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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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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It’s 1965. Truman Capote was a known figure on the literary scene and a member of the global social jet set. His bestselling books Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s had made him a literary favorite. And after five years of painstaking research, and gut-wrenching personal investment, part I of In Cold Blood debuted in The New Yorker. As people across the country opened their magazines and read the first lines of the story, they were riveted. Overnight, Capote catapulted from a mere darling of the literary world to a full-fledged global celebrity on a par with the likes of rockstars and film legends. The success was all encompassing, but the cost would p…
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When I was a child, I opened a detective agency with my best friend. We had an office (the space under my father’s desk), a filing cabinet (repurposed from the trash), a role model (Harriet the Spy), and a manual (The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook, which covered such useful topics as scene-of-crime forensics, pursuit of suspects, and forty-years-out-of-date drug slang). Though I didn’t grow up to be a private investigator, I did become a writer—and my own novel owes its origins to the fictional female detectives who came before mine. Kinsey Millhone: The leading edge of a new wave of crime fiction when A is for Alibi was published in 1982, Sue Grafton’s pragmatic and det…
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This month’s psychological thrillers are fast-paced, intricate, and deliciously shocking. With new books from May Cobb, Rachel Howzell Hall, Samantha Downing, Chandler Baker, and more, it’s a star-studded line-up of new releases that are sure to please whether you’re reading them poolside or (more reasonably) inside in the AC. May Cobb, A Likeable Woman (Berkley) Austin-based writer May Cobb is back with another sizzling thriller set in the sultry Texas heat. In her latest, a woman who has always wondered about the death of her unpredictable mother finds new answers in a memoir. She returns to her hometown to seek out the truth (and perhaps reconnect with an old flam…
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“The Hot Spot” is a movie of dark joy – dark because it immediately pulls the viewer into a sweltering world of illicit lust, desperation, and deception, but joyful because director Dennis Hopper and leading stars Don Johnson and Virginia Madsen make it all so seductive and fun. They also happen to play out their schemes, manipulations, and dashed dreams over one of the greatest, and most underrated, soundtracks in the history of film. The 1990 major theatrical release is based on Charles Williams’ scintillating pulp novel, Hell Hath No Fury. Williams cowrote the script with Nona Tyson in the 1960s, with Robert Mitchum in mind for the lead role of Harry Madox, an amoral…
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A new Brubaker/Phillips original graphic novel is always reason for crime fiction fans to celebrate, but there’s something particularly special about the bestselling, much-lauded team’s latest – Night Fever – a twisty, mind-bending neo-noir that pulls you through a winding, hypnotic tunnel of darkness in a way only Brubaker, Phillips and colorist Jacob Phillips can. Cinematic and gripping, Night Fever is an outlier in the greater Brubaker/Phillips canon, but in the best way possible – a memorable detour that sticks with you. It’s always a pleasure to chat with Ed, who took some time out of his busy schedule to discuss the book, his other projects, collaborating with Sea…
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On July 15th, 1976, in a small farming town in California’s central valley, three men wearing pantyhose masks and brandishing guns boarded a school bus on its afternoon route home and kidnapped the driver and twenty-six student passengers, some as young as five years old. For twelve hours, they drove the captives around in vans without ventilation, food, water, or bathroom breaks. Their destination was a stone quarry owned by the family of one of the gunmen, located over a hundred miles from where the police found the school bus. They instructed the victims to climb down a ladder into a hole in the ground that opened up into a buried moving truck. The truck was poorly sto…
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In July 1902, a fully rigged English merchant ship, the Leicester Castle, arrived from Hong Kong at San Francisco, its iron hull heavy with wheat. After docking, its Scottish Captain Robert D. Peattie expected to lose much of his crew of 26 men as a matter of course; sailors typically scattered for the excitements of San Francisco once they were paid off, picking up a new ship when they again felt light in the pocket. Capt. Peattie needed to replace more than half his men before heading out again for the long route to Queensland, northeastern Australia. He paid a shipping master named John Savory, who rounded up fourteen candidates living at sailor boarding houses aroun…
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Many noir tales feature infidelity as the motive behind mayhem and murder. More than a few of my favorite novels, films and songs have been motivated by cheating partners whose adulterous lust leads to broken hearts, cracked heads, stolen money or dead bodies. A few of the cheating narratives I’ve admired over the years include the Billy Paul song “Me & Mrs. Jones,” the steamy flick Body Heat and James M. Cain’s masterful debut novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Cain’s hardboiled story was about a miserable woman named Cora Papadakis who has an affair with java gulping hobo Frank Chambers, who’d recent been thrown off a “hay truck.” Click to view slideshow…
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There’s nothing quite like a cozy mystery novel for me. From the charming small-town settings to the quirky cast of characters, there’s just something about this sub-genre that always leaves me feeling warm and fuzzy inside. But you know what my absolute favorite thing about cozies is? The amateur sleuths. That’s right, forget about your typical hard-boiled detectives and seasoned police officers. In a cozy mystery, everyday people are the ones who take action to solve crimes in their hometowns. Whether it’s a talented baker, a curious librarian, or a spunky grandmother with a knack for trouble, these characters bring so much heart and personality to the stories they inh…
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Heather Levy is the author of Walking on Needles and a nonfiction series on human sexuality and BDSM, as well as the forthcoming Hurt for Me. She lives in Oklahoma, where her novels are set. In Hurt for Me, a survivor of abuse finds empowerment and financial independence in her career as a dungeon master, but her new life is threatened when one of her clients goes missing, just after telling her about a private party with no rules—and no safe words. In Hurt for Me, Heather Levy draws a stark difference between the consensual, safe practices of BDSM and the dangerous behaviors of those who would take advantage. When we were given the opportunity to interview Levy as part o…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto (Doubleday) Pulitzer Prize winner Whitehead continues his journey through the history of modern New York City, this time taking on the 1970s, as the cast of characters from Harlem Shuffle get swept up in political action, civil unrest, corrupt policing, the rise of Blaxploitation culture, and more. It’s a rich backdrop for Whitehead’s powerful human dramas, and he paints a vivid portrait of people moving between the straight and the crooked world, just trying to get by. –DM Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, The Centre (Gillian Flynn Books) W…
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The most powerful piece of true crime–related art I’d seen in years was tucked away in a difficult-to-access corner of a downtown New York City museum. This was not what I expected at the spring 2022 New Museum retrospective for the artist Faith Ringgold, a formidable educator and activist best known for showstopper quilts that present visceral juxtapositions of major facets of Black American history. The quilts were, justifiably, worth the museum visit. But my attention, at the time and since, kept returning to that corner, near a stairwell connecting the museum’s third and fourth floors, where the Atlanta Children and the paired Save Our Children in Atlanta and The S…
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I’ve often likened the writing of a crime novel to a stand-up comedy performance and I still believe that they have much in common, for me, at any rate. As a writer of commercial fiction I need to engage my reader quickly. I feel compelled to strive for this, largely because I require that same early engagement when I am reading a novel. It doesn’t need to be a crash-bang-wallop bit of action, a killer hook or an irresistible cliffhanger. Sometimes it’s just a voice or a character; something that teases and draws me in. But there needs to be something in those first few pages demanding that I read on. The same is certainly true when it comes to performing stand-up. Back w…
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The most generous thing you could say about the Metropol Hotel in 1941 was that it had seen better days. When it opened in 1905, it stood as a shining example of the Art Nouveau style, combining the designs of avantgarde British and Russian architects with highly coloured elements of décor drawn from Russian folklore. At that time the capital of the Russian empire had for two centuries been St Petersburg on the Baltic coast, reducing Moscow to ‘a village with four hundred churches’. Despite this cruel label, Moscow at the start of the twentieth century was the home of Russia’s wealthy merchants, who at the time were leading art collectors, patrons of the country’s cultura…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Bonnie Kistler, Her, Too (Harper) “[A] page-turner . . . . sharp prose and a ripped-from-the headlines premise. . . . Kistler, a former trial lawyer, brings authenticity to the proceedings . . . This burns hot.” –Publishers Weekly Mark Billingham, The Last Dance (Atlantic Monthly Press) “A gritty, engaging novel that balances light with dark, offering wit and wisdom in equal measure. Billingham’s new lead detective, DS Miller, may not be able to dance, but he never misses a step when it comes to solving crime.” –Nita Prose Arianna Reiche, At the End of Every Day (Atria) “A …
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Don’t get mad, and for God’s sake, don’t get weepy. Get even. These words become the motto of Kelly McCann in my latest novel, Her, Too. She’s a lawyer who’s built her career defending men accused of sexual assault. When she’s raped by her own client, she convinces herself that she can’t report him to the police without destroying her reputation. But her trauma manifests as rage, and soon it becomes corrosive. So instead of seeking justice, she charts a course for revenge. Hell hath no fury like a woman—assaulted? In four of the following novels, the victims chart the same course as Kelly, and their revenge proves sweet if morally debatable. In only one does the victim …
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About a year ago, I was sitting at a coffee shop when I had a great idea: instead of doing work, I should make a puzzle for a friend. This particular friend is very sharp, and he loves puzzles. (To steal a joke from Dial ‘M’ for Murder—I call him my friend, because if I call him my lawyer, he charges me.) So I sent my friend-lawyer a simple word puzzle, and he solved it almost immediately. It wasn’t the least bit frustrating for him, which made it twice as frustrating for me. So I abandoned the idea of working completely and focused my attention on sending him a harder puzzle: a cross between a logic grid and a murder mystery. Much to my delight, my lawyer-friend couldn’…
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There are things you want from an Indiana Jones movie. You want Indy to to yell directions at a stunned, fuddy-duddy academic while trying to dodge bullet spray. You want Indy to shove the lid off a big stone tomb, and maybe even yank an antique out from the stiff grip of the skeleton inside that tomb. You want to watch him shimmy though a cavern full of vermin and translate an ancient language very quickly by sight. You want him to growl at Nazis. You want the hat and the whip and the grin and the eye rolls and the French horns. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a good student of the canon that came before it. It is the fifth in a series which was originally inte…
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When I was doing my preliminary research for this little listicle, I googled as many synonymic combinations of “independence day” and “movies” as I could. There aren’t many movies with Fourth of July scenes in them, let alone crime movies. I could only think of six off the top of my head, and I didn’t actually find any more that fit my criteria. You see, most of the movies suggested to me by the algorithm were more thematic “Fourth of July movies” than literal ones—movies either about the military industrial complex, or Colonial times. Or both. And that’s not what I’m talking about, here. If you want to watch Born on the Fourth of July or Top Gun or The Patriot, that’s a…
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I was a kid playing Atari with my best friend when she informed me, as she sent her frog darting through traffic, that Nostradamus had predicted the world would end in nookuler destruction in August of that year. The exact date she named happened to be my birthday. Since Nostradamus lived hundreds of years ago and didn’t even know what nookuler was, she continued confidently, he must have had special powers and his predictions were therefore true. It was the early eighties and we had no internet, so I accepted her logic and spent the remaining weeks of summer assuming I would die before the leaves fell. If you were born in the 1970s, like me, or the sixties or the fifti…
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Last fall, when the BBC released Obscene: The Dublin Scandal, a podcast about an aristocratic Irishman’s deadly 1982 crime spree, there was a notable, if predictable, gap in the narrative. By then, Malcolm Macarthur, the notorious murderer at the heart of the story, had been out of prison for a decade, and though he was occasionally spotted in public—grocery-shopping, attending lectures at museums—he wasn’t among those interviewed in the show. “I knew that they had not been able to get access to Macarthur—that they had not, in fact, even been able to find him,” Mark O’Connell writes. How would O’Connell know this? Because he’d been interviewing the elderly ex-con semi-r…
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