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 are few people in the history of organized labor in America who are as infamous as Jimmy Hoffa. He rose from poverty to become the president of the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters (IBT or just the Teamsters) and helped expand it into one of the most powerful unions in the world. Hoffa rubbed shoulders with gangsters, fought bitterly with Robert F. Kennedy, got convicted of jury tampering and other crimes in 1967, and promised to take back control of the Teamsters after his controversial release from prison in 1971 before he mysteriously vanished in 1975. His disappearance, as well as the fact that his body was never found, continues to fascinate people. …
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The late Cormac McCarthy, widely regarded as the literary heir to Herman Melville and William Faulkner, a traditionalist in a sea of deconstructionists, had a flair for violence. Sometimes he boiled everything down to the brutal essentials. From his novel “No Country for Old Men”: “Chigurh stepped into the doorway and shot him in the throat with a load of number ten shot. The size collectors use to take bird specimens. The man fell back through his swivel-chair knocking it over and went to the floor and lay there twitching and gurgling. Chigurh picked up the smoking shotgun shell from the carpet and put it in his pocket and walked into the room with the pale smoke still…
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As a young child, my favorite activity involved going into my make-believe laboratory (a.k.a. the bathroom) and experimenting with powerful potions (empty shampoo bottles and such filled with water and soap). My big sister and I had a game we never spoke of. She would stand outside the door I’d left ajar and spy on me. I would stage-whisper to myself, “This will kill her, and she won’t even know how I did it!” A few years later, I got hooked on comic books. One that blew my mind was a mega-sized anthology of classic horror stories. It was printed like a comic book, but definitely foreshadowed what would later be known as graphic novels. It included comic book versions of…
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What is it about being alone in the woods that’s so frightening? Is it a fear of predators, disorientation, or a sense of vulnerability? What about the inability to call for help or a fear of the unknown? Or, what if the most pulse-pounding element is simply your imagination, feeding off a lifetime of consuming thrillers set in the deep, dark woods? Growing up, I spent my summers at a lakeside cabin situated a few miles down a narrow dirt road. Once the car bounced off the pavement onto the gravel and houses gave way to a dense forest, it felt as if I entered a different world. I relished the campfire tales and late-night walks to the pitch-black cemetery situated unsett…
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Three months ago, I put together a list of the 19 scruffiest detectives in crime film and TV. I wrote in that list that “[t]he scruffy detective is one of the purest, most persistent tropes in the crime genre” and that is true. But such is also the case for the suave, polished detective! Crime fiction contains multitudes, what can I say? The gentleman sleuth character is deeply entrenched in the genre, going back to the 19th century. The archetype flourished during the Golden Age of detective fiction at the start of the 20th century, giving us countless well-heeled, refined sleuths ripe for adaptation to television and film. As I did with this list’s rumpled-focused com…
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The Savage History of Proofrock, Idaho opens looking through the two eyeholes of a mask, and of course there’s some heavy, menacing breathing. What those eyeholes are fixed on from behind the bushes is a ten-year-old kid. It’s nighttime, well after midnight, and the kid’s sitting in a barely moving swing at Founders Park. It’s where the old staging area for Terra Nova used to be, eight years ago. The kid’s head is down so his face is hidden. He could be dead, posed there, his hands wired to the swing’s galvanized chains, but then a thin breath comes up white and frosted, and he starts to look up, eyes first. Before his face comes into focus, The Savage History of Proof…
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The whole doctor-patient confidentiality except in the case of crimes committed and threatened makes mobsters going to therapy a difficult needle to thread. If the point of therapy is to open up without reservations, having to sidestep the emotional fallout of murdering someone makes the whole approach less than ideal. Yet, that very concept of mobsters seeking psychological treatment turns out to be the foundation of not one but two major releases from 1999: the pilot and first season of the television show The Sopranos and the movie Analyze This. The Sopranos aired its pilot on HBO on January 10, while Analyze This debuted in theaters later that year on March 5. Both p…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best first novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant (Knopf) I just got my advance copy of Clémence Michallon’s much-anticipated new novel and I *can* confirm that it’s worth the hype!! It is a beautifully and thoughtfully written book with a pitch-perfect premise, about a man named Aidan, who, after he loses his wife, must downsize. He must move to a new, smaller home with his teenage daughter… and the woman he’s secretly had captive on his property for five years. He is a serial killer, and she is the one woman he has ever spared. Narrated by the three women in his life—his dau…
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When I first learned that “Liv Constantine” was the co-writing name of two sisters, Lynne Constantine and Valerie Rees, I was immediately fascinated. How did they do it, I wondered? We tend to think of the writing process as a necessarily solitary activity, so how could you share that task with someone else? Would it be fun or frustrating, productive or tedious to collaborate with another writer, especially a family member? I couldn’t wait to talk to them about it, and when I saw that their new novel, The Senator’s Wife, was out this spring, I jumped at the chance. I read The Senator’s Wife in one sitting. I’ve always been fascinated by the private lives of D.C. power …
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Clémence Michallon is an award-winning French journalist, a dog owner, a New Yorker, and a Sopranos convert/superfan. Her US debut, The Quiet Tenant, which comes out this June from Knopf, is poised to be a major summer blockbuster. The book has been sold in over thirty territories and is garnering comparisons to another famous captivity novel—Room by Emma Donoghue. The Quiet Tenant takes place in upstate New York and tells the story of three women affected by an active serial killer, Aidan Thomas. At the start of the novel, Aidan’s wife dies, and he is forced to move “Rachel,” the captive in his shed, into his new home. Suddenly, Aidan’s two identities—family man and mo…
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The first time I met Wanda Morris, we talked, in depth, about body odor. I won’t go into the details, but it was the sort of conversation that sticks with you. The same is true of Wanda. She’s a bestselling author, a lawyer, and a mother of three. Wanda’s stories mirror her life. They’re infectious and down to earth. Above all, they’re real. Readers and critics agree. Wanda’s work has won numerous awards. She’s received praise from every major media outlet. And, if that weren’t enough, her first novel All Her Little Secrets was recently optioned for a limited series starring Emmy-award winning actress Uzo Aduba. Needless to say, I was thrilled to talk shop with Wan…
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There’s a scene in the 2019 movie Captain Marvel where Brie Larson’s character crashes to Earth in 1995, falling through the roof of a Blockbuster video store. She walks through the dimly lit aisles of VHS tapes, before getting startled by, and blowing up, a cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger advertising the 1994 movie True Lies. Captain Marvel is full of nostalgic relics—troll dolls, a payphone in front of a Radio Shack, and songs from No Doubt, Garbage, and TLC. As someone born in 1985, it conjured visceral memories of Friday evenings, walking through Blockbuster, clutching the plastic VHS cases and trying unsuccessfully to get my parents to buy some of the over…
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There’s just something about the Gulf Coast region that invites gritty crime stories. From Dennis Lehane’s Joe Coughlin stories to the work of Carl Hiaasen to Nic Pizzolatto’s Galveston (not to mention the absorbing first season of Pizzolatto’s True Detective), there are many popular examples of hardboiled and noir stories in particular that revel in griminess of the Gulf’s swampy settings and rotten milieus. As someone who grew up on the Gulf, I can understand how the region became so strongly linked with the bleakness of noir. My hometown was a grim, two-faced place: if you wandered a few blocks past the short stretch of road along the waterfront that sold driftwood c…
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With the collapse of communism in the Soviet satellite states in 1989 and in Russia in the early 1990s, the transition to various types of capitalist democracies began. This transition proceeded at a different pace in each country, and to various degrees of completion, but most shared two uncanny facts: an obscene degree of corruption and the sudden appearance of immensely rich oligarchs. Oligarch is a term most used to refer to a person whose wealth resulted from his/her relationship with the ruling party or leader. The common image created by many articles on the rise of these oligarchs is that of savvy individuals “fooling” or “taking over” weak, ineffectual governmen…
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I stood there like a waiter left hoping for a tip. “I was actually hoping to speak to you a minute, Mr. Danby.” He was slow to turn. “’Bout what?” “I’m looking for work.” “Ain’t got any, pal. Sorry.” “You sure? I’m probably better than any guy you got right now.” “A steam tramper from Duluth? Shit, pal, you probably ain’t better than my sister.” The giant that came in with Danby slapped the table so hard the bottles jumped and clinked. The kid had spittle running down his chin. I waited until they were done laughing and said, “I don’t know your sister, Mr. Danby, so I can’t comment on that. When I said I was probably better than any man you got, I was looking at wh…
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I’m so, so, excited to present the conversation below to y’all. I’ve been a huge fan of Grady Hendrix and Riley Sager for years, both as great writers and great genre thinkers (they are also in that rarified category of “men who write women well”), and the conversation below proves that these two are some of the best, and funniest, folks around. Grady Hendrix’s latest novel, How to Sell a Haunted House, was released in January, and Riley Sager’s new novel, The Only One Left, releases today. The following discussion delves into horror, thrillers, 1980s paperbacks, and so much more. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads senior editor Grady Hendrix: Let’s start out with questions neith…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Wolff, The Man in the Corduroy Suit (Bitter Lemon) “A memorable voice in the genre, Wolff’s prose, all sharp edges and abrupt surprises, keeping the reader in a state of edgy discomfort.” –New York Times Riley Sager, The Only One Left (Dutton) “Perennial thriller favorite Riley Sager is back with another page-turner this summer, this one riffing on one of America’s most famous and most notorious true crime cases. . . . The kind of book you’ll stay up late into the night trying to finish.” –Paste Magazine Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant (Knopf) “A gripping psycho…
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There’s a scene in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 film Unforgiven where a kid named Schofield has just killed a man for the first time, and he’s obviously distraught. He’s trying to rationalize what he’s just done, and how this man will never walk or breathe or love again. Finally, he takes a swig of booze and mutters, “Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.” Clint Eastwood’s character, Will Munny, stares off in the distance and says, more to himself than the kid, “We all got it coming, kid.” It’s a poignant line and is a response to the moralistic good vs. evil westerns that dominated the early days of film to a more cynical and complicated world view. More than providing histor…
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If you’ve ever been stuck on a bad date, you might have found yourself looking at your watch and considering if there’s any way you can escape through the bathroom window. As a single man, I became slightly addicted to dating. I downloaded every app going and went on literally hundreds of dates. And while I never had to squeeze through any bathroom windows, or slip through any fire escapes, I did have my fair share of close calls. I spent many, many hours conducting small talk over a game of mini-golf, or trying to flirt while badly salsa dancing – and even getting brutally dismembered at an improvisational murder mystery theatrical experience. It was there, gurgling o…
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When I was watching Asteroid City, the new film from Wes Anderson, I kept thinking of a line from The Fabelmans, the Steven Spielberg movie that came out last year: “in our family, it’s the scientists versus the artists.” Asteroid City is a film about a group of strangers in September 1955 who all wind up in a desert town made famous by an ancient asteroid impact, now populated with scientists doing astronomical research and atomic bomb testing. It had seemed, from the advertisements, that Asteroid City would be Wes Anderson’s first sci-fi movie, and it is, but it’s also more a film exploring the relationship between science and art—the shared investments of scientists an…
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Whether you spend the summer lounging at the pool, hopping on a plane, or sweating it out on the train as you slog through your daily commute, you require a good book as temperatures climb. These historical mysteries are the perfect accompaniment to anything from blazing mornings to sultry summer nights, and all will draw you into mysteries even hotter than the temperature. The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray This Austen-meets-Christie imagining of the circumstances surrounding one of the most reviled of Austen’s character’s murders is a top pick for summer. A summer house party is a classic setting, not to mention we get plenty of nostalgia as we revisit not on…
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Alas, there are only four works in translation that I could find for June that counted as crime fiction, but what crime novels they are! It’s a great batch of mystery, noir, and suspense below, with meddling kids in China, mysterious housekeepers in Sweden, murderous mourners in Japan, and vengeful sisters in Brazil. Zijin Chen, Bad Kids Translated by Michelle Deeter (Pushkin Press) Bad Kids is about all kinds of morally compromised people, of all ages. When three teens come across the footage of a middle aged man’s murder of his in-laws, they decide to blackmail him. They’re also understandably worried about retribution for some of their own acts, and it’s a toss-u…
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When my husband and I lived in British Columbia, we used any and every opportunity to get outdoors. After trying life in suburbia, we opted to rent an old farmhouse (built in the late 1800s) on the bluffs above the Fraser River. We had a gorgeous view of Mount Baker from our front yard, and a babbling brook in the back. Sometimes, packs of coyotes would roam through the property late at night, howling at the moon and rattling the original, time-warped windows in the kitchen. I was grateful that our bedroom was on the second floor on those dark nights, but secretly feared that coyotes were surely smart enough to climb stairs if the windows ever shattered like I feared they…
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It’s been a really great year for new books coming out from Latine authors (including authors based in the United States and writers from across Latin America, because borders aren’t real anyway so why divide everyone up), so I decided to highlight a few of the many new titles hitting shelves this year. Below, you’ll find a mix of horror, noir, psychological thrillers, and historical mysteries, as well as a blend of new and established voices. This article is not pegged to a particular heritage date or holiday, because we shouldn’t need an excuse to read diverse books. Juan Martinez, Extended Stay (University of Arizona Press) El Norte meets Barton Fink in this hotel…
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Nicole Kotsianas was a Garden State girl, born and bred. “Jersey through and through,” she told anyone who asked, as if it wasn’t already abundantly clear. In high school, she drove a dirty white 1990 Buick Century her grandfather had given her, with cowskin interiors and the fuzzy dice—the “Buey Beast.” Her hairstyle, complete with bangs, harked back to her days as a teenager holding a lighter aloft for Bruce Springsteen, who had attended her same school. When, as an adult, she finally made it out to Los Angeles, she wandered down to the Venice boardwalk and strolled past head shops and haunted houses and didgeridoo-playing Rastafarians. It reminded her of the Jersey sho…
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