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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A housewife moonlighting as a hitwoman for hire. Baking cakes in the morning, ending lives in the dark of night. Trading the spatula for the shotgun. That was what I wanted the protagonist in my new historical fiction book, A Woman of Intelligence to do. I didn’t want to write her this way because I’ve made a career writing shoot ‘em up thrillers. I wanted murder because I was dealing with post-partum anger and I needed her to be violent for me. I had two children eighteen months apart, and while I’d been career/kid juggling for a few years, the delusion that I was doing okay was disappearing. I felt like the old me had burst into flames and I was not a fan of the new m…
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These were lean years for National Socialism. The party would poll just 2.6 percent of the vote in the elections of May 1928. Hitler spent much of his time reorganizing the movement, growing the membership, expanding the ranks of the paramilitaries, and establishing absolute control. Under the Führerprinzip (leadership principle), he was the physical embodiment of National Socialism, its demigod and supreme commander. His personality hadn’t much changed since the Vienna days—Kubizek would have recognized the “coffee-house tirades,” “distaste for systematic work,” and “paranoid outbursts of hatred” Putzi Hanfstaengl described in these years—but his following had. His word …
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The absence of a goodwill communiqué from America to the All African People’s Conference in Accra had been noted with regret by the delegates. Then, just before the final session, a message arrived from Vice President Nixon. He had been advised of the bad impression created by America’s silence and was seeking to put this right. Even so, one of the American delegates described the telegram as ‘a lukewarm statement quite out of keeping with the spirit of the conference’. In any case, his telegram arrived too late: the hardworking committees did not have time to read it out. However, the US had, in fact, been well represented throughout the conference— in covert and unfores…
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Every once in a while, a story appears in the media about a “time capsule” in the form of the contents of an apartment, unchanged in all the years a recently departed tenant lived there, or a house left vacant while ownership has been tied up on the courts, sometimes for decades, that has finally been awarded to an heir. Many an old house is sold with some of the original owner’s possessions still stored in the attic—a treasure trove for the inquisitive buyer to explore. My own time capsule story, Murder, She Edited, grew out of a fascination with such tales, combined with the traditional question writers ask themselves: “What if . . . ?” My senior sleuth, Mikki Lincoln…
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Eric Powell—the legendary creator of comics like The Goon and Hillbilly—and Harold Schechter—the author of true crime classics including Deviant and The Serial Killer Files—are collaborating on an ambitious new graphic novel about one of the most notoriously deranged murderers in American history, Ed Gein. Powell and Schechter are co-writing Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?, an all new, 200-page, original graphic novel illustrated by Powell that delves into the twisted history of the Gein family and the notorious violence that inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Painstakingly researched and illustrated, Schechter and Powell’s tru…
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Long before I became a writer of foodie mysteries, I fell in love with reading them. It started with Diane Mott Davidson’s series about a Boulder-based caterer who couldn’t help solving mysteries on the side. Davidson didn’t merely dump descriptions of meal preparation onto the pages, food was woven into her story. As the reader, I wanted to be friends with caterer Goldy, sitting in her kitchen, tasting her food. When Goldy finally remarried—this time to a cop, many crimes were dissected in their kitchen as they cooked. Readers knew that Goldy’s husband Tom was a good guy, because he cooked incredible comfort food for her. And made amazing coffee. Food can do more than p…
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It was a Monday morning in September, on the beach, when it all began. It is called the beach, for want of a better term, even though nobody can swim there on account of the reefs and the tide, nor relax on it because it is made up of rough, sharp volcanic shingle. The Old Woman walked there every day. The Old Woman was the former teacher. Everyone on the island had passed through her class. She knows all the families. She was born here and she will die here. No one has ever seen her smile. They scarcely know her age. Probably not very far off eighty. Five years previously, she had been obliged to give up the class. From then on she took her daily walk early in the morni…
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It’s no accident that some of the most iconic detectives in literary history are beer lovers. Beer lubricates the gears and gets the mind humming. Nero Wolfe does some of his best thinking with a delicately poured glass of Remmers, and John Rebus has contemplated many a mystery over countless pints of Deuchars IPA in his favorite pub, the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh. And what would Harry Bosch do without a cold bottle of Fat Tire? Or Robert B. Parker’s Spenser without a Sam Adams, or a Blue Moon, or a Rolling Rock, or tall can of Budweiser? (Spenser may be the most beer obsessed private eye out there.) Robert Crais’ yoga loving gumshoe Elvis Cole even gives beer to his cat. …
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BEATRIZ Septiembre 1823 Two months earlier The carriage door creaked as Rodolfo opened it. I blinked, adjusting to the light that spilled across my skirts and face, and took the hand Rodolfo offered me as gracefully as I could. Hours of imprisonment in the carriage over rough country roads left me wanting to claw my way out of that stuffy box and suck in a lungful of fresh air, but I restrained myself. I knew my role as delicate, docile wife. Playing that role had already swept me away from the capital, far from the torment of my uncle’s house, into the valley of Apan. It brought me here and left me standing before a high dark wooden door set deep in white stucco wall…
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Television history may not recall the second week of September 1974 as indelibly momentous. Yet for fans of small-screen private eye series, it most certainly was. On Friday, September 13, NBC-TV’s The Rockford Files premiered, featuring James Garner. That was just one night after competitor ABC launched another Southern California-set gumshoe drama with a well-known lead and lofty ambitions: David Janssen’s Harry O. The former program went on to five and a half seasons of public acclaim (plus eight TV reunion movies), and in 2002 was ranked No. 39 on TV Guide’s list of the “50 Best Shows of All Time.” While a previous Janssen crime series, The Fugitive, scored even bett…
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I’ll say upfront that there is nothing quite like the firm economy of Die Hard, a Christmas-set movie about how German terrorists commandeer a fancy Los Angeles high-rise, hold hostage all the people currently attending their office holiday party inside, and are slowly picked off by the one partygoer who had managed to stay hidden during the initial raid: a scrappy NYC cop named John McClane (a Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis). Although it is now thought of as a quintessential action movie, with a big-budget franchise in its wake, I like the first Die Hard for the—when you think about it—tightness of its conceit. The Nakatomi Plaza building is locked-down, and so the movie …
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“A girl dies today at 3 p.m.” —Posted on Facebook, January 14, 2012 at 1:04 p.m. *** Joyce Hau had her whole life ahead of her. Known to everyone as “Winsie,” she had a smile that lit up her face, and she wasn’t afraid to show it. An attractive and outgoing fifteen-year-old, she enjoyed the kinds of things other young people her age enjoyed: hanging out with friends, going to parties, chatting on social media. Winsie also maintained close ties with other young people in the Chinese Dutch community and often attended Asian cultural events. Always into the latest fashions, she sported a piercing beneath her lower lip. She danced and played the piano and was even skilled …
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__________________________________________________ Excerpted from the book MEADOWLARK: A COMING-OF-AGE CRIME STORY by Greg Ruth and Ethan Hawke. Copyright © 2021 by Ethan Hawke and Greg Ruth. Illustrations © 2021 by Greg Ruth. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. View the full article
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We can all identify the final girl early in any slasher story. She’s the bookish one. She dresses conservatively, she takes her responsibilities seriously. If it’s the eighties, she’s probably just gone camping at the wrong place, or signed on to work at an unlucky summer camp, and if it’s the nineties then she’s probably already dealing with some trauma, has some issue this confrontation with horror can make her deal with, and if it’s the 2000s or later then she’s in a time loop, she’s up against the ancient ones, or maybe she’s even the slasher herself. If it’s the seventies, though? If it’s the seventies, then she’s Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s Halloween, w…
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Shop Talk: Steph Cha Writes Yelp Reviews, Works Jigsaw Puzzles, and Always Has a Blanket
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Steph Cha is the author of the Juniper Song crime trilogy, and most recently, Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award. She’s also a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology. What you may not know, however, is that Steph is also an avid dissectologist. So deep is her love for jigsaw puzzles, she actually tackled a 5,000-piece puzzle while under quarantine due to the pandemic. Naturally, that seemed like the perfect place to start our “Shop Talk.” Steph Cha: Oh, yeah. I lo…
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After I was raped at knifepoint at thirteen years old, I recall thinking that I could never call the police if I were raped again. No one would believe a two-time loser. I’d had my one bite at the apple when it came to protection from that kind of violence, and it hadn’t been much of an apple. Battered and visibly bruised, I’d endured the rape exam in the hospital; a nurse telling me she “would have scratched the guy’s eyes out”; and multiple police interrogations, epitomized by one cop’s artful question, “Did he stick his thing in you?” The rapist was never caught. And, in my mind, I was beyond the protection of the law. For writers of thrillers other than police proced…
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There’s arguably no question that animates crime fiction more than the question of guilt. Because one of the genre’s central aims is an epistemological one—to discover and understand transgressive events, usually crimes, and uncover who’s responsible and why—it’s often structured around a process of gradual enlightenment. One of the most seductive promises it makes is that by the end of a story, readers will know something new and important: more often than not, it’s who’s guilty and what motivated them. This knowledge, and the comforting certainty it brings (that the world is knowable; that guilt is assignable; that people’s motives are legible), are some of the biggest …
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There’s a reason why media with complex, nonlinear timelines tends to be referred to as “mind-bending.” This was true before we spent 2020 either doomscrolling and Netflixing our brains into mush or squeezing a decade of stressors into a year. But especially now, we can only keep track of so many simultaneous realities at one time without resorting to spreadsheets and diagrams. Of course, some people love making spreadsheets and diagrams, especially about the books and movies they consume for entertainment. (If you don’t believe me, do an image search for Inception timeline infographic.) When I was writing my novel The Other Me, I knew I would need to satisfy those analy…
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What draws readers to espionage fiction? It’s a question I’m asked again and again, at events, and in conversation, when I describe my novels—for want of a better descriptor—as part spy-thriller, part domestic noir. Objectively speaking, the answer might be obvious: the world of international espionage with its seductively glamorous settings and endless scope for subterfuge, is as alluring for readers as it is for writers drawing audiences into their darkly alluring worlds, and then wrong-footing them at every turn. With double lives straddling—and sometimes blurring—the lines between good and evil, hero and antihero, the inner workings and often outlandish actions of th…
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Julius and Ethel Rosenberg remain the only Americans ever put to death in peacetime for conspiracy to commit espionage, the only two American civilians executed for espionage-related crimes committed during the Cold War that roughly lasted from 1946 to 1991, and Ethel is the only American woman killed for a crime other than murder. Today there is widespread recognition that Julius did pass military information to the Soviet Union, yet skepticism that the couple had, according to the phrase used at the time, stolen “the secrets” of the atomic bomb. Much was known about the basic physics involved in making a bomb; the main difficulty was devising practical weapons and the a…
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Somewhere in a recondite basement poorly lit by one dim, flickering bulb there is a sub rosa committee of crime readers crowding around an investigation board featuring a map of the world full-up with pushpins and other markers. Next to each indicator is a corresponding profile which all the readers know by heart. For instance, in South Florida there’s a fedora-wearing P.I. in a sweat-stained floral shirt investigating a body found in the Glades. In the Pacific Northwest a shadowy killer stands at the edge of a tree line, his figure blurred by the sheets of rain. And on the bustling streets of London a deductive detective knows the game is afoot. But in the thick pine for…
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We all love a good villain. From Tom Ripley to Hannibal Lecter, it’s the bad guys who make us sit up and pay attention when the movie scene changes or we dare to turn the page. In cinema, the cheapest scares come from the sudden jump cut, the full-face close up, a blast of discordant violins. There is no real equivalent in the novel, and none of those techniques produce what a truly effective literary villain can: that insidious creep of fear you get while reading, the dread that crawls up your spine, and often even lingers long after the cover is closed. But what is it about them that fascinates us so much? Let me rephrase that: how does the author fascinate us? Why do w…
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When discussing the lifestyle of a radio DJ, most people probably would fall back on the television sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati as the authoritative source of their knowledge. The comedic tales of Dr. Johnny Fever, Venus Flytrap, and the rest of the gang at WKRP painted a picture of broadcasting as being a career filled with raucous fun and excitement. It was certainly an influence in my decision to take a job as part-time DJ at a small station in southern New Jersey in 1990. To my surprise, that first radio job was far from being the lively gig that I was anticipating. In fact, working the Saturday overnight shift was about as boring as reading a poetry book written by a…
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Lists are useful and terrifying things. I have a “To Do” list for my day job that is approaching 350 items since we shifted to a remote, quarantined office existence (don’t worry, I’ve checked off almost all of them over time). There are, however, lists generated by other people that sucker me in and drive me mad. I am referring to the “Best of” lists, particularly when they come to books or movies. I should know better. These lists are compiled by people who devote their lives to these fields, whereas I, lucky enough to have a full-time day job to subsidize the side-gig/addiction of being a writer, find myself with not enough hours in the not enough days to keep up with…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new nonfiction crime books. * Margalit Fox, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History (Random House) Margalit Fox crafts a rollicking good tale of spiritualism, deception, and escapades in her latest foray into narrative history. In 1917, two prisoners of war in a remote Turkish POW camp during WWI—Harry Jones, the son of a gentleman, and Cedric Hill, an working-class Aussie—managed to dupe their captors into letting them escape, using only a ouija board, rumors of treasure, and their own skills at sleight-of-hand. Read here about the construction of the prisoners’ ouija…
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