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 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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Growing up in New England, you learn to worry that you’re not sufficiently of the region. That your roots aren’t deep enough, your attitudes aren’t pure, your accent has been watered down. It has to do with the Puritans, or maybe the Red Sox. Or it comes out of the rocky soil, the rugged coastline. All that doubt and dread and self-interrogation, it yields a proud kind of art, too. The region is known for its literary output: six states, a few hundred years of history, and a disproportionate number of American classics. But it’s not immediately the place that comes to mind when you think about “noir.” For that, we often go to California, New York, or Florida. But almost f…
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As a guy who loves mysteries, thrillers, and horror, my favorite types of books are the ones that crisscross genres, mixing classic thriller stories with supernatural elements that, in my mind, elevate the novel to a whole new level of delicious mayhem. I enjoy those slipstream / cross-genre books so much that when I wrote my debut novel, A Child Alone with Strangers, I specifically wanted to create a book that mashed together all my favorite genres into one gonzo opus. To that end, I thought it would be fun to share ten of my favorite novels that meld supernatural horror with awesome mysteries and breakneck thrillers. Ready? Buckled in? Good. Let’s do it. Ronald Ma…
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I have described my new novel Lowdown Road (out July 11 from Hard Case Crime) as the ‘70s drive-in movie playing in my mind. In telling the story of cousins Chuck and Dean Melville and their ill-fated marijuana run from Texas to Evel Knievel’s Snake River Canyon event, I draw on a deep well of Americana from the not-so-distant past. For those too young to remember, there was a time before movies lived on streaming services following a fleeting theatrical release (or none at all). In the early ‘70s, the theater was the only place to see a movie until it turned up on television years later. Films would hang around for months in their first run, and many would resurface lat…
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There’s a region touching on three areas of fiction that I like to explore when writing. It’s the region where mystery story meets horror story meets psychological thriller. You can play with a lot of ambiguity in this zone. Does an odd and creepy situation connected to a crime have a rational explanation, or will the final revelation involve the supernatural? If the narrative is told in the first person, how reliable is the narrator? How much of what we are told is supposed to be real and how much has been distorted, if not outright imagined, by this central character? My new novel, The Screaming Child, is a first-person tale told by a woman trying to go on with her life…
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It is not the greatest moment in Hitchcock’s Suspicion but it’s a good one: when Joan Fontaine fends off Cary Grant as their car skirts dangerously close to the edge of a cliff. We watch in horror to see what happens next. That deadly stretch of road with its jagged drop to the sea, the reckless speed at which Johnnie is driving and Lina’s terrified conviction that he is a killer add up nicely enough on their own, without our suspicion that Hitch was rooting for an ending where Johnnie pushes her out. Suspicion is based on Before the Fact, an English novel by Anthony Berkeley Cox writing under the pen name Francis Iles. The novel has an ending far closer to Hitchcock’s …
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“Wherever there is human nature, there is drama.” –Hercule Poirot in “The King of Clubs,” by Agatha Christie I often think of murder mysteries and magic tricks as complementary art forms. Both feature a “performer” attempting to bamboozle an audience via elaborate methods of good-natured deception. That has been my underlying principle when writing my first two books, Death and the Conjuror and The Murder Wheel. In fact, The Murder Wheel is mainly set backstage in a fictional London theatre – the Pomegranate. I love the theatre in all its myriad forms, from the classical to the commercial to the experimental, so I suppose you could say it’s my second great passion (afte…
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There’s this family I used to babysit for who lived in the hills overlooking the lowly riff raff of greater Los Angeles. Their pride and joy was a pint-sized poodle ironically named Yeti. The kids were terrified Yeti would be devoured by a mountain lion after seeing a video of P-22 (RIP), so the parents bought him this (literal) suit of spiky armor that he had to wear whenever we let him outside after dark. He looked like a Muppet who’d been smuggled onto the set of a Mad Max movie, and he was the bravest little idiot I’d ever seen. It was like he knew he was wearing this deathproof vest and could do whatever he damn well pleased. One night, he scared away a raccoon three…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Lee Burke, Flags on the Bayou (Atlantic Monthly Press) “[An] outstanding thriller . . . Burke stitches plot threads and historical details with ease, weaving it all into an urgent, propulsive story steeped in his deep personal connections to Louisiana. This is masterful.” –Publishers Weekly Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast (Viking) “This atmospheric heist thriller…proves that genre readers really can have it all: terrific characterization, an intricate plot, and stylish writing to boot . . . Murphy’s spare, polished prose carries a touch of Elmore Leonard and a whisper of Ern…
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