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 don’t know why the 1993 thriller movie The Fugitive sets one of its most dramatic chase sequences in and around Chicago’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade. Probably just because it’s cool, it’s a cool scene, there’s nothing more to it than that. I do think it might be over-reading to suggest there’s some sort of allegorical connection between the story of Dr. Richard Kimble, the falsely-accused prison escapee hunting for his wife’s murderer, and the story of Saint Pádraig, the fifth-century Christian bishop who turned walking sticks into trees and fixed Ireland’s alleged snake problem. (And who was probably a fraud on the pest-control front, honestly, since there were zero sn…
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Just west of Holcomb, Kansas, on the lonesome wheat plains In Cold Blood begins with, stands the world’s largest slaughterhouse. It was the first thing Bonnie and I found when we went looking for the Clutter farm, on a June day so hot it felt like we were being ironed. Earlier, in Albuquerque, I’d typed Holcomb into my phone, and the directions led us here. If the Tyson plant had existed when Capote came to Kansas, his book would probably start with the abattoir at the edge of town. Subtlety was not his strong point. I stopped the car at the gates of the facility, where signs prohibited trespassing. The building ahead was long and beige and bland, as if designed to hide …
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In my debut thriller, Firekeeper’s Daughter, 18-year-old Daunis witnesses a murder and must use her knowledge of chemistry, traditional Ojibwe medicines, and even hockey to find out who is behind a series of drug-related deaths on her Indian reservation. I don’t shy away from telling a darkly realistic coming-of-age story. But I also include comic moments that are also every bit as real on my reservation. A great grandmother named Granny June who, upon seeing a graffitied billboard—one letter changed to read: VOTE! It’s your tribal eRection—dryly remarks, “I’d vote for that.” I lived and worked for many years in my tribal community in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. One of m…
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Sibling relationships are the stuff of gothic novels. When characters have grown up together from childhood, breathing the same familial atmosphere and inheriting the same assumptions about life, there is always going to be potential for intensity and intrigue. The intimate bond that sisters and brothers share may be a blessing or a curse, but either way it is inescapable. In my own novel, The Whispering House, the central sibling relationship is fraught with anger and guilt, but the protagonist, Freya, cannot move on with her own life until the mystery of her sister’s death is resolved. The gothic novels I’ve chosen here explore the deepest darkest possibilities of sibl…
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Although their partnership had lasted only ten months, Gurney knew more about the personal life of Mike Morgan than that of anyone else he’d worked with in his twenty-five years in the NYPD. From the day he was assigned to replace Gurney’s retiring partner in the homicide division, Morgan had treated him as a confidant—with the result that Gurney had learned more than he wanted to know about the man’s longing for approval from his revered cop father, his reckless relationships with women, his waves of paranoia. He’d also witnessed Morgan’s obsession with superficial orderliness, especially punctuality. So it was no surprise when, at exactly 3:59 p.m., a black Chevy Tahoe…
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I can’t remember when I first heard of Mike Hodges’s seminal 1971 British gangster film, Get Carter, but it was long before I finally managed to see it late one night on cable television in a hotel in Prague in the late 1990s. And it was several more years until I was able to track down a copy of the then relatively rare source novel of the film, Ted Lewis’s Jack’s Return Home, published in 1970. Until the last half decade or so, Get Carter as the book would subsequently be retitled and how it will be referred to it in this piece, along with Lewis’s eight other novels, were all out of print and little known. This is despite the praise heaped on them by luminaries such …
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Psychopaths lie, manipulate and they kill. We’re unlikely to invite them into our homes and offer them a seat at the dinner table. Our families are unlikely to be jumping up and down and planning their wedding outfits if we announced our engagement to a Hannibal Lecter wannabe. We indulge in True Crime documentaries and the serial killer memes are rife on our social media timelines. Psychopaths are everywhere. They infiltrate every moment of our lives. Our demand for the psychopath’s story on our tv screens, bookshelves and group chats shows no signs of abating. Psychologists have given our love for psychopaths a name. Hybistrophilia is a sexual interest in and attractio…
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Let’s face it. Growing up isn’t easy even in the best of circumstances. And whose circumstances are ever truly ideal? Maturing under the intense pressures of the world around us is challenging enough. But what if the things that fill us with dread and fear when we’re young become the stuff of real-life nightmares? What if we harbor guilty secrets that follow us into adulthood? The books that spoke to me during my own fraught, complicated journey of adolescence were always tales of mysteries and psychological suspense (I still love this genre). Stories about kids like me, or somewhat like me, maturing under extraordinary conditions really resonated. I would read far into …
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Monday. Nineteen hours in the dark. The dead man lived up the hill. We could have walked, if the world wasn’t ending and we didn’t have to bring him back. But it was and we did, so Harkless and I suited up and went out to the parking lot. As we exited the building a stunning fist of heat descended on us. The nearest wildfire was thirty miles away. Gritty sky and roaring air gave the illusion it was right over the ridge, climbing fast. The apocalypse smells like a campfire and glimmers gold. Through fierce raking wind we hurried to the body van, got in, and slammed the doors. Above his respirator mask Harkless kept blinking. “God.” He pulled the mask down over his ch…
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Sascha Rothchild has worked on some of our favorite shows in the (now virtual) office, including GLOW and The Bold Type, so it’s no surprise that when I was given an advanced reading copy of her debut thriller, Blood Sugar, I devoured it (despite the book’s rather effective message of self-care and restraint). Sascha Rothchild was kind enough to answer a few questions about the book and its absurdly charming killer. Scroll down to see an exclusive cover reveal. Blood Sugar will be published in April of 2022. MOLLY ODINTZ: So, one of my coworkers is a type 1 diabetic, and I was recommending this to her as “diabetes noir”—can you talk about the use of diabetes in the stor…
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In 1969, Sam Melville and an activist group known as “the Crazies” conspired to bomb the Federal Office Building in downtown New York. He was later serving in Attica Prison during the uprisings, when he was shot and killed. His son, Joshua Melville, is the author of the new book, American Time Bomb, Attica, Sam Melville, and a Son’s Search for Answers. The following is an excerpt from that book. ___________________________________ The Sharon Krebs and Pat Swinton I met in mid-1988 looked nothing like the pictures of them I had found in archives at the Donnell Library. The one of Sharon was originally published in an underground newspaper and showed her walking naked; he…
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Of the many triumphs of feminism, and often-cited benefit of women’s equality is the goal of equal participation in the job market. We are able to benefit far more than previous generations from women’s job skills being taken seriously, and there are more working mothers than ever before. And yet maternity leaves, like real wages, or salaries for women of color, or job security for laboring women who are also about to be in labor, remain far behind the glowing promises of the 1970s (or the 1920s, if you go with Soviet promises). Despite the wide variety in length of leaves available across the world, from the average three months of the United States to the year-long lea…
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You’ve got your large Coca-Cola in the cupholder affixed to the chair and your bucket of popcorn overflows into your lap. The lights go down and the movie begins. Cue the hero: some grizzled ex-special forces vet or former assassin with an ax to grind. This isn’t just any hero, though. This person is godlike, superhuman, the best in their field. No punch or kick will derail them. Maybe they’ll break a rib or two, or take a knife to the arm, but they will not stop kicking ass. Similarly, no bullet will take them down. There will be hundreds of bullets—thousands—fired at them over the course of the movie, and not one of them, not a single one, will be lethal. The bullets th…
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Ten years ago, I came across a true story that enthralled me like no other: the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from a remote post in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, over Christmas 1900. The mystery itself was fascinating enough—the abandoned, ghostly lighthouse; two stopped clocks; and the Principal Keeper’s weather log recounting a terrible storm when there had been no such thing—but the setting made it irresistible. I’ve long been drawn to the sea, its wild splendor and changing moods, the secretive depths that call us on a voyage of discovery. This real-life event roped together all I love to get lost in as a reader, and I knew I had to tell it. An author’s c…
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From the moment I began writing fiction, I knew my stories would be fantasies. I’ve always read widely and enjoyed a variety of genres, but I hold a special place in my heart for magical stories that feel as though they might just be real. A childhood love for C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle led me, as an adult, to authors like Gabriel García Márquez, Alice Hoffman, and Neil Gaiman. My debut novel, The Memory Collectors, is firmly grounded in our world, with a little bit of magic woven throughout. It tells the tale of two women with a shared gift: they can sense the emotions left behind on objects. Each of them is haunted by events in their pasts, and when they meet, the…
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Sometimes, when I walk my neighborhood at night, I glance at the lit-up windows, watch dark silhouettes move behind curtains, wonder at the words spoken, the secrets shared or hidden, the dynamics at play behind those closed doors. More often than not, my mind will craft an unsettling narrative for the people inside—not because I wish them harm or unhappiness, but because in my own life, I am constantly writing about deeply dysfunctional families. Take my latest thriller, The Family Plot, which features the Lighthouses, a true crime obsessed family who gathers to bury their patriarch only to find the remains of their long-missing brother already in his grave. The Lightho…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Melissa Ginsburg, The House Uptown (Flatiron) “Melissa Ginsburg’s page-turner is a devastatingly simple trap: characters so beguiling you settle in for a charming coming-of-age fable before realizing the spring is snapping shut on an inexorable and satisfying calamity. The theme is the-past-isn’t-dead-it-isn’t-even-past, but painted not with Faulkner’s heavy hand so much as with the crisp ingenuity of Ross Macdonald.” –Jonathan Lethem, Harlan Coben, Win (Grand Central) “Twisty—and we’d expect no less from the author of hot thrillers like Tell No One and Missing You.” –AARP Nadi…
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Fire Bones begins with a mystery: a Lebanese-American ferry pilot and Pentecostal preacher from the Arkansas Delta named Amra Boustani goes missing after a transatlantic flight. Back home, a poet named Greg Brownderville and a filmmaker named Bart Weiss investigate her disappearance, crossing paths with the townspeople of Thisaway, Arkansas: Amra’s friends, a ragtag bunch of outsiders and misfits and schemers, men and women who have walked out of a medieval pilgrimage tale into the carnivalesque contemporary Deep South. But what exactly is Fire Bones? Let’s start with what it isn’t. It doesn’t seem to be a chair or a telescope. It’s not a fake Christmas tree or one of …
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She slept naked. Dates with her psychiatrist were scrawled in a diary beside her bed, and it was her psychiatrist, in the end, who would find her lifeless body. She was thirty-six years old. A broken marriage, affairs with married men—but all of that was public knowledge. What wasn’t public was the problems with drugs and alcohol: amphetamines and barbituates, mostly, including old-fashioned sleeping tablets known as “knock-out drops.” Recently there had been lapses in personal hygiene: her toes and fingernails were unkempt, and her teeth were in a state of decay. She was not well, had not been well for some time. Most of the drugs had been prescribed to help with her me…
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In the spring of 2019, long before the global pandemic hijacked the news, the FBI’s Operation Varsity Blues (OVB) college admissions scandal dominated the headlines for months. Jaws dropped around the world as rich and famous parents were indicted for faking sports resumes, cheating on standardized tests, and paying huge sums in bogus philanthropic contributions to guarantee golden admission tickets for their offspring. The incessant news coverage continued with each plea deal struck and prison sentence meted out. A few years before OVB made headlines, we’d begun exploring the parental college admissions battleground—the crown jewel of competitive parenting. We’d observe…
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The front cover of the 1997 edition of Lolita, the one I’ve dog-eared and underlined, features a black-and-white photograph of the lower half of an adolescent girl wearing bobby socks, saddle shoes, and a very short skirt, one leg self-consciously—or coyly—bent. The accompanying blurb, from Vanity Fair, proclaims that this novel is “the only convincing love story of our century.” The publisher’s ad copy on the back describes it as “a meditation on love.” The description on the book’s Amazon page calls the relationship between Humbert Humbert, in his late thirties, and twelve-year-old Lolita “a love affair,” “a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows,…
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For the past ten years I have lived in Oxford, MS, which is most famous for being the hometown of William Faulkner and John Grisham, neither of whom live here anymore. When I moved to Oxford with my husband Chris Offutt, I expected the place would be steeped in their legends, and it is. What surprised me was finding ourselves embraced by a living, vibrant community of writers. All we had to do was wander into City Grocery Bar, two doors down from the beating heart of our town, Square Books, and find all the crime writers there: William Boyle, Tom Franklin, Ace Atkins, the poet Derrick Harriell, whose short story won an Edgar last year, Michael Farris Smith, Matt Bondurant…
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She hailed me on East 62nd Street, not far from Bloomingdale’s. She was an attractive girl, wearing big-lensed sunglasses against the June glare, and carrying two plaid suitcases, one of which she waggled at me as I rolled down the street. “Say ‘Kennedy,’ ” I whispered, and eased the cab to a stop. Opening the rear door, she shoved the suitcases in first, then followed, slammed the door, shoved the sunglasses up on top of her head, and said, “Kennedy.” “You got it,” I said, and started the meter with a smile. Not only is the long expensive run from Manhattan out to John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens one of the joys of a cabby’s life, but there’s no pleasant…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Velvet Was the Night (Del Rey) “It’s hard to describe how much fun this novel is—Moreno-Garcia, whose Mexican Gothic (2020) gripped readers last year, proves to be just as good at noir as she is at horror. The novel features memorable characters, taut pacing, an intricate plot, and antiheroes you can’t help but root for. A noir masterpiece.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Jonathan Santlofer, The Last Mona Lisa (Sourcebooks) “The Last Mona Lisa brings together past and present, seasons it with intriguing characters, and brushes it with plot twists that you d…
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James Lee Burke occupies a small room in the world of American literature. Joined by only a few contemporaries and predecessors, he writes books that provide entertainment and suspense, but also possess the rare capacity to alter the reader’s perception of art, history, and the most intractable mysteries of life itself. As the author of more than 40 books, he is astoundingly prolific. Readers around the world have fallen in love with his tales of detective Dave Robicheaux, who solves homicides in New Iberia, Louisiana. Far more than mere police procedurals, Robicheaux’s cases, in large part due to the Milton-esque poetic prose of Burke, have a grand philosophical and the…
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