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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When we decided at CrimeReads that our next roundtable would be with women who write espionage fiction, I really did not know what to focus on. How does espionage work in a Trump or post-Trump world? As this roundtable was back in the dark ages between the election and inauguration, I knew we’d have to address the orange man in the room but not how to put it into an espionage context. Fortunately, our excellent panel had many ideas about the political climate and the hallmarks of espionage: double-dealing, lying, manipulating, cheating, money, reputation. Once we got into our discussion it seemed inevitable that a regime like the one recently past would be chock full of …
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Ah, school days! The grassy quads, the tang of autumn in the air, the dying screams of murdered classmates. With atmosphere like that, it’s no wonder campus mysteries have been around since the Golden Age of detective fiction. All the greats took a crack at it—Dorothy Sayers in Gaudy Night, Agatha Christie in Cat Among the Pigeons, Ellery Queen in The Campus Murders—and later innovators like J. S. Borthwick, Pamela Thomas-Graham, and Lev Raphael helped diversify the subgenre. But in 1992, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History was the first to break out of the cozy mold, becoming a crossover bestseller and changing the face of the campus thriller forever. A lush, melancholy wh…
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Raymond Chandler had a complicated relationship with Hollywood. If you’re inclined to dig around there are any number of interesting and sometimes shocking anecdotes about his time working around movies, and he certainly left behind a litany of quips on the subject. (“Its idea of ‘production value’ is spending a million dollars dressing up a story that any good writer would throw away.”) My own personal favorite has a slightly lighter air than most of the matter on offer. It’s the now legendary, possibly apocryphal story about William Faulkner, hired for a script adaptation, desperately trying to work out the plot of The Big Sleep and inquiring of Chandler which of his ch…
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tk ___________________________________ The Soothsayer: Rose Marks ___________________________________ There were so many sad women in Manhattan. They were educated and successful and desperate. They had MBAs and books on the New York Times Best Seller list and jobs in international finance; they had abusive husbands and drug-addled sons and mothers who were dying. Their daughters were depressed and their boyfriends were leaving them and their bodies were riddled with cancer. What could they do? These women had grown up believing that there was something more out there, something to cling to. And now, as they dragged their aching hearts through the city, something appe…
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While working on our recent ranking of prison escape movies, I hit a wall after thinking about movies in which the villain gets himself (or herself, possibly, but it’s almost always a “him”) caught, as part of an evil plan. In these films, it is only by “getting captured” that the next phase of the villain’s plan may commence. And then, usually, he’ll escape. Often, out of some sort of large glass box. So, these films didn’t seem like they should go on my prison escape list, but felt relevant. Hence, the mini sub-list. But of course, there are also movies where the good guy wants to get caught, so he can escape and do something. I think these instances are fewer, but sti…
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The season is changing! As I write this, it’s eighty-four degrees and sunny outside. I can hear an ice cream truck out my open window, and also a cop shouting over the cruiser speaker at that ice cream truck, because I guess it’s illegally parked. My eyes are itchy from the pollen and my hair is voluminous from the humidity. On my block, the smells of grilled hot dogs wafting from the balcony barbecues above mingle with the smells of hot dog urine from the sidewalk below. This morning, I saw a pigeon fight with a seagull over a Popsicle wrapper. Rejoice, all, for it is summer in the city. I love—and I mean really love—summer in New York, the terrible place where I was bo…
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In 1917, as World War I raged on, two officers named Harry Jones and Cedric Hill were being held captive in a remote POW camp in Turkey. There, Jones received a postcard from his aunt. She suggested he might pass the time practicing some form of spiritualism. She included precise instructions on constructing a Ouija board. Jones and Hill would soon be holding seances for the camp’s prisoners, a ritual that drew attention from the guards. Using coded information from home and their keen sense of human psychology, the two officers went on to cast a spell over their captors, a spell that would one day result in a daring escape. Here, we read about their first experiments man…
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I started writing crime novels back in the dark ages—the early eighties. I had always wanted to be a writer, but somehow other things had gotten in the way of my doing that—two years of teaching high school English, five years of being a school librarian on an Indian reservation, and ten years of selling life insurance, not to mention the births of my two children. In 1982, at age 38 and as a divorced single mother, I finally gave myself permission to start living that dream. I hadn’t been allowed in the Creative Writing program at the University of Arizona in 1964 on account of my being a girl. As a consequence, my first effort at fiction writing turned out to be a 1,40…
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I have a confession to make. In 2020, my debut novel, Little White Lies, was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association “New Blood” Dagger Award. I was delighted, of course, BUT… I never meant to write a “crime” novel. I’m not a “crime writer”. I hardly even read any crime. If I do, twenty-four hours after finishing, I often can’t remember “whodunit”. What stays with me instead are the characters. Their relationships. The atmosphere. Not the plot. So, gate-crashing about on the fringes of the genre, what am I? My marketing team would probably tell you that I’m a psychological thriller / psychological suspense author. And I’m quite happy with that categorization. I…
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Yarn lovers love yarns. After all, storytellers are said to “spin a yarn,” right? Knitting and reading simply go together. I’ve been knitting for as long as I’ve been writing (and reading). Every yarn lover that I know—be it knitter or crocheter—is also a book lover. And if you walk into any bookstore or book club and ask who knits, you’ll see a lot of raised hands (if they don’t already have hooks or needles in them). So why is that? To me, the process of creating a good story is much the same as knitting. You take one thing—a straight piece of yarn in this case—and transform it into another one stitch at a time. Patterns emerge. Transitions take place. Something enti…
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It was painstaking work, creating that fort out of a large thicket at the bottom of the hill. The opening was small and cut through the side so it couldn’t be spotted by anyone who might wander by. A tall cinder-block wall, about ten feet in height, stood a few feet in front and stretched across part of the bottom of the hill and down the road toward the Corniche. It surrounded an old, abandoned peppermint-stick lighthouse. The wall made for good cover and didn’t restrict our view to the other side of the hill and down the same road to our apartment building, which was a couple of blocks up from the Corniche, and the Mediterranean Sea. The fort became our hideaway. We na…
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Crime fiction, which we might also call “homicide fiction,” has been popular since the 19th century, with the US and my native Britain dominating the genre. The trend continued even as violent crime rates generally declined and intentionally taking a life became an ever more unusual way for people to break the criminal law. In recent years, alongside invented mysteries and thrillers, we’ve seen the rise and rise of the true crime genre on streaming services and in audio podcasts. It appears everyone wants to know more about the minds of murderers. As it happens, this is my day job; I’ve spent the last 30 years working with violent offenders as a forensic psychiatrist and…
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Ask readers of crime fiction whether they have heard of John Sanford, and the writer most likely to come to mind is John Sandford, the author of the Prey series of detective novels—as they commit the common mistake of overlooking the “d” hidden in the middle of the name. But long before John Camp chose Sandford as his pen name, there was John Sanford—author of 24 books, including two hard-boiled 1930’s masterworks that combine gut-wrenching plots with a literary flair that drew favorable comparisons with William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and James M. Cain. Sanford, who died in 2003, is best known as a writer of non-fiction—including creative interpretations of American…
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Last week, in our Summertime Crime Movies series, we spotlighted urban summer crime films: movies where the heat is so hot, your ice cream cone won’t stand a chance. But this week, we’re spotlighting summer crime movies set in small towns, where things may not be as bustling, but the atmosphere will be just as tense. The thing about crime movies set in small towns is that so many of them are set in the wintertime. Fargo! Winter’s Bone! The Burned Barns! Wind River! A Simple Plan! Blow the Man Down! Alas. ALAS. I wish we could include them, but who wants to watch a film about the cold, right now? Maybe me, actually, because it’s really in New York. In the Heat of the Nig…
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Having decided I wanted to write about a young female spy in London on the brink of World War Two, I knew I’d be taking a deep dive into research for the project. This ‘work’ (though, happily, it never really felt like that) took me to London, Oxford and other sites in the UK, visiting archives, museums, houses, pubs and parks. As I immersed myself in these places, conjuring character, events and the specific historical era, I read some influential novels to lend flavour to my journey and add inspiration to the writing process. William Boyd’s Restless This novel inspired me to really plumb the depths of the psyche of a female spy. Boyd’s enigmatic Eva is a Russian rec…
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Delving into any aspect of the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy is an ambitious and even perilous endeavor. So much has been said and studied: thousands of pages of scientific evidence, hundreds of witness accounts including some that have evolved over fifty-plus years, numerous government investigations and literally thousands of books. It has long been difficult for so many to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, who had previously defected to Russia, killed Kennedy acting alone and that less than two days later, Jack Ruby, with his loose ties to the Dallas underworld, also acting alone, so easily killed Oswald. Dozens of conspiracy theories about who…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Chris Offutt, Killing Hills (Grove) Offutt is overdue for a new breakout novel, and The Killing Hills may just be it, part southern gothic, part searching, seething portrait of loss and betrayal, and part an entertaining offshoot of the world of Justified. It’s set in the Kentucky hills, and when a military CID is enlisted by his sister, the town’s new sheriff, to help out with a shadowy homicide investigation, all hell breaks loose. A story full of feuds, rivalries, and crimes hiding in plain sight, The Killing Hills is as poignant and powerful …
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The forensic anthropologist’s job is to try to read the bones of our skeleton as if they were a record, moving a professional stylus across them in search of the short, recognizable segments of body-based memory that form part of the song of a life, coaxing out fragments of the tune laid down there long ago. Usually this will be a life that has ended. We are interested in how it was lived and the person who lived it. We want to find the experiences recorded in the bones that will help to tell its story, and perhaps give the body back its name. Within our discipline of forensic anthropology—the study of the human, or the remains of the human, for medico-legal purposes— th…
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It’s Pearl’s first time. She sits in the cabinet as usual, behind its black damask curtain, but already she feels like someone else. Tonight she hasn’t got the floor-length veil over her face and there aren’t any ashes smeared on her skin. She isn’t playing a spirit guide now: she’s the Main Event. She worries about how it will feel when the ghosts take possession of her. Myrtle used to screw up her face and roll her eyes – but that was all for show. Myrtle freely admits it. ‘I’m a Sensitive,’ she told Pearl. ‘I hear the voices. But that ain’t enough for ladies and gents. They want a thrill. Tables rocking. Materialisation.’ The spirits have since whispered to Myrtle …
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One of my favorite things in the entire world is to lie in bed with the lights out, just the faint glow of my e-reader lighting up the edge of my pillow as I flip the virtual pages of a thriller that, by the end, leaves me gasping. I award bonus points if it keeps me up past my bedtime. That part doesn’t feel too great in the morning, when I’m fumbling to make that first cup of strong tea, but the rush is worth it. The books that keep me up all night must have characters who, against their better instincts, must learn to be truly and deeply brave, especially when it comes to family. It’s even better if it would be easier not to change. One of my most recent favorite read…
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A plague on these women who, lengthily wooed, Are not to be won until one’s out of the mood. And who then discerning one’s temperateness, Accuse one of cooling because they said yes! —”Curse in the Old Manner” (Dashiell Hammett poem published in The Bookman in September 1927) “You’re going to behave. I don’t want a lot of monkey-business out of you.” She laughed suddenly, asking: “Will you beat me if I’m bad?” —Exchange between the Continental Op and Gabrielle Leggett in Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Dain Curse (1929) Tell me something, Nick. Tell me the truth: when you were wrestling with Mimi, didn’t you have an erection? —Nora Charles to her husband Nick in The…
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As I type this, a new film has been released which offers a backstory into the motivations of the Disney villainess Cruella de Vil, a character who needs no introduction (or even, some might say, explanation) but has been given one anyway. I haven’t seen this new film, Cruella, which stars Emma Stone and sets itself up as a pseudo-prequel to Disney’s live-action 101 Dalmatians film from 1996, which starred Glenn Close as the diabolical, piebald, puppy-stealing termagant. I probably won’t see the new film (simply because I’m not very interested in Disney’s live-action remakes and such), but I’m not writing this to knock it. All I can say about it is that I’ve noticed that,…
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Con men flourish in two diametrically opposite times—when the people have nothing and are desperate for anything that will raise them out of poverty; and when there is boundless plenty for the vast majority, when countries are newly awash with easy money, and there are countless newly rich men and women who can just as easily be separated from their money as they acquired it. My book How To Kidnap The Rich is set in India, a country which is in both of these moments at once. For hundreds of millions of its very poorest, very lowest caste people, many former agricultural workers newly urbanised, every day can be a pitfall in being separated from their hard earned pittance…
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Once a week this summer, Bobby Santovasco and his best pal Zeke head down by the Belt Parkway to throw things at the cars getting off at the Bay Parkway exit near Ceasar’s Bay shopping center. Bobby’s just turned fourteen. Zeke is thirteen. They like stealing CDs from Sam Goody and cigarettes from Augie’s Deli and playing video games in Zeke’s basement. They both have a crush on Carissa Caruso from Stillwell Avenue. They’re both headed into eighth grade at St. Mary Mother of Jesus on Eighty-Fourth Street. Bobby was left back in third grade, so he’s a little older than everyone else in his class. Their teacher is going to be Mrs. Santillo, who Bobby heard fart during the …
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Trouble in paradise is about as classic a concept as they come—it all started in the Garden of Eden and only got wilder from there. A dreamy but flawed protagonist filled with hope and expectation arrives in a stunning location only to discover they are still the exact same person they were at home. What could possibly go wrong? In my latest book, Before We Were Innocent, Bess and Joni’s dream vacation in Greece turns into a nightmare when their best friend Evangeline dies, and they are arrested for the crime. When the world’s media turns their attention on them, they are judged not only for the night Ev died but for every moment leading up to it. Now, ten years later, J…
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