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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Clémence Michallon is an award-winning French journalist, a dog owner, a New Yorker, and a Sopranos convert/superfan. Her US debut, The Quiet Tenant, which comes out this June from Knopf, is poised to be a major summer blockbuster. The book has been sold in over thirty territories and is garnering comparisons to another famous captivity novel—Room by Emma Donoghue. The Quiet Tenant takes place in upstate New York and tells the story of three women affected by an active serial killer, Aidan Thomas. At the start of the novel, Aidan’s wife dies, and he is forced to move “Rachel,” the captive in his shed, into his new home. Suddenly, Aidan’s two identities—family man and mo…
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The first time I met Wanda Morris, we talked, in depth, about body odor. I won’t go into the details, but it was the sort of conversation that sticks with you. The same is true of Wanda. She’s a bestselling author, a lawyer, and a mother of three. Wanda’s stories mirror her life. They’re infectious and down to earth. Above all, they’re real. Readers and critics agree. Wanda’s work has won numerous awards. She’s received praise from every major media outlet. And, if that weren’t enough, her first novel All Her Little Secrets was recently optioned for a limited series starring Emmy-award winning actress Uzo Aduba. Needless to say, I was thrilled to talk shop with Wan…
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There’s a scene in the 2019 movie Captain Marvel where Brie Larson’s character crashes to Earth in 1995, falling through the roof of a Blockbuster video store. She walks through the dimly lit aisles of VHS tapes, before getting startled by, and blowing up, a cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger advertising the 1994 movie True Lies. Captain Marvel is full of nostalgic relics—troll dolls, a payphone in front of a Radio Shack, and songs from No Doubt, Garbage, and TLC. As someone born in 1985, it conjured visceral memories of Friday evenings, walking through Blockbuster, clutching the plastic VHS cases and trying unsuccessfully to get my parents to buy some of the over…
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There’s just something about the Gulf Coast region that invites gritty crime stories. From Dennis Lehane’s Joe Coughlin stories to the work of Carl Hiaasen to Nic Pizzolatto’s Galveston (not to mention the absorbing first season of Pizzolatto’s True Detective), there are many popular examples of hardboiled and noir stories in particular that revel in griminess of the Gulf’s swampy settings and rotten milieus. As someone who grew up on the Gulf, I can understand how the region became so strongly linked with the bleakness of noir. My hometown was a grim, two-faced place: if you wandered a few blocks past the short stretch of road along the waterfront that sold driftwood c…
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With the collapse of communism in the Soviet satellite states in 1989 and in Russia in the early 1990s, the transition to various types of capitalist democracies began. This transition proceeded at a different pace in each country, and to various degrees of completion, but most shared two uncanny facts: an obscene degree of corruption and the sudden appearance of immensely rich oligarchs. Oligarch is a term most used to refer to a person whose wealth resulted from his/her relationship with the ruling party or leader. The common image created by many articles on the rise of these oligarchs is that of savvy individuals “fooling” or “taking over” weak, ineffectual governmen…
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I stood there like a waiter left hoping for a tip. “I was actually hoping to speak to you a minute, Mr. Danby.” He was slow to turn. “’Bout what?” “I’m looking for work.” “Ain’t got any, pal. Sorry.” “You sure? I’m probably better than any guy you got right now.” “A steam tramper from Duluth? Shit, pal, you probably ain’t better than my sister.” The giant that came in with Danby slapped the table so hard the bottles jumped and clinked. The kid had spittle running down his chin. I waited until they were done laughing and said, “I don’t know your sister, Mr. Danby, so I can’t comment on that. When I said I was probably better than any man you got, I was looking at wh…
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I’m so, so, excited to present the conversation below to y’all. I’ve been a huge fan of Grady Hendrix and Riley Sager for years, both as great writers and great genre thinkers (they are also in that rarified category of “men who write women well”), and the conversation below proves that these two are some of the best, and funniest, folks around. Grady Hendrix’s latest novel, How to Sell a Haunted House, was released in January, and Riley Sager’s new novel, The Only One Left, releases today. The following discussion delves into horror, thrillers, 1980s paperbacks, and so much more. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads senior editor Grady Hendrix: Let’s start out with questions neith…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Wolff, The Man in the Corduroy Suit (Bitter Lemon) “A memorable voice in the genre, Wolff’s prose, all sharp edges and abrupt surprises, keeping the reader in a state of edgy discomfort.” –New York Times Riley Sager, The Only One Left (Dutton) “Perennial thriller favorite Riley Sager is back with another page-turner this summer, this one riffing on one of America’s most famous and most notorious true crime cases. . . . The kind of book you’ll stay up late into the night trying to finish.” –Paste Magazine Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant (Knopf) “A gripping psycho…
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There’s a scene in Clint Eastwood’s 1992 film Unforgiven where a kid named Schofield has just killed a man for the first time, and he’s obviously distraught. He’s trying to rationalize what he’s just done, and how this man will never walk or breathe or love again. Finally, he takes a swig of booze and mutters, “Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.” Clint Eastwood’s character, Will Munny, stares off in the distance and says, more to himself than the kid, “We all got it coming, kid.” It’s a poignant line and is a response to the moralistic good vs. evil westerns that dominated the early days of film to a more cynical and complicated world view. More than providing histor…
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If you’ve ever been stuck on a bad date, you might have found yourself looking at your watch and considering if there’s any way you can escape through the bathroom window. As a single man, I became slightly addicted to dating. I downloaded every app going and went on literally hundreds of dates. And while I never had to squeeze through any bathroom windows, or slip through any fire escapes, I did have my fair share of close calls. I spent many, many hours conducting small talk over a game of mini-golf, or trying to flirt while badly salsa dancing – and even getting brutally dismembered at an improvisational murder mystery theatrical experience. It was there, gurgling o…
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When I was watching Asteroid City, the new film from Wes Anderson, I kept thinking of a line from The Fabelmans, the Steven Spielberg movie that came out last year: “in our family, it’s the scientists versus the artists.” Asteroid City is a film about a group of strangers in September 1955 who all wind up in a desert town made famous by an ancient asteroid impact, now populated with scientists doing astronomical research and atomic bomb testing. It had seemed, from the advertisements, that Asteroid City would be Wes Anderson’s first sci-fi movie, and it is, but it’s also more a film exploring the relationship between science and art—the shared investments of scientists an…
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Whether you spend the summer lounging at the pool, hopping on a plane, or sweating it out on the train as you slog through your daily commute, you require a good book as temperatures climb. These historical mysteries are the perfect accompaniment to anything from blazing mornings to sultry summer nights, and all will draw you into mysteries even hotter than the temperature. The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray This Austen-meets-Christie imagining of the circumstances surrounding one of the most reviled of Austen’s character’s murders is a top pick for summer. A summer house party is a classic setting, not to mention we get plenty of nostalgia as we revisit not on…
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Alas, there are only four works in translation that I could find for June that counted as crime fiction, but what crime novels they are! It’s a great batch of mystery, noir, and suspense below, with meddling kids in China, mysterious housekeepers in Sweden, murderous mourners in Japan, and vengeful sisters in Brazil. Zijin Chen, Bad Kids Translated by Michelle Deeter (Pushkin Press) Bad Kids is about all kinds of morally compromised people, of all ages. When three teens come across the footage of a middle aged man’s murder of his in-laws, they decide to blackmail him. They’re also understandably worried about retribution for some of their own acts, and it’s a toss-u…
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When my husband and I lived in British Columbia, we used any and every opportunity to get outdoors. After trying life in suburbia, we opted to rent an old farmhouse (built in the late 1800s) on the bluffs above the Fraser River. We had a gorgeous view of Mount Baker from our front yard, and a babbling brook in the back. Sometimes, packs of coyotes would roam through the property late at night, howling at the moon and rattling the original, time-warped windows in the kitchen. I was grateful that our bedroom was on the second floor on those dark nights, but secretly feared that coyotes were surely smart enough to climb stairs if the windows ever shattered like I feared they…
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It’s been a really great year for new books coming out from Latine authors (including authors based in the United States and writers from across Latin America, because borders aren’t real anyway so why divide everyone up), so I decided to highlight a few of the many new titles hitting shelves this year. Below, you’ll find a mix of horror, noir, psychological thrillers, and historical mysteries, as well as a blend of new and established voices. This article is not pegged to a particular heritage date or holiday, because we shouldn’t need an excuse to read diverse books. Juan Martinez, Extended Stay (University of Arizona Press) El Norte meets Barton Fink in this hotel…
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Nicole Kotsianas was a Garden State girl, born and bred. “Jersey through and through,” she told anyone who asked, as if it wasn’t already abundantly clear. In high school, she drove a dirty white 1990 Buick Century her grandfather had given her, with cowskin interiors and the fuzzy dice—the “Buey Beast.” Her hairstyle, complete with bangs, harked back to her days as a teenager holding a lighter aloft for Bruce Springsteen, who had attended her same school. When, as an adult, she finally made it out to Los Angeles, she wandered down to the Venice boardwalk and strolled past head shops and haunted houses and didgeridoo-playing Rastafarians. It reminded her of the Jersey sho…
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I’ve always loved Sunny Randall. Introduced at the dawn of the Millennium, Robert B. Parker’s youngest—and only female—PI is also his most modern creation. Divorced and sex-positive, Sunny has always enjoyed the company of men, yet she’s never needed a male presence to complete her. Right out of the gate, she’s been unabashedly great at her job (In one of the first scenes I remember reading in 1999’s Family Honor, she impresses a chauvinistic would-be client with her shooting skills.) And she unapologetically puts that job first. At a time in which women were typically relegated to supporting roles in crime fiction, Sunny earned herself a place alongside such shining ex…
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I never knew my grandfather, Alpha LaRue Eberhart; he died long before I was born. But I knew of him through my father’s stories, along with sepia-toned photograph albums from my dad’s childhood. Tall, with perfect posture, a regal nose, and a twinkle in his eye, A.L., as he was called, wore bespoke suits, enjoyed a bourbon and a fine cigar, and took his family and friends on sporting trips to the big rivers and lakes of northern Minnesota and Canada. They’d fish for their dinner, tell stories by the campfire, and sleep under the stars. It was he who endowed his children—along with me and my cousins—with our love of wild places. I knew he was known across the country as a…
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About four years ago, when I was sharing a few chapters of my novel-in-progress 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster with my creative writing group, I was met with extremely harsh criticism from some of the members, mainly due to my main character, Trickster, they found her too deceitful, too violent, with no redeeming quality in her. 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster is inspired by the life of my great-aunt, who was one of the oldest women to escape alone from North Korea. She had lived through the most tragic, dramatic period of modern Korean history. When I decided to write a book about her, however, she wasn’t able to tell me a coherent story of her life in Pyongyang…
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“Opposites attract” is a romantic adage that translates into numerous languages, exists in many cultures, and, thanks to an incredibly catchy Paula Abdul song, is well-known to anyone who was alive in the late Eighties. We all know pairings that seem too different to work: the extrovert and the introvert; the child of privilege and their working-class partner; the archetypal beauty and the beast. But when we remove pheromones and physical attraction from the equation, are we still drawn to those who are so different from us? Science tells us that people usually choose friends who share their interests, values, and world views. But many of us have companions with differe…
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One of my favorite lines about conspiracy theories is that when the famous director Stanley Kubrick was hired to fake the moon landing, he was such a perfectionist he insisted on shooting on location. That’s a funny one, but there are people who believe (maybe you) that Kubrick was hired by the government to film a fictitious moon landing and that he left six teasing clues in The Shining as proof he did. I learned all of this while researching conspiracy theories for Night Will Find You, a thriller about a missing girl that also examines our belief system—in higher powers, ghosts, science, psychic phenomenon, conspiracies—basically in things we can’t see or prove but be…
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The inspiration for FINAL CUT, my murder mystery set behind-the-scenes of a Hollywood movie shoot that’s plagued by a string of disasters, came from my 27 years working as a costume designer and key costumer in the film industry — and realizing all the things that can go horribly wrong on a movie set, especially one that’s run without proper safety oversight. Since reading murder mysteries is (without question) my own favorite form of entertainment, I knew before I started writing that would be my genre of choice as an author. And I just thought that a movie set teetering on the brink of chaos was a good backdrop for a mystery because as the author, I can present the ci…
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Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by stories about nomadic people, or those who are otherwise living off the beaten path: grifters, circus performers, con artists. If the character is doing life in a nonconformist, unstructured way, I want to read about it. I don’t think my interest is unusual; just look at the performance of books like On the Road; Eat, Pray, Love; and Wild. We love to believe that it’s possible for the most normcore among us to get off this hamster wheel and fling themselves into the great unknown. Like Frodo exiting the Shire, we envision ourselves unencumbered by the shackles of our 9-5s—our mortgages—our monthly expenses—the need to make dinner…
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Maybe I was influenced a little too much by Indiana Jones as a kid, or perhaps a childhood growing up finding arrowheads and fossils on the flat alluvial soil of the Midwest seared my imagination with a love of excavation, but whatever the cause, one of my favorite plot devices is the discovery of an ancient relic or artifact. It can be an object, something buried away for centuries that has repercussions in the contemporary world. It can be information that has been withheld, usually purposely, but once discovered drastically alters the characters’ perceptions. It can be a virus or contagion, bottled up and then released like a genie from a bottle. Or it can be a valuab…
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Female friendships can be complicated—just like the women in them. My own best friend and I have been through it all. The ups: laughing so hard our sides hurt about jokes from years before; confessing our deepest secrets; crying on each other’s shoulders. The downs: growing apart during university; awkward catch-ups via messages on birthdays that sometimes went unanswered; getting into stupid arguments and simmering about them for far too long. But I know I can call her anytime, and she’ll be there. Crime novels magnify female friendships, taking them in directions that might shock or appall readers—perhaps because the characters are all too familiar. Whether readers have…
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