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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Sometimes secret codes can be the poignant echoes of languages that have been suppressed by conquering powers. There are words and phrases and cadences that have been smothered by oppressors and, as such, can be used by their original speakers in the spirit of defiance. This was the case for the languages spoken by the many tribes of the Native Americans in the early years of the twentieth century, whose lives and cultures had been decimated by the swarming colonialists taking over the whole of North America. The new rulers of the west decreed that the children of Native Americans should be turned away from the old tongues. They were enrolled in boarding schools far from …
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The whistleblower cuts a lonely figure. Disruptive by definition, the whistleblower is the ultimate outsider – a shadowy player who ignores not only the rules, but the very team itself. The whistleblower’s motivations are often misunderstood, and their habit of exposing difficult truths means they are easily smeared by their detractors as troublemakers, fantasists and traitors. All of these qualities make the whistleblower an excellent character in crime fiction. My novel, The Messenger, follows the journey of Alex, a young man who has just been released on parole for the crime of killing his father. Alex claims he was wrongly convicted, is desperate to prove his inno…
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“All the world loves a lover,” said someone (not Shakespeare, it turns out) expressing the universal appeal of romance and that enraptured state of attraction that often leads to procreation and the perpetuation of our species. And then there are those cases, fictional and non, where the lovers’ chemical infatuation leads to the inverse of reproduction: the murder of their fellow Homo sapiens. Yes, we’re talking about Mickey and Mallory in the Oliver Stone-Quentin Tarantino collaboration Natural Born Killers; Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate the real-life spree killers from the 1950s; Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow who shot to death policemen and civilians during…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Megan Davis, The Messenger (Pegasus Crime) “An intelligent, gripping, and stylish literary thriller—I couldn’t put it down. Megan Davis is a major new talent.” –Sophie Hannah Mindy Mejia, To Catch a Storm (Atlantic Monthly Press) “[P]ropulsive . . . Mejia sets things up nicely for further teamwork and conflict between Jonah and Eve, at the nexus point of what we can — and choose to — believe in.” –New York Times David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew (Putnam) “[A] searing stunner of a book…It’s like a Nina Simone song that contains ‘an infinite sort of sadness,’ yet closes wi…
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Tanzania in East Africa has a complicated history. Sitting there on the Indian Ocean bordering Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – that’s a lot of neighbours. Once part of German East Africa, then ruled over by the British as Tanganyika (first as a League of Nations mandate and then as a United Nations trust territory until the 1960s and independence as Tanzania. You’d be forgiven for thinking the capital is Dar es Salaam, “Dar” to those that know it, right there on the coast. And Dar is the financial capital and most populous city of the country with six million people (out of a total population of over…
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Molly Odintz: What did you want to explore in your novel about the experience of occupation? Kemi Ashing-Giwa: The aspect of occupation I most wanted to explore was the contradictory nature of the imperialistic machine. Across history, the most “successful” empires grew in no small part via assimilation. (How we determine the metrics by which the success of nations is measured is a complicated question well worth delving into, but that’s for another time, and for those more knowledgeable than I). These empires not only forced their own way of life upon peoples they viewed as “lesser”—they also absorbed and sometimes even adopted the cultures of the defeated. Empires are …
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City of Angels, California, 1915 Tongues of flame flickered in the fireplace, hot and silent. Belle needed a window to rest her cheek on, to cool her skin, glowing red, fresh as dew, calm and hot. These little mustache hairs, she ran her fingers over her lips and heard her murmuring lungs. She lit a cigarette and looked out at the city. The enormous oak tree in the evening sun reached its long, gnarled roots along the wall and into the ground; the roots coiled around the fence, crept out under the grass. Clotheslines ran between the branches, sheets and panties flapping gently in the wind. There are things I can’t ever admit, she whispered, things that are too big, too …
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It’s hard out there for the discerning true crime fan. Amid a glut of superficial rehashes of famous cases, or bloated limited series on run-of-the-mill murders, it’s hard to find anything truly new and juicy. You’re always on the lookout for an interesting, underexposed case, told with a good amount of access and a bit of flair. There’s something special, however, in Lanon van Soest’s The Jewel Thief, which premiered on Hulu last week. It’s the literally incredible tale of a stunningly brilliant, staggeringly arrogant, thief, who managed to pull off a series of stunning heists through a mixture of cunning and no small measure of compulsion. As a young kid, the slightly…
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The horror renaissance continues! And the second half of the year brings plenty of new standout titles to add to your TBR. The works below twist, shatter, and reinvent gothic and horror tropes, bringing old forms together with new issues, and do not attempt to separate the social from the personal when it comes to understanding fear and and its bringers. There are gruesome body horrors, cackling dark comedies, surreal metaphorical structures, and (like earlier in the year) so many haunted houses. From old favorites, to new voices, teen slasher heroines to Eldritch-fighting grannies, here are Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, The Centre (Gillian Flynn Books, July 11) What would…
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Romcom mystery is a genre that perfectly blends whodunit, wit, grit, romance and laugh-out-loud moments. With quirky female protagonists desperately trying to navigate life’s complexities, these stories come alive with characters you can’t help but cheer for as they come up against extraordinary events in their ordinary lives. Whether they are waitresses, actresses, nurses, lawyers, or food anthropologists, they manage to keep their humor in situations that are often far from laughable. Lighter on crime and heavier on humor, romcom mysteries can sometimes border on madcap but still deliver the same rollercoaster ride of thrills, spills, red herrings, twists and turns of…
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In an earlier article, I had written about the lack of Indian crime fiction when I was growing up. We had plugged that gap by turning to western authors – Christie, Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, Erle Stanley Gardner, and other giants of crime fiction. The lacuna had kept gnawing at the back of my mind, and had eventually pushed me to write crime fiction set in India. That paucity of local crime fiction had continued until a decade ago. How much has that changed now? In this article, I’ll try to offer a glimpse of today’s Indian crime fiction space. Huge Potential Before I do that, let me step back and look at India as a setting for fiction. The first thing that hits you be…
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Earlier this year, Winnie M Li and Jordan Harper sat down at the legendary BookSoup in Los Angeles, to discuss their recent novels Complicit and Everybody Knows, which are both mysteries set in Hollywood. The following are amended extracts from their conversation. Jordan Harper: So we met at the Edgar awards. Five years ago, we were both nominated for Best First Novel. Winnie Li: Jordan won. (laughs) It was well deserved. JH: Five years later, I was working on a novel that became Everybody Knows. The working title was ‘Hollywood Sickos.’ When Winnie posted about her novel Complicit, I got very excited because I knew from her description of that book that we were circ…
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Ah, summer. There’s just something about these months of sun-soaked, sun-dappled, sunscreened sunniness that makes me long for the dark and drizzly days of autumn. I live for the rare thunderstorms, rejoice in the occasional foggy morning, and generally spend my afternoons pretending I’m curled under a quilt and not hugging the nearest AC vent like a well-placed comma. It’s little surprise that I save my darkest, eeriest reads for this season of heat and humidity, escaping into the tall grasses of ill-maintained estates, wandering through long corridors of questionably sentient shadows, and basking in the perilous angst of another gaslit heroine. I was around ten years …
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The Record Shop Mysteries aren’t food cozies per se, but main character Juni Jessup freely admits that food is the way to her heart, as she eats her way through the tasty food vendors at the annual Cedar River Bluebonnet Festival in A Fatal Groove, all while solving the mayor’s murder. Juni knows her way around a cappuccino maker and has an exceptional knowledge of music from working at her family vinyl records shop/coffee café, Sip & Spin Records, but one thing Juni has never been good at is making up her mind—not when it comes to making the hard choice between two suitors, and especially not when her stomach is hungry. In honor of summertime, and Juni’s indecisivene…
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T.S. Eliot had it right. “Good writers borrow,” he said. “Great writers steal.” What he meant was that a writer aspiring to greatness should be reading critically (always) to learn the boundaries of the craft from better writers and to then apply their triumphs in their own work, organically. I’m not a great writer but I try to get better with each book. And I certainly look to other authors (both in fiction and nonfiction) for inspiration on how best to construct a true crime mystery into a compelling narrative. My next book, Little, Crazy Children, arrives June 27. It’s the real-life story of a teenage girl who was stabbed to death behind a mansion in Shaker Heights, O…
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Of all the subgenres of crime fiction, the one I know the least about is the spy novel. I will happily watch almost any Bond movie (especially if it has Daniel Craig in it), but my only familiarity with his novelistic counterparts comes from the one John le Carré novel I picked up in college. If you’d asked me why I avoided reading about espionage, I would have said that while it’s fun to watch beautiful people zooming around exotic locations with outlandish gadgets, I prefer even the most high-concept novels to have a heavy dose of realism. The spy novel is, I would have argued, unrealistic by definition. But Chris Pavone changed my mind. In his novel The Expats, the pr…
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Like Dark Lover, the book that kickstarted my Black Dagger Brotherhood series, The St. Ambrose School for Girls is one of those “book of my heart” projects that had to be written. But it was not something I anticipated. I was going along, writing about vampires quite happily, with a full schedule of releases (thank you, Gallery!) when from out of the blue, Sarah M. Taylor came to me in a dream. I had a vivid vision of a fifteen-year-old girl with dyed black hair, black baggy clothes, and a tense look on her face. She was staring at me, as if she were trying to tell me something, and as I bolted out of sleep and sat up in bed, all I could think was… Who the hell was that…
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Standing alone at the front of a Chicago courtroom, Guadalupe Fernández Valencia wore orange prison coveralls. Her long light-brown hair, streaked with gray, was pulled back into a tight ponytail at the nape of her neck. She wore no makeup. She was sixty years old. “I want to take advantage of this opportunity to ask forgiveness from my children and from my family,” said Guadalupe. It was August 2021, and she was about to be sentenced for a sobering litany of drug trafficking charges, including conspiracy to transport and distribute, and money laundering. Guadalupe spent more than three decades in the drug business, working for Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the world’s most…
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Strange Murders: “The Hatchet Killer” Transcript of the original episode, four years ago Host Wesley Steele: Joy, Montana, a sleepy mountain town with scenic views, quaint shops and lively bars, seemed like the perfect place to either take a break and cut loose before college classes started or to celebrate after the rigors of college. During the summer of 2014, three women, unknown to each other, two who were recent high school graduates and another who had just finished her nursing degree came to Joy to do just that. Samantha Brodie, Emily Lynn, and Abby Marshal traveled here from different parts of the country to hike the trails, swim in the glacier-fed lakes, and ta…
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In a recent article for CrimeReads, Kelly J. Ford asserted that when asked about their favorite Southern writers, most cishet white men often ramble off “the same old white guys everyone mentions,” and then, at the very end, add Flannery O’Connor. The article is a beautiful, thought-provoking piece of writing, and I hope you’ll give it a read. But the reason I mention it here is to tell you a story. Kelly and I are both from Arkansas. Shortly after that article came out, we were doing an event together at Bookish in Fort Smith. At some point, somebody asked me about my influences, and I rambled off a few names, the last of which was Flannery O’Connor. I shit you not…
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Before I became a full-time writer, I spent a decade working as a criminal defense attorney. It was rewarding, exhausting, heart-breaking work. I’m glad not to be practicing any longer, but I also feel lucky to have had the experiences I did during those years. They shaped me into a better, more empathetic person, one who is able to look past a stark black-and-white perspective and see all the subtle gray space in between the extremes. Given my background, writing a legal thriller might seem like the obvious choice, but so far setting a book inside a courtroom hasn’t appealed to me. Keeping the courtroom out of my novels doesn’t mean that each of my books isn’t informed b…
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There’s a story in the Mahabharata: a young prince wants to become an expert archer, so he begs a guru to train him. Over and over, the prince is rebuffed. Eventually, he builds a clay statue of the guru with his bare hands. Under the gaze of this idol, he begins to study and practice. This is how he teaches himself. That’s one way in which a writer can find their own book. You collage your influences into a sort of constellation, and this map of symbolic coordinates comes to orient your entire project, allowing you to conjure up the destination to which your writing journey is heading. At least, that’s how it was for me. I have no formal training in creative writing.…
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__________________________________ I hated her too. I wanted her dead. And I know I’m not the only one. But now that leading lady Vanessa Hargreaves, celebrity starlet, lies spent and lifeless on the stage of the glorious Royal Ruby Theatre, I have to ask myself: How did it come to this? I know one thing for sure: I didn’t kill Vanessa. But if I didn’t do it, who did? The audience is confused. I can hear them whispering in their seats. What’s going on? Why is the star of the show dead in the very first scene? They don’t realize this isn’t part of the play. And who can blame them? At the Royal Ruby, we’re known for our stage illusions, for a show that changes with ever…
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When I was a little girl, my parents rented a lakeside cottage. The owners would be out of town for a year, and they needed someone to keep an eye on their property, so they rented it to us cheap. My sisters and I were excited about living next to a cool blue lake with tiny islands to explore. Down the hill from our house was a small beach with a private dock. My father bought an old rowboat and patched up the holes in the hull, while painted turtles sunned themselves on the shore and king snakes curled up in the grass like warm inner tubes. That summer, I dangled my feet over the end of the wooden dock and searched the water for sunfish or bluegills. Sometimes I’d …
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This month’s international thriller releases showcase authors at the top of their game, split fairly evenly between Latin America and Scandinavia (with one Swiss author thrown into the mix). What’s remarkable about this month’s selection is the incredible diversity of genre forms—whether you’re looking for a chilling psychological thriller, a fast-paced tale of international intrigue, a thrilling cat-and-mouse chase, or a moody consideration of how a killer comes to be, there’s a book on this list sure to satisfy. Paula Rodriguez, Urgent Matters Translated by Sarah Moses (Pushkin Vertigo) In this perfectly paced and plotted Argentine thriller, a train crash is the o…
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