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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Norman Schwarzkopf, the late hero of Desert Storm, is credited with saying, “The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.” Though Stormin’ Norman’s contributions to that war will certainly go down in the history books, one could argue that this famous quote could be his greater legacy. During my military service—post Desert Storm and into the war on terror—I heard it repeated countless times as justifications for military exercises, i.e., sweat. Small wonder. It is hardly debatable that a well-drilled, well-exercised military would be more prepared for the horrific, dreadful challenge of a real war. And that’s what the US military does during peacetime—sweats. T…
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Imagine being in your own locked room scenario, surrounded by thriller authors. Considering the search histories on their computers, all these people know not only how to kill, but also how to get away with it, hide the body, and set someone else up to take the fall. So, how bad would it be if someone around you—a peer, no less—ended up dead? In I Didn’t Do It, that’s exactly what happens. Murderpalooza, the annual thriller conference, is taking place in New York City when the darling of the industry, Kristin Bailey, is found by housekeeping stabbed to death in her hotel room. Then, four authors of varying successes—a midlister, an egomaniac, a has-been, and a newbie—are…
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What is a thriller or mystery without a sprinkling of red herrings? The dictionary defines a red herring in two ways: a dried smoked herring, which is turned red by the smoke. a clue or piece of information that is, or is intended to be, misleading or distracting. Interestingly, there is no actual species of fish named “red herring.” A red herring is actually a type of herring that’s smoked heavily, or brine cured, giving it a red color and a strongly pungent smell. They were used in hunting to train dogs to follow that fishy scent and not get distracted by other smells. The redness and powerful odor are designed to both distract and lure attention—exactly the purpo…
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“It is strange how a girl can disappear without leaving a ripple upon the waters of the Port of Missing Girls.” In 1943 Chicago Tribune journalist Marcia Winn traveled to Hollywood to report on the stories rarely covered by their local papers. She brought back tales of scandal, corruption, cover-ups, and crime, but none of her articles had as big an impact as the second in her series: “Hollywood Vice Swallows Up 300 Girls a Month.” In the article, Winn interviewed an anonymous law enforcement official who laid out in brutal terms what often happened to girls who arrived in Hollywood looking for fame and stardom: finding movies hard to break into, the girl would meet a “s…
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I should probably raise this with my therapist, but instead I’m just going to write about it here. On both page and screen, I’ve always been drawn to characters who have no clue what’s going on. There’s something both comforting and thrilling about sitting on the shoulder of a fictional character who is bewildered about the world around them. To clarify, I’m not talking about fictional characters who are simply challenged by the need to solve a mystery or a puzzle. Such a challenge is commonplace in fiction, of course, and one would be hard pressed to argue that Sherlock Holmes, for example, was bewildered or confused about the world around him. No, I’m talking about s…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Emma Rosenblum, Bad Summer People (Flatiron) “Rosenblum is a master of understated social satire, and her gift for capturing human follies and the dark, emotional depth of her characters through artfully rendered details make Bad Summer People a seriously compulsive read.” –Shelf Awareness Jaime Lynn Hendricks, I Didn’t Do It (Scarlet) “A furious, riotous, meta-romp … A dishy balm for every aspiring author who’s envied those established figures at mystery conventions.” –Kirkus Ivy Pochoda, Sing Her Down (FSG/MCD) “In muscular prose, Pochoda plumbs the psychological depths …
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San Diego, lolling in the sunshine down there on California’s southern Pacific coast. Just under a million and half people, it’s America’s eighth most populous city. Formerly part of the Mexican Empire, boasting a “Mediterranean climate,” and the second largest city of California after LA. A lot of beaches, Balboa Park, a world-famous zoo, a baseball team, and some of the US’s most expensive homes and resorts. Of course, there’s some crime writing too…and some strong pedigree—Raymond Chandler did pitch up in La Jolla for a time… Let’s start with San Diego’s entry into the always excellent Akashic Noir short story series – San Diego Noir (2019) — which, as the book’s blur…
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When I first sat down at the keyboard, I enjoyed inventing all sorts of characters. A little red-haired girl who can tell the future a in bowl of popcorn. A beautiful half-Chinese, half-Black divorcée who decides to revenge-date every guy she’d turned down before she got married. As author Charles de Lint says, “Why not use the whole palette?” Then I saw a survey of actors appearing on-screen in big American movies the year that the first Avatar came out, and it was #sowhite. A few Black and Latinx actors were allowed in, but Asians were so rare that the chance of glimpsing us on-screen was statistically equal to spotting a blue-skinned alien. And I’m guessing the aliens…
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People ask writers about the best piece of advice they ever received. I haven’t received many, but I recall one particularly well. Many years ago I had a friendly acquaintance with the brilliant writer/producer/director Larry Gelbart, probably best known as having developed M*A*S*H for television and co-written the book for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He was a real mensch, a gentleman who did not rub his fame in your face. And I asked him once how he could take something that made him very angry and turn it into genius-level comedy, which he often did. “Go where the pain is,” Gelbart said. It took me a long time to process that and even longer to be …
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The extra marital affair is like a Petrie dish of great material for a writer—secrets, betrayal, danger, sex, destruction, jealousy. Right out of the gate an affair raises the stakes for the characters involved. Marriages could end, families could be destroyed, reputations ruined, and yet, people still do it—risk everything for an illicit hook up. Readers are sucked in by the sexy, intense beginning stages of an affair and will inevitably stick around to see how badly it ends. Another reason that I believe affairs appear so prominently throughout literature is the fact that there’s something universally relatable about them. Most people have either been involved in an aff…
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May brings with it a host of new fiction in translation that proves, once again, that by the time something is translated, a large number of people have already vetted its quality and pronounced it very good indeed. The following includes two novels from Japan, a psychological thriller from Fuminori Nakamura and a locked room mystery by Yukito Ayatsuji, as well as the last novel from Spanish great Javier Marias, a brutally astute thriller from French author Louise Mey, and a deeply human new investigation from Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indridason. Arnaldur Indridason, The Girl By the Bridge Translated by Philip Roughton (Minotaur) In Icelandic author Arnaldur Indrid…
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The serpent was the most cunning of the beasts and tempted Eve to eat the fruit. She gave the fruit to Adam and he ate, too. Then their eyes were opened, and they saw they were naked. Just so, a snake figures prominently in The Lady Eve—a Brazilian snake, called Emma—along with a woman who is sometimes called Eve; and after the woman “clunks” a man on the head with a piece of fruit (using the traditional though nonbiblical apple) he soon enough begins to fall, not once but six times. He’s also conked on the head twice more (by a large hat box and an entire coffee service), gets a carving roast spilled over him with all its gravy, and is interfered with by a horse. It’s a…
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“Women have an eye for detail and are excellent observers.” –Kate Warne In 1856, Allan Pinkerton hired Kate Warne, a 23-year-old widow, to join his detective agency. She was America’s first female private detective and instrumental in uncovering assassination plots on President Abraham Lincoln and catching embezzlers. John Derrig wrote that Warne “dress[ed] the part or fit right into whatever situation she was in… She was very brave, and was comfortable doing what she was doing because she was good at it.” Warne was so good, Pinkerton created the Female Detective Bureau in 1860 and asked her to oversee the recruitment of ladies. (Derrig, John. Pinkerton’s First Lady: Kat…
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Recently, I re-read Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is a dark, bewitching book, and this time, I hunted for monsters in it. I found four—four specific usages of the word “monster”—amid a glut of spooky things (ghoulish motifs, metaphors and pathetic fallacy, and sinister pet-names, to name a few types). As a seminal Gothic text, which both plays up and subverts stylistic hallmarks of the genre, Charlotte Brontë‘s 1847 novel Jane Eyre is obviously associated with beasts and phantoms—and many such examples are highlighted in a chapter called “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress” from perhaps the most influential work of feminist Victorian scholarship written in the twe…
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Josh Kendall is the executive editor of Mulholland Books. Josh works with some of my current favorite writers: Jordan Harper, Gabino Iglesias, Walter Mosley, Michael Koryta, Joe Landsdale, Michael Farris Smith, and many, many more. With Shop Talk lumbering along into its third year, I decided it might be nice to mix things up. Considering the aforementioned laundry list of all-star authors, Josh seemed like a good place to start. The main goal of this column has always been to delve deeper into the work. That’s what interests me most, how people in this industry make books. How they’re written. How they’re revised. And now, for the first-time in Shop Talk history—how t…
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In “The Backlist” series, Polly Stewart and today’s top authors revisit and discuss a classic work of mystery or suspense. Today, Stewart is talking with Andrea Bartz, bestselling author of The Spare Room, We Were Never Here, and more. They’re reading Ethel Lina White’s 1936 novel, The Lady Vanishes. How were you first introduced to The Lady Vanishes? Well, I first read it when I was thirteen or fourteen, and then pretty much forgot about it. Then I recently read Lucy Foley’s The Paris Apartment, and in the back of this particular edition, they had a section on the books and movies that inspired the novel, and one of them was The Lady Vanishes. Foley said it was an insp…
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It was February 24, 1995 and I was flying from New York to Memphis, Tennessee to interview soul man Isaac Hayes. As a fan of “Black Moses”—a name that Hayes’ friend and hired gun (literally) Dino Woodard began gave him and Jet magazine writer Chester Higgins popularized the moniker—since I was an eight-year-old bopping to the Blaxploitation bounce of “The Theme from Shaft” in 1971, I looked forward to spending time with the man. The flight south was two-hours long. Lounging in a window seat, I flipped through a thick folder of Xeroxed newspaper/magazine clips on Hayes and Stax Records, the historic label that launched his career. In the segregated 1960s South, Stax was …
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The art of espionage is as old as war itself, so it’s no surprise that popular books and films have long included stories of spycraft and undercover derring-do. Spies must possess qualities we generally admire—courage, intelligence, adaptability, endurance—as well as specialized skill sets that give them an added advantage in their fight against the enemy. They are fascinating because we wonder what it would be like to be in their shoes, what decisions we would make when faced with the same choices. The elements of danger, ingenuity, of deadly expertise and secret-keeping, all lend a certain allure to the bloody business of war. WWII seems an especially fertile ground fo…
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a widely known classic must be in want of some reimagining, reconstruction and general exploration (to misquote Pride and Prejudice). However, different authors reimagining the same original work may go to different levels or poke at different areas when looking for tools they can work with, images they can use, and inherent issues to explore. The surface elements of the Scarlet Pimpernel stories are straightforward enough: a heroic nobleman (Sir Percy Blakeney) rescues innocents from peril (the French Revolution) while pretending to be a fashionable idiot (“Lud, my cravat!”) while juggling a loving wife (Marguerite), romanti…
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One of the first things I did after inking my initial two-book contract as a suspense novelist was head to Barnes and Noble and buy a couple of Nancy Drew mysteries. I’d been offered the contract based on only four chapters and an outline for a mystery—in part because I’d already worked with the publisher on a successful non-fiction book—and as sweet as I found that arrangemnent, there was a hitch: I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I could write an entire book, especially one that readers would find entertaining. It was time to accelerate my learning curve. Since my day job running a magazine meant that my learning curve needed to be approached late at night or early on …
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I make mistakes in all my books. Once I described the USS Intrepid as a battleship. A reader who had served on her during World War II set me straight that she was an aircraft carrier. Another time I had a character gazing out onto the Atlantic from the shores of Sag Harbor. A local told me that Sag Harbor is on the Long Island Sound, a tidal estuary of the Atlantic. (And yes, I had to look up what that meant.) There are others. A lot of others. All of my errors, however, are inadvertent. I do not take any literary license in my writing. Most of my books are legal thrillers, and I pride myself on getting the look and feel of the legal system exactly right. There are…
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In my book THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS, a teen on a scholarship sneaks into a party filled with her wealthy prep-school peers. As a ‘have-not’ in a world full of ‘haves,’ she just wants a taste of the glamorous life for a night, but she ends up in a twisted game of lies that turns deadly. The theme of Haves Vs Have-Nots has been explored in YA fiction across all genres, from thrillers like mine, to contemporary romance, mystery, even historical fiction. Here are nine titles that stand out: The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes All Avery wants to do is win a scholarship and get out. So when Tobias Hawthorne – a billionaire she doesn’t even know – dies and l…
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Why bother with a divorce when you can have it all? For a certain type of male sociopath, the calculus is simple. I say this because I knew one. Fifty years ago, on a blazing Saturday in June, Duane Frye beat his wife Betty to death in their Denver-area garage two weeks before I was to marry their son. That morning I was one of the last to speak to Betty. Two hours later, she was dead. A couple of hours after that, I encountered Duane at the karate studio where my fiancé was teaching. Between the time Betty was murdered and her body was found, I was with him for more than an hour. And, of course, we were together that evening with cops crawling through his house, during …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Kevin Powers, A Line in the Sand (Little Brown) “Sure to rank among the year’s best thrillers, A Line in the Sand is a tense, twisting, and thoughtful story of the intersection between grief and greed— and the human lives crushed in the middle. Kevin Powers writes with uncommon grace, delivering the rare novel that is both propulsive and contemplative, calling to mind writers as varied as Tim O’Brien and Michael Connelly.” –Michael Koryta Kate White, Between Two Strangers (Harper) “Another fine performance. . . . The writing sizzles, the mystery of the inheritance is intriguing, …
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Kabul – of late a poor benighted city of three and half million people destroyed by politics, extremism, endemic poverty, and foreign intervention – British, Soviet, American. But once Kabul was different – an oasis high up in a narrow valley of the Hindu Kush and the thrilling end of the old “Hippie Trail”. It was a place of colour, experimentation, modernism – once dubbed the “Paris of Central Asia”. The Soviet invasion of 1979 started a series of continuous civil wars – Russian vs Mujahideen; Taliban against the American-led invasion, a brief respite before Kabul fell to the Taliban once again in 2021. A geopolitical hot spot, a country of incomparable beauty and harsh…
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