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,
3,491 topics in this forum
-
- 0 replies
- 290 views
Women love true crime. While certainly not a universal truth, it’s a generalization that feels apt enough that even SNL has noticed. On February 27, the song spoof “Murder Show,” aired to general acclaim — if the women I follow on Twitter are any indication. As the skit begins, Nick Jonas leaves his girlfriend alone for an evening of unwinding and self care. Bubble baths and sheet masks come to mind. But as soon as he shuts the door behind him, she curls up on the couch, opens Netflix, and breaks into song about the specific delight of watching murder shows. It’s the kind of parody that works because it feels a little perverse. This is a guilty pleasure, emphasis on the…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 379 views
You could call this “Emily Gerard and Count Dracula,” or “The Anthropological Musings of a Vampire,” or “Nosferatu and the Scotswoman,” or….. You know Dracula, right? The book that spawned an entire industry of knickknacks, tourist attractions, bad jokes, films (almost as many as Sherlock Holmes), and pastiches? Do you ever wonder if anyone asked Bram Stoker that most basic of questions aimed at writers, namely, Where do you get your ideas? The truth is, writers don’t always know for sure. Writers have magpie minds, always picking up shiny or odd-shaped bits—a castle, a historical figure, an interesting tidbit of folklore—and seeing how they might fit together. Sometime…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
The crimefighter known as the Shadow was a pop-culture sensation who arrived on the detective fiction scene before Perry Mason, Nero Wolfe, and Philip Marlowe, and whose extravagant war on evildoers predated those of Superman, Batman, the Lone Ranger, and Doc Savage. Americans during the Great Depression got regular doses of the Shadow via the radio and pulp magazines, and his adventures continue to this day in comic book form. Oddly, the character was never a big hit with movie audiences, despite decades of films that create an occasionally compelling but ultimately confusing portrait of the clever, menacing protagonist. Amazon Prime subscribers can check out some of the…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 636 views
Whether it’s the language, the tradecraft or the folk legends of American Mafia life, The Godfather reads like a voyage through the underworld with Mario Puzo acting as our Virgil. The Godfather also functions as a classic of another genre: the immigrant story. Vito is the new arrival who works around the clock to establish himself in his new land, getting his hands dirty, while his more privileged and better-educated son longs to succeed like a native. Michael Corleone’s dreams are of assimilation. He marries a willowy WASP beauty, her family rooted in the New England of the Mayflower. He wears the uniform of the US Army. He is adamant that ‘his children would grow i…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 336 views
I didn’t always love surfing. Or surf culture. Or surf books for that matter. I never really thought that much about any of it. But today, my love for the genre of surf noir borders on obsession. I’m always looking to discover new books in the surf or beach noir genre. Or even just good books on surfing. The only problem is there isn’t a ton out there. There are some staples, sure, and there are a few new ones here and there. And there are some oldies that people might forget about. But the simple truth is, I could use a lot more. We can all use a lot more. My interest in surf noir started four years ago in a poetry class I was taking at UC Riverside-Palm Desert. In t…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 341 views
He opens the tray table and sets his water bottle down, then opens a packet of chocolates and pops one in his mouth. The train leaves Ueno and returns to the world above. A few clouds float in the sky, but mostly it’s just clear blue. The sky’s as sunny as I am, he thinks. He sees a driving range, with its backstop like a giant green mosquito net. It f lows off to the left and a school slides into view, a string of concrete rectangles, uniformed students hanging around the windows. He can’t tell if they’re his age or a little older, and Satoshi ‘The Prince’ Oji spends a moment trying to figure it out, but almost immediately decides that it doesn’t matter. They’re all the …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 382 views
The thief of perfume is, in fact, one of the most active of the twenty-first century. In the UK, cosmetics/perfume was the fourth most-shoplifted category in 2019 (after packed meat, razor blades, and whisky/champagne/gin). In the US, perfume is first on the list of products pinched by women, and an AdWeek list of the ten most shoplifted items ranks Chanel No. 5 at No. 9 (a few notches down from Axe body spray). Just ask Mrs. Thyra G. Youngstrom. In a 1959 news article, she’s reported as having discovered her West Hartford, Connecticut, home had been ransacked. It seemed everything was out of place, but nothing was gone: until she noticed she was poorer two bottles of Ch…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 324 views
Carol and Charlie were my upstairs neighbors. They were an older couple, sliver-haired and retired, always around on weekdays. I registered them as vaguely eccentric but sweet, complete opposites from one another. Carol was gregarious. She was always smiling, always generous, delivering packages from the lobby to our apartment doors and feeding a feral cat on our block. I met her as I was moving into my now-husband’s place. She seemed delighted to have me in the building, peppering me with personal questions like some cheerfully nosy aunt, welcoming me to the family. Charlie was quieter, inconspicuous. I don’t remember much about him except that he wore hats. Well, one …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 334 views
la valle d’abisso dolorosa . . . the valley of the sad abyss . . . —Dante, Inferno You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. Harry Kendall Thaw (the Pittsburgh coal heir who shot Stanford White, the beaux arts architect, on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906), Jean Harris (the Smith College alumna and Madeira School headmistress who murdered the diet guru Dr. Herman Tarnower in 1980), and William Bradford Bishop (the Yale-educated diplomat who bludgeoned his family to death with a sledgehammer in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1976) very nearly exhaust the list of WASPs who killed other than in the service of the state and the intelligence agencies. As for Li…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 787 views
I got married in 2012. I remember sitting on the plane en route to our honeymoon staring at my brand new wedding band and thinking: I am somebody’s wife now. A small thrill passed through me at the idea of belonging to someone in this way. Ever since, I have always enjoyed introducing myself to my husband’s coworkers or high school classmates as “Rob Baker’s wife.” Hey, he’s a great guy to be married to! But also, let me be perfectly clear, as much as I love him, ‘til death do us part and whatnot, that sobriquet better not be the thing engraved on my tombstone. And furthermore, if someday I become rich and famous or just really interesting, y’all better not title the ensu…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 334 views
__________________________________ “The Text Message” by Luc Brahy is excerpted from FIRST DEGREE: A CRIME ANTHOLOGY. Used with the permission of the publisher, Humanoids. Copyright © 2021 by Luc Brahy. View the full article
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 313 views
My latest novel, Velvet Was the Night, is a noir set in the Mexico City of the 1970s. This is a changing world, beset by political and social turmoil, and a space where different forces are violently clashing. To me, it seemed like the perfect decade for a noir, but when I told people what I was working on, they tended to be surprised I was writing a book set in 1971. Most of them associated the word ‘noir’ with the 1950s. Noir has always had a close relationship with film and it is no wonder that when we think of noir, we tend to harken back to iconic images inspired by Golden Age Hollywood rather than more modern proposals. But noir did not vanish once people traded…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 303 views
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here (Ballantine) “Bartz takes the idea of a ‘frenemy’ to new heights. . . . Yet another expert vivisection of female modes of communication and competition.” –Los Angeles Times Megan Abbott, The Turnout (Putnam) “Abbott’s novels are often described as crime fiction, and, while indeed she works with mystery and suspense and draws on noir and Gothic tropes, her goal seems less to construct intricate, double-crossing plot problems than to explore the dark side of femininity….In other words, Megan Abbott is a mood.” –The New York Times Book Review Nao…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 619 views
Quite how Ian Fleming got to Portugal in June 1940 is unclear. To have gone overland would have been extremely unlikely, and as his objective was to get to Madrid if going overland, why go to Portugal? He could have gone by sea, but he would have had to obtain a visa from the Portuguese Consul in Bordeaux. These were freely obtainable, thousands being issued by the consul, Aristides de Sousa Mendes. However, most people traveled by land and the influx was so great that it led to the Spanish closing the border with France, and an increase in tension between Lisbon and Madrid. Sousa Mendes paid for this humanitarian act with his career and the ruin of his family by a furiou…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
—Translated by Daniel Hahn Frustration and liberation. These two extraordinarily strong feelings were what prompted me to write Two Spies in Caracas, my first novel. The frustration stems from my conviction that I was not telling my readers the complete story, the real story of what was happening in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. I have been writing newspaper columns, academic articles, books about Venezuela and about President Chávez for more than two decades. About his Bolivarian revolution, his 21st century socialism and about his executions both inside and outside Venezuela. All these were analytical works in which I used the best techniques I could find in social sc…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 349 views
We had books, radios and cars. What we didn’t have was the internet, cell phones or GPS. It was 1976, the bicentennial year, and I was a young private investigator, employed by a small detective agency operating just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC and everyday brought a new adventure. Information is the private detective’s stock in trade. Our business focused on matrimonial problems, insurance fraud, criminal law and locating people who didn’t want to be found, and each problem usually came down to uncovering information someone wanted to keep secret. Much has changed since the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter; perhaps nothing more than our acce…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 335 views
What do you call twenty-five skydiving lawyers? SKEET! If you haven’t heard this one, I bet you’ve heard another or have a good lawyer joke that you love to tell. Have you heard the one about the lawyer that… the list is endless, and no one loves to tell lawyer jokes more than lawyers! Before I began writing legal thrillers, I asked myself why we love the law and what brought about our fascination with lawyers, civil conflict stories, and those involving people in trouble with authority. I went in search of the origins of the genre and found a rich history of chills and thrills. I also discovered something particularly interesting about how people view lawyers through th…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 377 views
For those of us obsessed with them, stories about skyjackings offer retro fascination, criminal ingenuity and daring, and, in some cases, wackiness. Skyjackings have been around as long as aviation itself, and continue to this day. But they are most associated with their peak in the 60s-70s, when air travel evoked a sense of glamour (well-coiffed stewardess and Dungeness crab served on china). In this so-called “Golden Age” of skyjackings, global political turmoil produced many cults, revolutionary groups, and malcontents. These are colorful characters, who saw skyjackings as financial or political opportunities. While it was shockingly easy to hijack a plane back then, t…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
Ever wondered if you could be tempted by a cult? If the current viewing and reading choices are anything to go by, probably. From strictly religious, to New Age and downright bizarre, cults represent that fascinatingly dark side of devotion. And we never tire of wondering: what causes seemingly ordinary people to give up their wealth, their bodies, and sometimes even their lives to group of strangers? With life being more isolating than ever, it is perhaps not surprising we’re more drawn than ever to peeking inside extreme groups, promising a simpler, decision-free life. My own interest is strictly professional, of course. Researching my book, Black Widows, cast me deep …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 461 views
Why are imaginary friends so creepy? What is it that’s so unsettling about the sight of a child confidently babbling away to thin air? Stephen King wrote, “The root of all human fear is a closed door, slightly ajar.” The things we can’t see that are almost always more frightening than those we can. The idea of a threat that the child can see but the adults around him can’t is recurrent in the horror genre because it’s so effective: think The Others, The Sixth Sense My debut novel, The Woman Outside My Door, owes a lot to horror. It’s situated firmly in the psychological thriller and domestic noir genres, with themes of mental health, motherhood, and homemaking and dark…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 400 views
Although I’ve produced a book or two a year for the past thirty years it’s a truth still to tell that publishers continue to struggle to slot my output into a specific genre. You might ask what is a genre other than a label made up for the purposes of marketing and easy introduction. It rarely encapsulates everything that goes on in a book, is used simply to make a sale quicker and more achievable, and I guess there’s nothing wrong with that. However, doesn’t it leave us wondering what we might be missing if we “never read crime” or we “scorn romance” or “wouldn’t go near science-fiction”? I can’t imagine there’s an author alive whose only real concern when writing a bo…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 442 views
“Think Downton Abbey meets Sneakers, but in World War II!” That’s how a Hollywood bigwig might pitch the story of Bletchley Park, a remote English country manor stuffed with codebreakers, all laboring under dire secrecy to break the supposedly unbreakable Axis military codes. But Bletchley Park’s extraordinary achievements are no Hollywood screenwriter’s fever dream; they’re real…and would never have happened without thousands of extraordinary women. A university campus, a Wonderland, “the biggest bloody lunatic asylum in Britain”: BP, as it was casually known by insiders, resembled all three. A Victorian country house chosen for its remote location and its railway proxi…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 495 views
Once upon a time. In a deep, dark wood. In a kingdom far away. These fairy tale beginnings and so much more speak to a place and time very long ago. How many of us ever wonder if these places and those stories were real? Were there inklings of nonfiction embedded into the words of fairy tales we have come to know so dearly? The last lines in “Cinderella” are not “And they lived happily ever after.” The last lines in “Cinderella” are: “And thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness all their days.” This punishment was of course applied to the wicked sisters, and shortly before the tale ended we learned that “pigeons pecked out one eye fr…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 447 views
How can a mystery weave a tale about the human psyche? Can the unravelling of plot and the unravelling of human desires occur simultaneously in a story? Those questions were humming away in the background of my mind as I set about writing my debut novel. For authors who write to explore the human condition, they’re often pressing concerns. Characters may need a plot, but plot also needs character—I wanted to tie a story of crime into a tale about the messiness of human psychology, the complexity of private grudges, and all the joy and anguish of foiled desires. Diving into motivation helped me to bring it all together. A look back through literature shows that stories a…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 261 views
September brings an outstanding line-up of new crime releases showcasing the breadth of the genre and the variety of talented approaches to the world of crime. With new works from established voices and plenty of debuts, September also provides further proof of an ever-expanding and evolving genre. Whether you’re looking for shocking twists, historical thrillers, or fair-play mysteries, here are twelve new releases perfect for finishing out the summer. Vera Kurian, Never Saw Me Coming (Park Row) Vera Kurian’s extraordinarily entertaining Never Saw Me Coming is one of a few books in a new trend I’m calling “yoga pants noir,” in which hot girls in athleisure wear are …
Last reply by Admin_99,