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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Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by stories about nomadic people, or those who are otherwise living off the beaten path: grifters, circus performers, con artists. If the character is doing life in a nonconformist, unstructured way, I want to read about it. I don’t think my interest is unusual; just look at the performance of books like On the Road; Eat, Pray, Love; and Wild. We love to believe that it’s possible for the most normcore among us to get off this hamster wheel and fling themselves into the great unknown. Like Frodo exiting the Shire, we envision ourselves unencumbered by the shackles of our 9-5s—our mortgages—our monthly expenses—the need to make dinner…
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Maybe I was influenced a little too much by Indiana Jones as a kid, or perhaps a childhood growing up finding arrowheads and fossils on the flat alluvial soil of the Midwest seared my imagination with a love of excavation, but whatever the cause, one of my favorite plot devices is the discovery of an ancient relic or artifact. It can be an object, something buried away for centuries that has repercussions in the contemporary world. It can be information that has been withheld, usually purposely, but once discovered drastically alters the characters’ perceptions. It can be a virus or contagion, bottled up and then released like a genie from a bottle. Or it can be a valuab…
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Female friendships can be complicated—just like the women in them. My own best friend and I have been through it all. The ups: laughing so hard our sides hurt about jokes from years before; confessing our deepest secrets; crying on each other’s shoulders. The downs: growing apart during university; awkward catch-ups via messages on birthdays that sometimes went unanswered; getting into stupid arguments and simmering about them for far too long. But I know I can call her anytime, and she’ll be there. Crime novels magnify female friendships, taking them in directions that might shock or appall readers—perhaps because the characters are all too familiar. Whether readers have…
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From the moment I sold my first thriller, I’ve been acutely aware of genre. I’m not alone. The explosion of the psychological thriller in the wake of Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster Gone Girl created a wide lane for crime writers to steer into. Twisty twists and unreliable narrators became our calling cards, and book concepts were shaped to fit the mold. I owe my career to genre boundaries, so I was not about to start a rebellion. In 2015, I was on the brink of quitting the business. I had been writing novels for a long time – long enough to get the message from the Universe that it just wasn’t going to happen. I was a divorced mom, co-parenting three children, managing a ho…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Chris Offutt, Code of the Hills (Grove) “Excellent Kentucky noir—Offutt’s third Mick Hardin novel is the best yet . . . Offutt once again beautifully captures both the roughness and the generosity of the inhabitants of Rocksalt, both the menace and the beauty of the eastern Kentucky landscape.” –Kirkus Reviews Wendy Walker, What Remains (Blackstone) Thoroughly enjoyable from the first page to the shocking conclusion, Wendy Walker’s What Remains is an addictive, immersive, propulsive thriller. Not only is Walker at the top of her game, she is absolutely one of the genre’s best.” …
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Twenty-one years ago. That’s when Craig Clevenger’s debut novel, The Contortionist’s Handbook, came out. That’s when I read it. The book, about a young forger constantly reinventing himself to avoid the authorities—which, if you’re into labels, you could call neo-noir—was like a bolt of lightning in my hands. Stark and gritty, thoughtful and ever so carefully-crafted. If I had to make a little pile of books that pushed me to knuckle down and make a career as a writer, Handbook would hold a place of esteem near the top. A short time after I read it, I wrote Clevenger—just tracked down his e-mail somewhere—and asked him if he had any advice for an up-and-comer. He came ba…
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Liz Lawson and Kathleen Glasgow are the authors of TheNew York Times bestselling murder mystery series The Agathas and The Night in Question. The Agathas follows two messy teenage girls in a small seaside town, who team up to solve the disappearance of the richest girl in their high school. The sequel, The Night in Question, releases on May 30, and this time, our detectives are investigating a deadly dance and the death of a Hollywood starlet. Kathleen: Liz, we’re here today to talk about partners in crime. Specifically, those characters that team up to solve dastardly deeds and leave mayhem in their wake. You and I are doing this on Facetime and I just noticed you’re fi…
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It was 1962, I was in fourth grade, and my teacher Miss Houghton was not the nurturing type. She would sit behind her desk, glaring at her class of ten-year-olds with contempt and disdain. When she was particularly annoyed, she’d throw a pint-sized statue of the Empire State Building against the wall. Every morning when we came into class there was a name chalked on the blackboard, with the words See Me beside it. After class the designated target would have to go “see” her and be told off in front of everyone for inattention or tardiness or whatever sin they had committed. One day our homework assignment was to write a story—on any topic. I decided to write about a Ru…
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June brings with an incredible array of psychological thrillers and novels of suspense, with plenty of horror cross-overs and some delightful summer beach reads. Whether you want to take down the villain, root for the villain, or simply escape the villain with stolen diamonds intact, there’s a book below for you! C. J. Leede, Maeve Fly (Tor Nightfire) For all those who stan the creepy girls/learned the Wednesday dance, Maeve Fly is a delicious, disturbing treat. Leede’s very-much-antiheroine is a Disney princess by day (one of the Frozen sisters, which makes it even funnier), and a serial killer by night. She has a best friend, a grandmother who understands her, and …
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Not long ago I was contacted by a businessman named John Kleinheinz. He’d read my novels, and he had a story he wanted to tell me about his life. It was a little time-sensitive, he said, because he’d just become the last living person who knew this particular story. His former business partner has just been killed in a helicopter crash under suspicious circumstances. Of course, helicopters crash a lot, relative to other forms of aerial transportation. If an airplane loses power, the wings still provide lift. Not so in a helicopter. In a helicopter, the second the rotor goes off, you fall like a rock—there’s absolutely nothing keeping you in the air. And because a helicop…
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Mom-friends. If you are a woman with children, then you’ve probably found yourself in this particular kind of circumstantial friendship. Would you be friends were it not for the same baby-and-me schedule during those long, tedious infant months? Or if your children hadn’t started school at the same year in the same neighborhood, each of them wailing at the drop-off gate for the first three weeks of school? Perhaps not, but this is what makes mom-friends such interesting territory for (cynical) domestic suspense writers like me: these new friendships can look like lifelines on the surface, but underneath there is just enough room to plant the toxicities we love best—lies! …
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I wrote much of my new novel, Relentless Melt, during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. My partner was in another city and I spent a lot of hours alone in my apartment, grappling with the manuscript and making weird art with some remote collaborators. I’ve always used music as a backdrop while writing, but it was even more crucial during this drafting period, bringing vitality and creativity to what would otherwise have been very quiet months. My new novel is set in 1909 Boston—but, to me, its “soundtrack” is not era-appropriate ragtime music or popular marches: rather, it is best accompanied by longform ambient tracks or noisy electronic music. The novel involves magicia…
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Thursday night festivities were just beginning to wind down when Tinsel pushed her way through the front door of The Fitzroy Pinnacle. There was a tuckshop window that provided a view into the beer garden out the back and as she’d passed it, she’d seen that even there amongst the fairy lights and creeping vines, the crowd had dissipated. “Babbbbbbe!” her favourite bartender Gee yelled as they spotted her. “I was just about to turn off the frozen margarita machine but could sense in my waters you were around the corner.” The greeting did a lot to ease the discomfort that had been steadily growing until she’d stepped over that threshold. A spicy frozen marg would do even …
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Cardiologist Doug “D.P.” Lyle kept telling himself he would write a novel someday—someday when he finally retired. His biggest problem was he loved his career and had no plans to retire. Was this just an excuse not to write? He finally asked himself the age-old cliché: “If not now, when?” Now finally won out when he was about to turn 50 and “someday” became his second career. He wrote. And wrote. For ten years he wrote, enduring 27 drafts. Finally, he completed his novel Stress Fracture. It was his first professionally published novel, although he’d self-published an earlier one. He’d also had several non-fiction books published on forensics topics for writers—he is a do…
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Set largely during covid lockdown, Sing Her Down introduces Florida, recently released from prison due to issues with overcrowding, thus finding herself with a second chance at life. Pursued by a woman named Dios, also recently released from the same prison, Florida has to reckon with her own past and what the future might hold in a world that seems to be on fire, the pandemic only intensifying the sense of desperation that permeates Florida’s world. Florida skips parole and travels out of state to find her most prized possession, a car she left behind when she was locked away—only Dios, and Florida’s own true nature, can’t seem to leave Florida alone. Sing Her Down pr…
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The 1920s was a decade of strict social hierarchies, with huge divides between wealthy elites and poor workers, bias against immigrants, racial segregation, and laws against homosexual activity. But the free-for-all nightlife of the Jazz Age was built around embracing everything naughty, illegal, and new. This meant that at night, many of those strict hierarchies came toppling down. Prohibition was created by the Eighteenth Amendment, and it ended the nationwide production, import, transport, and sale of alcoholic beverages… in theory. In reality, it was easier to get a drink during Prohibition than it was after. When liquor was illegal, it was unregulated, and speakeas…
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The appeal of the procedural is built upon a simple human desire: we love to solve problems, and we love to watch others solve them. Even better when solving a problem feels like revealing a hidden connection beneath the skin of the world. In a class I teach on the procedural genre, we start with Poe and Doyle and Collins and Sayers and work our way to Mosley and French. We watch the Spielberg-directed pilot episode of Columbo, which is (apologies for the fifty-year-old spoiler) about a murderous mystery novelist. We watch the crass pilot of Law & Order: SVU, studded with homophobia and transphobia, and then we read Carmen Maria Machado’s hallucinatory novella “Espec…
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Die Hard had started with a man named Roderick going to see a movie in 1975. Novelist Roderick Thorp, a burly, bald former private investigator best known for his novel The Detective, bought a ticket for The Towering Inferno, sat through 165 minutes of Paul Newman and Steve McQueen trying to save a large ensemble cast of tanned celebrities, and then went home and had a horrific nightmare. Just as the image of a Terminator rising from flames first came to James Cameron in a bad dream, so Thorpe that night imagined a lone figure trapped in a high-rise, fleeing men with guns. He expanded the image into a 1979 sequel to The Detective, Nothing Lasts Forever, in which a reti…
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The original opening credits of “Lou Grant,” the late-1970s, early 1980s TV series about the newspaper business, are of a particular time but also timeless. The credits montage for the first season shows a bird sitting in a tree, trees being chopped down and turned into newsprint, the reporters and editors of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune gathering news and writing stories, rolled-up newspapers being thrown into puddles and onto roofs and, finally, the newspaper being used to line the floor of a birdcage. The life of a newspaper – and a newsroom, for that matter – is very different now than in 1977. To be sure, print editions are still produced and delivered, some…
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There are several reasons why corporations and/or billionaire CEOs make such good villains in works of fiction. First, all mysteries and thrillers need a power imbalance favoring the bad guy. Second, because in real life, we keep seeing tech titans do reprehensible, insane and/or criminal things. And third, as Arthur C. Clarke told us, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Let me take on that last one first: High tech corporations do stuff that, to a guy like me with a bachelor of arts degree in political science, is simply arcane. I read articles about, or ads for, Silicon Forest juggernauts and realize: I don’t know what any of those n…
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Horses are highly sensitive herd animals and as such, they reflect the emotions of those around them—including their human partners. To quote my latest novel, Girls and their Horses, “Horses are like mirrors. They reflect all the best parts and all worst parts of ourselves back at us.” Horses in fiction are often used to echo the qualities of their human counterparts. They also inspire fast-paced, passionate stories of determination. Horses are often used to represent deeper emotional struggles or iron will. While perhaps not strictly thrillers, the following stories are fast-paced, thrilling and filled with twists. Dark Horses by Susan Mihalic \Dark Horses tells the…
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It’s the not knowing, really, Isn’t it?. When we read mysteries and thrillers centered around solving a murder, we know the person is dead… but a missing persons case opens up a slew of psychological aspects to explore. There is no closure in cases of people disappearing. There is never an ability to mourn and move on because there is still a lingering flicker of hope. A character holding onto hope and simultaneously torturing themselves with endless possible worst-case scenarios is what really draws us into missing persons stories and what makes us resonate with them–empathize with the pain and grief of the family. Not only can we deeply sympathize with the character se…
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Janice drove slowly to avoid jostling the plastic containers of food on the floor behind her seat. She had better ones at home, but her father was likely to use them for storing nuts and bolts. She brought him food twice a week and resented it—the cooking, the drive, the awkward struggle for a topic other than weather or his cars. It was a matter of proximity. Janice was the oldest of his four adult kids and the only one who lived close. She often wished he’d died before her mother. With his wife gone he’d turned useless and low. Nothing engaged him but working on cars and taking care of his chickens. At the turnoff for his holler, she tried to straddle the mud holes, an…
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I was born into a second-floor flat on the Lagos mainland. It was the kind of flat with a living room that blurred into pale muslins of smoke whenever we forgot to shut the kitchen door before turning on the cooker. Outside the flat’s door, stray dogs and cocks bathed in the afternoon heat and rangy cats maundered through refuse for abandoned ponmo. In the mornings, I would rush out the flat to buy powdered milk and butter mints on credit from far mallam, a tall smiling Hausa man whose corrugated metal kiosk flanked our building. In the evenings, I would stand by my bedroom’s louvers to watch the neighbors perform ablution outside the estate’s mosque, a sea of plastic ket…
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I wish I was the kind of person who could live happily in all kinds of places. Don’t get me wrong; I love to travel, and I’ve lived in most regions of the country at one time or another, from Washington, DC to the Central Coast of California, to Missouri and northern Michigan. There were things I liked about each of the cities and small towns I briefly called home, but I couldn’t see myself settling permanently in any of them, and after a while I figured out why: I’m a Southerner. This is partly background, partly temperament. My father’s family settled in Virginia in the mid-nineteenth century, and I feel in a way that’s hard to put into words that the Blue Ridge Mounta…
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