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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I’m on the record with all my lavish praise for what Colson Whitehead is doing, which is nothing short of a monument to crime fiction—and to New York City. I’m not sure what else there is to say about the man’s work except, I suppose, to urge readers once again, if somehow they haven’t already been persuaded, to give themselves over wholly, unreservedly to the wild pleasures of Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy: first Harlem Shuffle, now Crook Manifesto, and a third novel still to come. In the new installment, Whitehead returns to the misadventures of Ray Carney, quickly ascending to the status of éminence grise in the small business community of 1970s Harlem, but with that cro…
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Like many readers, I love a good historical mystery. A mystery that unlocks secrets of the past, reveals a forgotten story, or sheds light on tensions still plaguing the modern world. While most of my work is contemporary, I’ve discovered that the skillful use of history can deepen the traditional mystery, including the cozy. In my Spice Shop mysteries, set in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, history is in the air—along with the smells of fish, produce, and flowers, the sounds of buskers, and the hubbub of ten million visitors a year. Founded in 1907 and saved from the wrecking ball by voters in 1971, Pike Place is the country’s oldest continuously-operating farmers’ market.…
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In 2019, I was just digging into what would become my fourth historical novel. Set in 19th century Pari’s infamous Salpêtrière asylum, it follows two young women: Josephine, who arrives at the hospital stripped of memory and covered in blood, and Laure, a recovered hysteric who helps Josephine navigate the surreal world she’s now trapped in. It’s a world in which Jean-Martin Charcot, the Salpêtrière’s famous director, not only studies, photographs, and publishes on his traumatized female patients, but hypnotizes them into violent, even sexualized manifestations of their illness, often in front of hundreds of curious spectators. It may sound like the stuff of horror novel…
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I didn’t set out to write a crime novel. I mean, I did. Obviously. A book isn’t the sort of thing that just happens by accident. But I never thought this would be the genre I found a home in. I’ve loved crime fiction ever since a bookseller put a copy of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River into my hands and I learned it is more than just hardboiled cliches and overwrought metaphors describing women’s legs. Crime fiction is a dark mirror, painting the world’s flaws in stark relief. It is a genre of desperation, where the iniquities of civilization drive men and women to the brink. It asks what we are truly capable of when everything is on the line. Its facets reveal the hidden…
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\We do love our special events—birthday parties, weddings, family reunions, and such. These happenings give us a chance to acknowledge important milestones in our lives and celebrate traditions that have brought us together for generations. But what happens when these cherished occasions go wildly off the rails? There’s something quite sinister and devilishly fun when a celebration turns calamitous. Despite all our planning and good intentions, the wild card is always other people, and in our hearts, we all know that nothing is quite as safe and secure as we pretend it to be. In my own domestic suspense novel, THE BLOCK PARTY (On-sale July 18), I explore the secrets and l…
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“There is nothing more dangerous than security” – Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster to Queen Elizabeth I of England In 1988, I read The Last Ship by William Brinkley which centers on a crew of one-hundred-and-fifty-two men and twenty-six women assigned to the U.S.S. Nathan James when nuclear Armageddon breaks loose and the ship’s captain has to find a refuge from the poisonous radiation that is rendering his men sterile and his women without any healthy sperm to start repopulating the earth. It’s a long book, more than six-hundred pages, but I’ve read it at least three more times in the intervening years. As I recall, the book offers no explanation for how or why this fi…
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CALIFORNIA STATE PRISON, LOS ANGELES COUNTY, CALIFORNIA AUGUST 2018 California State Prison, Los Angeles County, is located in the city of Lancaster, roughly eighty miles northeast of the palm tree–lined boulevards of Beverly Hills, but it might as well be eighty million. The prison is an ecosystem unto itself, where over three thousand men live sandwiched between a sunbaked terrain inhospitable to much more than scrub brush and a wide, unforgiving sky. In the early morning hours, when dawn lights up the desert in dusty shades of rose, there’s something almost peaceful about the way the outside world recedes quickly, beyond the fifteen-feet-high, maximum-security-s…
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My cleaner berated me last week: “Why do you leave me with nothing to do?” Yes, readers, the sad truth is that I would rather clean my toilets than write a book. I would possibly find it easier to commit a murder than to write one. If procrastination were an Olympic sport, I would surely be a gold medallist. When I’ve run out of toilets to scrub, I turn to the next best procrastination technique: socializing. I make new friends almost every time I leave the house. Anyone who tells me that they like my books/husband/shirt/etc. is an auto-friend. I strike up chats with the cashier at the check-out counter. The hairdresser doesn’t have to ask me where I’m going on vacation…
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When I was younger and hungry for escape, I was naively surprised to learn that over a third of Americans have never moved away from their hometowns (based on data from 2008, anyway). If you include people who never leave their home state, that percentage jumps to over half of Americans. Time has humbled me – I now live in my husband’s hometown, and increasingly miss my own, many hundreds of miles away. Considering how many people stick close to their hometowns, it’s amazing what a powerful pull the idea of return has on us. The idea of leaving and then coming back, either triumphantly or in disgrace, either out of obligation or nostalgia, is one that has an enduring …
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Let’s say you have a successful series of detective novels, anchored by a core set of well-established characters — a private detective, his wife, and his sidekick — who, in book after book, are threatened by and finally defeat formidable criminal antagonists. This detective is smart, smooth, logical, obsessed with his work, and sometimes troubled by that obsession. His equally smart wife respects his ability and devotion to his work, but keeps pushing for more balance in their life together, more closeness. His sidekick is skeptical of everything and everyone, constantly challenging the detective’s ideas, but he’s always there when the chips are down. The cases that dr…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Liz Nugent, Strange Sally Diamond (Gallery) “Nugent fashions an unforgettable protagonist in Sally, and never loses sight of her characters’ fundamental humanity, even as she piles on twists and steers the narrative into exceptional darkness. Inventive, addictive, and bold, this deserves a wide audience.” –Publishers Weekly Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Doubleday) “Dazzling … a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game … [Whitehead] uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping poin…
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“Whistle!” my friend Mel told me as we pushed our way down the overgrown trail to the beach, surfboards under our arms. “What?” I asked, confused. “To let the snakes know you’re coming,” she said. “So they have time to crawl away.” Unsure if she was joking, I added my unsteady whistle to her piercing one. Minutes later, we were in the ocean, sitting on our surfboards with the blood-warm water lapping around our waists. Before either of us could catch a wave, a jet ski zoomed towards us. “Get out of the water!” the rider shouted. “There’s a shark in your area.” The shark, we later learnt, had attacked a surfer at a nearby beach and the coast guard were following it d…
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In 2019, Meagan Lucas floored me with her debut novel Songbirds and Stray Dogs, a gritty tale of one woman’s fight for survival amidst generational poverty and depravity, written by an author who not only openly embraced the Southern grit lit tradition, but knocked down some of its conventional walls with the authenticity of her female characters. With her sophomore release from Shotgun Honey, Here in the Dark, a collection of sixteen stories rooting her firmly now in the crime fiction world, Lucas’s work is even more startling and more unapologetic. It is, and she is—read on and you’ll see why—absolute fire. Steph Post: I’m going to start with the obvious—and something…
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If there is one truth in this life, it’s this: in Texas, it’s hot as hell in the summer. Scorching, unrelenting, and punishing, summertime calls for icy swimming holes, cold beer, and most of all, scorching thrillers. Lowdown Road by Scott Von Doviak “Pursuit doesn’t get any hotter” is the tagline for Doviak’s latest, masterful white-knuckle suspense, a Dukes of Hazard-esque thrill ride set in the summer of 1974 in which two cousins form a plan to drive a taco truck full of marijuana, stolen, nonetheless, across state lines to where Evil Knievel aims to jump over the Snake River on his motorcycle. The NYTimes recently raved, “with its’ hapless good ol’ boy antiheroes …
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Penned by an unknown hand towards the end of the sixteenth century, Arden of Faversham is the first surviving drama based on an actual domestic murder. From beginning to end, the play’s eighteen scenes are centered around the motive, planning, and execution of an assassination instigated by a wife against her husband. The real-life murder took place on Sunday, February 15, 1550, at seven o’clock in the evening. Thomas Arden was a landowner living in the town of Faversham, county of Kent, England. He was a man in his fifties. His wife, Alice, thirty years younger and described as “tall, and well favoured of shape and countenance,” fell in love with one Thomas Mosby, a …
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When I first wrote about my experience in the Marines as a college student, the work was unreadable. The fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction I produced for my undergraduate workshops scarcely transcended the angry thoughts in my head to amount to more than angry rants on the page. I was upset about my experience in the military, to say the least, especially while serving in Afghanistan. That experience stayed with me because nothing about it had been resolved. I spent seven months in Afghanistan in 2010, but the work that my friends and I did on the deployment seemed to amount to nothing then. In the years after, we struggled to see evidence that it ever would. In a …
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SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich had an idea. It was not an unusual event, for the feared head of Nazi Germany’s Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office, the RSHA) – the umbrella organisation that would run the Hitler regime’s chief organs of terror – was a constantly fertile source of schemes to better control, intimidate and persecute the country’s cowed population. This plan, however, first formulated in Heydrich’s mind shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, was audacious and amoral even by the debased standards set by the man known as ‘Hitler’s hangman’. It was, in the vulgar words of a modern German historian, to ‘fuck for the Führer’…
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In a completely fictional world, characters can be designed to suit your plot. But in my historical fiction (the Hunt & Hooke novels, published by Melville House Publishing) I use real people and real events of the 1670s and 1680s, mixing them with made-up stuff. I’m very lucky that one real person, who happened to live where and when my books are set, was the scandalous, outrageous, and transgressive Ortensio (Hortense) Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin (1646 – 1699). No amount of designing could surpass her. Her father, Baron Lorenzo Mancini, was a Roman aristocrat—the Mancini family traces its lineage back to the time of Romulus—and an astrologer and necromancer, none …
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For almost as long as Hollywood has existed, there have been stories about cursed movie productions. From the freaky weather that threatened to derail The Omen (1976), to the fires that ravaged the sets of The Exorcist (1973), to the tragic deaths of some the Poltergeist (1982) cast, stories of “haunted” films have become legendary. Sometimes, those stories are even more famous than the films themselves. It’s a fantastically Hollywood phenomenon. Tinseltown is, after all, a place where stories come to life, and there’s something tantalizing about the idea that the filmmaking process can summon a kind of magical energy that spills into the real world, reshaping it in its …
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What does home turn into when a stranger steps inside? Have you ever considered yourself a trespasser? In many ways, all of us are. The setting of The Guest Room revolves around the concept of home. The spaces we create for ourselves which at their foundation are meant to be safe – somewhere to retreat, breathe out and do whatever we like away from the eyes of society and the scrutiny of people. My story subverts this, picking apart the nature of a home, and the selves we are within it – how this can be intruded into, both physically and psychologically. The environment my narrator lingers in most is a small London apartment – one of the millions of boxed spaces inside …
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One of the things I love most about thrillers is that the stakes are always so high—never more so than when the mystery or conflict threatens a supposedly sturdy relationship that’s central to the protagonist’s identity. Often, in domestic suspense, that relationship is a marriage, but perhaps there’s even more on the line when it’s a friendship that’s jeopardized. After all, love comes and goes, but friendship is forever. Right? In my latest thriller, Thicker Than Water, Julia and Sienna are not only sisters-in-law, but best friends and business partners, too. They believe that theirs is a perfect, unbreakable bond—until, that is, the man who connects them (husband to o…
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Some readers hate ‘unlikeable characters.’ But I love them. Well, let’s be clear: I love complicated, charismatic, devious, utterly compelling characters. The kind who keep you guessing, keep you flipping the pages, wondering, are you good? Are you bad? Or something in between? Writing my own historical heist, The Housekeepers, was my chance to play with just that sort of duality. My protagonist, Mrs King, is a sharp-witted, cool-headed housekeeper to one of West London’s grandest mansions. We meet her in 1905, an era of big hats and big houses captured in the popular imagination by TV shows like Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs. She’s just been dismissed from her …
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As a kid, I was mesmerized by the eerie tales my grandmother told about ghosts from her childhood in Croatia. My older sisters and friends captivated me with creepy stories when Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board took our slumber parties into séance mode. In dark bathrooms, the neighborhood kids swore that Bloody Mary showed up in the mirror when we chanted her name. I was excited to play along, but I never opened my eyes. Was I afraid of seeing her? Or was I afraid of not seeing her? I didn’t want to encounter a scary ghost, but I did want proof they were real. Profoundly afraid of death, I clung to the belief that when my loved ones died, I’d never really lose them. …
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There’s a vast number of good YA thrillers and horror novels out this year, most using genre tropes as wider metaphors for the human experience, fierce fights against injustice, or lush groundings for romance. There’s also a whole lot of campy slashers and dead influencers….and there can never really be enough of those, can there? Courtney Gould, Where Echoes Die (Wednesday, June 20) Two sisters head to the desert to find the truth behind their mother’s death in this moody, atmospheric detective story. Their journalist mother had been obsessed with a small town with a reputation for miracles—and lost memories. People return over and over again to the unremarkable des…
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Everyone knows that horror novels are meant to be read on a winter’s evening, curled up in the dark while the wind howls and rain drums the windows. We’re supposed to imagine the ghosts breathing down our necks as chill drafts leak through door frames and night descends earlier with each passing day. But I relish the experience of rising dread under the glare of the summer sun. To look up from the page – distressed, wary, pulse racing – and encounter the world in neon reality. I love reading horror in the summer, I love the contrast of being sucked into a dark, spooky story during the bright cheer of a sunny afternoon. Not very Goth of me, I know, but try it for yourself …
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