaege. The past is alive, and it takes its toll. Many years ago, we paid a visit to Jim Swire and his wife in their lovely, rambling house, which was full of comfortable clutter; there were family photos on the walls and a smell of baking in the kitchen. Our daughters played with their two dogs in the sun-drenched garden, among fruit trees and flowering shrubs. Jim Swire was a practising GP then; he was also, and very famously, a campaigner. In 1988, over a decade previously, his 23-year-old daughter Flora had been on the Pan Am Flight 1…
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I often wonder, what is it about a haunted house that truly scares us? Is it the sounds of tapping against window frames, a creaking door, or shadows that seem to dance along the periphery of our eyesight? These are just sounds, aren’t they? These are just sights, right? A noise or the wisp of something rushing past can’t really hurt us. What is it really and truly that generates dread regarding a haunted home? Is it the possibility that a human form can materialize before us? And even if it does, can a ghost harm us? Who knows? I believe that much of what generates fear in a house thought to be haunted is the memories, and the history that lingers, of cruel and awful o…
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There were no queer people in history. At least, that could be a reasonable take-away from pursuing one-star reviews of some of the best historical fiction novels out there. Perhaps the—very—slight uptick in LGBTQ+ representation in everything from World War II novels to Regency romances seems overwhelming to some because there was so little of it before. That reaction reminds me of the saying, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Until recently, if queer people showed up on the pages of historical fiction at all, their stories often ended in tragedy to make the inclusion palatable to mainstream audiences. We became solely defined by the …
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Jason De León’s second book is the result of an exemplary commitment to what he and fellow anthropologists call “deep hanging out.” In Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, the UCLA professor and MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant recipient spends countless hours with people often written off as ruthless miscreants. On cable news and in pop culture, his subjects are known as “coyotes,” but De León suggests that guía—guide— “more directly reflects the work.” For varying fees—these depend on what route is chosen and the cost of bribes paid to gangs, drug cartels and civil servants—the young Latin Americans in De León’s book lead groups …
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With crime readers ever worshipping at the stacks of dark academia (myself among them), is it any wonder that the category’s wicked pen has bled onto neighboring shelves? Its fatal quill planting itself into the backs of unwitting genres? In fact, if we wander just beyond dark academia’s oak-paneled recesses and shadowy archives, in the direction of the science quad, the classroom merges with the laboratory to reveal a cache of academically ambitious mysteries and thrillers I like to think of as dark science. Don’t call it science-fiction—although there may be some crossover—and you wouldn’t mistake it for dark academia’s touchstone, The Secret History, either, although w…
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Every writer likes to think they’re a psychologist. Inventing a character means having at least a cursory sense of their backstory, motivations, past traumas—the history that makes them unlike every other person in this world. By definition, writers are observers and people-watchers, and most of us believe that this gives us an uncommon understanding of what makes them tick. But Jonathan Kellerman really is a psychologist. Prior to his career as a novelist, he worked as a staff psychologist and clinical professor of pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine and then opened a private practice. He is now a clinical professor of pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine, but…
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Any study of Aphra Behn is really a study of shifting disguises and political guesswork. She is remembered in history as the first woman to make a living by writing in English, all the way back in the seventeenth century. Few know that she became a writer while exploring her first intriguing career: Spy for the British crown. Fittingly for a spy, Behn was secretive and her reputed garrulity among friends did not extend to anything autobiographical for future generations to rely on. Most of what we know of her is uncertain, gleaned from the literature she left us. Her espionage career might have begun in 1659, when she was about nineteen years old. The death of Oliver Cr…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Steve Cavanagh, Kill for Me Kill For You (Atria) “Explosive, game-changing reveals that, combined with an uncommon attunement to the central characters’ emotional arcs, make for a wild, deliciously satisfying ride.” –Publishers Weekly Sulari Gentill, The Mystery Writer (Poisoned Pen Press) “Gentill’s worthwhile novel is full of compelling characters, including doomsday preppers, online conspiracy theorists, and overzealous publishing agents. Recommended for readers who enjoy mysteries from Riley Sager, Ruth Ware, or Louise Penny.” –Library Journal Nova Jacobs, The Stars Turned…
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If Chris Bohjalian were to write a memoir—or a manifesto on craft—it could be called: I was a teenage magician. It’s a history that has served him well. A master of misdirection, Bohjalian—the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books including The Lioness and The Flight Attendant—occupies unique territory in the literary landscape. While his novels often incorporate crime, they aren’t often considered crime novels (which is why you’ll usually find them shelved in Fiction as opposed to Mystery). And yet Bohjalian considers crime his MacGuffin, or the pistol that marks an opening salvo. Case in point: While Bohjalian’s newest genre-bender, The Princ…
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Who is a lady going to call if she’s been wronged by an insufferable rake in Victorian England? If the lady is the main character in a historical romance, a lady’s reputation—and the reader’s favorite tropes—call for the FPI. The Fictional Private Investigator. Unlike PIs in contemporary crime fiction, the FPIs of historical romance do not sit outside a cheating man’s house in a beat-up Ford peeing in a bottle. Instead, they have a backstory that leaves them flawed and brooding, usually in possession of a small fortune or at least enough money to make a good match, and with muscular forearms. (That last part is just my humble opinion.) My latest release, The Love Remed…
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In The Hunter, her ninth novel, Irish-American author Tana French takes us back to the small West Ireland village that she introduced in The Searcher. Retired detective Cal Hooper has made a home in Ardnakelty at the foot of the mountain, away from police cases and the city bustle. It’s a blazing hot summer, and while farmers worry about their crops, Cal’s life seems to have settled in a peaceful groove. His relationship with local Lena is going strong; meanwhile Cal keeps a watchful eye over teenage neighbor Trey, his now trusted carpentry assistant. But Cal’s makeshift family comes under threat when Trey’s father, Johnny, marches back into town with a scheme to find gol…
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Remember Pizzagate? In 2016, a conspiracy theory that high-ranking Democrats were running a pedophile ring out of a D.C. pizzeria compelled a man to open fire inside the restaurant in an attempt to rescue the imprisoned children, who didn’t exist. The story dominated headlines for five minutes before fading into the category of “well, that happened.” The bamboozled gunman, Edgar Maddison Welch, was sent to jail and mostly forgotten, his identity blurring into an avatar for a certain set of social anxieties—that liberalism breeds perversion, that politicians lie, that modern life is emasculating. Any larger lessons which Pizzagate may have held for society were swiftly bur…
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As a writer of narratives, I’m leery of them. Especially historical ones. I’m not skeptical of events; I’m skeptical of wording and connective tissue. Of the clean causality. Take the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. (Seven men murdered in a garage, no one was ever convicted). Because speculating on whodunits is great fun, and because politicians at the time did what they do—spun the events to their advantage—and because that advantage played into anti-gangland sentiment that eventually, indirectly resulted in a RICO case against Al Capone (who was never connected, materially, to the murders), I wasted several hours of my youth waiting for Geraldo to open an empty vault. A…
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Here are some of the trickiest pitfalls to sidestep while crafting your novel. Remember, in each pitfall to be avoided is also an opportunity to be seized. Don’t set the stakes too low. Something vital has to be at risk. Anything from one person’s life to the survival of all humankind. Don’t wait. Hook your reader immediately. Maybe with a bang. My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. The beginning of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold draws you right in with a startling detail that throw…
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At the turn of the twentieth century, American crime fiction was at a shallow ebb. Anna Katharine Green, who had achieved great success with The Leavenworth Case in 1887, continued to produce popular novels (and would do so until 1923), but the tastes of American readers of mystery fiction had turned to England. Certainly the popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories had focused attention on British crime writing, but not until Mary Roberts Rinehart, whose first novel appeared in 1908, the popular The Circular Staircase, did American mystery writers again achieve success. It is not surprising, then, that Richard Harding Davis— the most popular American journalist of the …
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CrimeReads editors make their selections for the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Andrew Boryga, Victim (Doubleday) In Boryga’s debut novel, Victim, a young hustler on the rise learns to manipulate the currency of identity as he bends the truth about his past and establishes himself in the world of New York media and letters. The satire in this novel comes in sharp and merciless, but the friendship at the story’s center steals the show, rounding out all the complexities and contradictions of two young men on different sides of the truth. Boryga is a keen observer of culture and a storyteller with style to spare. –DM Jennifer Croft, The E…
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In a late episode of Better Call Saul, Saul Goodman beseeches his wife Kim Wexler, “What’s done can be undone.” Caught up in a web of lies and deaths, and questioning what she has become along the way, Kim has relinquished her law license, and Saul implores her to undo her decision in an act of desperation. He knows what she has worked to achieve; he knows the people she has helped. He knows that their partnership is on the line. His plea is also an interesting inversion of a line from Shakespeare’s historic play, Macbeth. Lady Macbeth, haunted by remorse to the point of bloody hallucinations, knows there is no going back from the murderous machinations she and her husba…
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Sometimes novels inadvertently reflect some aspect of the current zeitgeist, and Irish writer Claire Coughlan’s first one is this kind of story. Set in 1968 during the Christmas season, Where They Lie is a complex tale with a large cast—both living and dead—about the mysterious disappearance in 1943 of a theatre actress, Julia Bridges, and a former mid-wife, Gloria Fitzpatrick, who may or may not have played a role in that disappearance. Gloria was also a patron of the theatre where Julia performed. While never charged with a crime related to Julia’s disappearance, in 1956 Gloria was sentenced to hang for performing a backstreet abortion. Fast forward to the night befo…
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I joined my first cult when I was…just kidding. Mostly. When I was born in the early 80s, my parents were part of a church in Virginia Beach, an area influenced by the likes of Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network as well as Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. These are the kinds of organizations that helped fuel the Satanic Panic, decrying games like Dungeons & Dragons and any Halloween celebration that wasn’t spent as a simple “Harvest Festival” in a church gym. My family’s Southern Baptist Church was no exception, inviting my parents to break their classic rock records in order to avoid “backmasking,” the supposed subliminal evil messages encoded in rock s…
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I don’t think of myself as a reader or writer of crime novels, and yet (knocking on my own skull to see if anyone’s inside) almost all of my novels do have a crime—or a strange disappearance or a person concealing their identity or a similar mystery. My latest novel, Discipline, involves three stolen paintings, a no-doubt-about-it-crime story, inspired (in part) by reading about a man fleeing from police who, perhaps to conceal evidence, burned two of a famous painter’s canvases by the side of the road. I realize (more knocking on my own head) that I loved Donna Tartt’s A Secret History and am a fan of Kate Atkinson’s fantastic Detective Brody series, so I am as delud…
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“They had gold and my baby was sick.” —Mahin Qadiri About ninety-five miles northwest of the Iranian capital Tehran is the city of Qazvin. Located on the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, it has a population of more than four hundred thousand people. It’s a place rich in cultural and historical significance. It’s also a place where people are turning up dead. A man is murdered in 2006. Between February and May 2009, five women are murdered. The method used in the killings is similar, as is the method by which the bodies are disposed of. Each of the victims has been strangled and, apart from the first victim, all of them are women. Specifically, older women. Is th…
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Anyone who knows me, or has read my second book, or has stood too close to me at a bookstore knows I despise the concept of genre. I despise the tweed coat that genre wears when it decides what is literary and what is not. I despise the lab coat genre wears when it separates hard sci-fi from soft sci-fi. I despise genre’s internalized misogyny as it reliably separates anything feminine into whatever category is least likely to garner acclaim. There is one thing, though, that I find genre invaluable for: communicating a contract with the reader. Imagine a line with “Safety” at one end and “Threat” at the other. Genre determines where on this line your reader can expect t…
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I was 25 years old and had a novel written when someone named the feeling that has chased me my entire life. Survivor’s guilt. I sat on a Zoom call with someone I didn’t know, but who’d read my debut novel and used these two words to describe it like it was nothing more than a theme. She asked me how survivor’s guilt impacted me as a Syrian American. I stared back at her blankly. Some people search their whole lives for a diagnosis—visiting countless experts, regurgitating their symptoms—until they obtain the validation that comes with uncovering what is wrong with them. At first, I liked it: Two words that captured what I’d needed ninety thousand words of a novel to u…
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I’d been told to wait at the airport for an official car to arrive. There were always detailed, specific instructions in case the car was late or didn’t show up at all. Under no circumstance was I, a single, unescorted woman, to get into a “taxi.” That would be “provocative” behavior, marking me as a woman looking for trouble, so instead I sat on an airport bench and waited. All too aware of the leering stares of men walking by, I unzipped my bag and retrieved the large shawl packed by Maggie, our housekeeper and lifelong friend. I draped it over my bare arms, eager to cover my pale skin. The next morning, I was to report to the field office. I was in my mid-twenties b…
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