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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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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It’s never been more important to start your crime novel with high-stakes. Doesn’t matter if it’s life-or-death type peril, or if someone’s marriage is about to go down the toilet. Maybe he’s hanging from his fingernails from a cliff. Maybe she just arrived home from meeting up with her boyfriend, and hubby’s sitting there in the dark kitchen waiting for her, his eyes full of dreadful knowing. Something has to be at badly at stake in your opening page, paragraph, line, because we’re living in a time when readers don’t have to tolerate anything less. Elmore Leonard said it in his ‘Rules for Writers’: ‘Never open a book with weather.’ He was trying to say that what’s goin…
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Shark! Coming soon to an Eastport, Maine beach near you – sharks! Big ones, little ones, even huge, bitey ones: In 2021, nearly 50 Great White sharks were seen on marine scientists’ tracking devices in Passamaquoddy Bay and nearby waters. And that’s just one species; eight different kinds of shark visit Maine, eating seals and any other tasty creatures unlucky enough to encounter one of these toothy apex predators. Tasty creatures like us, for example. Before Europeans arrived in North America, ancestors of the nearby Canadian Micmac tribe had special weapons for battling the sharks that attacked their ocean-going canoes. More recently, in 2010 a Maine lobsterman leaned…
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A few years ago, I went to see the film Victoria with a friend. It was his pick and I knew nothing about the film beforehand apart from that it was shot in one continuous take over two hours at dawn. What begins as a story about new friendship devolves suddenly into a crime story in ways I didn’t see coming. The story accelerates in sudden, shocking ways after the real-time pacing lulls you into a sense of safety. This film burrowed its way into my subconscious and I dreamed about it for weeks afterward, dreams that were so real I’d wake up gasping. It’s something I hadn’t experienced since watching The Blair Witch Project at a sleepover when I was twelve. (Interestingly,…
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Megan Abbott, Beware the Woman (Putnam) Megan Abbott goes Rosemary’s Baby! A pregnant woman and her doting husband head to a family retreat in the woods, ready to relax with the knowledge that her father-in-law is a doctor. But a sudden health scare, and the family’s strict supervision of her activities, make the cottage start to feel more like a prison, and Abbott’s narrator starts to get a bad feeling about her mother-in-law’s early demise. Abbott has already proven that teenage girlhood is Noir AF, so I’m psyched to read her do the same thing for pregnancy. Emma Rosenblum, Bad Summer People (Flatiron) It was difficult to tear myself away from this delicious thri…
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Growing up, there was a box full of three-by-three cardboard-framed Kodak slides that lay in my parents’ closet upon a plywood shelf. The slides were a world I viewed by pinching the squares between index and thumb, holding them up to the light, and viewing the pics of young men attired in military-green clothing. They were soldiers. Marines. One pic always stood out. It was a black-and-white photo of my father standing with a grenade launcher in his right hand, wearing a pair of Chuck Taylors, dressed down in his fatigues with a backdrop of hooches he and other marines had constructed upon their arrival. The pics were from my father’s service overseas in Da Nang from De…
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“It’s important to know your genre if you’re going to make an impact on it,” says Millie Blomquist, the protagonist of my debut novel, Breaking In, a story in which Millie leads a group of film students to pull off a real life heist by utilizing what she learned from the movies. Her knowledge stems from having watched and documented over 150 heist movies, which meant I got to watch and document over 150 heist movies (though to be honest, Millie is much more discipled than I am as I stopped taking notes after movie #102). To fully submerge myself in the genre, I started back when heist films were fully steeped in black and white noir. Working my way through the years, I d…
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I spend my days working on municipal climate change policy. Each day I confront details of the dire future ahead if we don’t collectively change how we live in a very big way. There is so much potential for good—for a shift to systems that make us all healthier and more connected and resilient, to correct the injustices baked into our existing systems. But change is hard and often frustratingly slow. And we aren’t currently cutting our fossil fuel use fast enough to avoid climate catastrophe. So why in the world would I choose to come home from my day job to hunch over a different laptop and spend yet more time thinking about climate change in the context of a suspense …
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The soaring popularity of shows like Succession, White Lotus, and Gossip Girl is a testament to our insatiable appetite for stories set in the glamorous, high-stakes world of the wealthy elite. From dramatic power struggles to indulgent excess, we’re fascinated by the lives of the one percent of the one percent. But for thriller authors, the rarified world is also a treasure trove of danger and intrigue. The ultra-rich are a notoriously private bunch and their penchant for concealing skeletons in their curated closets only adds to the allure. Throw in the assumption that money can make problems (and sometimes people) disappear, and we’re itching to know more about what go…
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There is something particularly sinister about horror media centering around moms and motherhood. Traditionally, mothers are thought of as nurturing and kind, as the centers of our universe, places of safety, from the moment we’re born. When that dynamic is broken, when our trust in what we believe is a fundamental truth proves to be misplaced, a gripping unease sets in. But what happens when the unease festers in the mother, too? In my book, Graveyard of Lost Children, Olivia is hit from both sides—betrayal by her own mother at a young age that follows her to adulthood, and her fractured feelings as she becomes a mother in her own right. How can she possibly claw her w…
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As a mystery writer, it’s no surprise that whodunnits are my favourite genre to read—especially if I’m caught off guard by a shocking twist. But when considering these sharp suspense novels, the question arises: to twist or not to twist? It’s often agreed that a murder mystery feels most satisfying when the clues were there all along, but the reader simply didn’t piece them together in time. Although, when there are twists involved, it’s all too easy to feel cheated. For me, though, the deception makes the read even more rewarding. It’s that complete 180 flip that turns everything on its head and makes you pause, think back over the clues and subtle nudges, and then kick…
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Two years before writer, director and composer John Carpenter reshaped horror films with “Halloween,” he made “7Assault on Precinct 13,” a lean, violent film made on a shoestring budget and owing a debt to predecessors like Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo” and George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.” Released in 1976, “Assault” is an influential but little-seen thriller. It’s possible that siege thrillers like “Die Hard” would have been made without Carpenter’s original film but they almost certainly would have felt different. The original “Assault” has been a favorite of critics and film industry types for going on 50 years. And “Assault” has its own off-the-screen mys…
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It probably goes without saying, New York Times bestselling novelist Tosca Lee is a woman possessed. You may not want to say it too loudly, but after all, her first novel was about the devil. And she describes herself as stubborn and determined, a characteristic she picked up from years of classical ballet training. And a trait, frankly, that’s not bad for a writer. She wanted to be a ballerina, not a writer, but a groin injury at age 14 cured that notion. There’s something fearless about her. A biblical scholar, a self-proclaimed Christian since age eleven but not a member of a brand-name religion. No, she relies more on non-denominational churches and appeals more to…
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Ekphrasis: (noun) a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art As a published poet, I tend to lean heavily on literary devices. Metaphors, cadence, a cannonball of irony, you get the picture. So even within my debut mystery, I didn’t shy away from ekphrastic writing, as I knew how it would add depth and underscore the tension in my novel. After all, writers have been vividly describing art since seventh century BC. (Thank you, Homer.) Art can grip you, rattle you, charm you, seduce you, and burn into your consciousness. If you have ever seen the classic film Laura, you know how a portrait can captivate both the hero and the audience. (Cue the d…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * C.E. McGill, Our Hideous Progeny (Harper) In this innovative debut, Victor Frankenstein’s grand-niece, Mary, is determined to make her own way in the bustling science scene in mid-19th century London, but is running into obstacles at every turn. But soon, she comes across the family mystery: what really happened to her great-uncle? The search for that answer will take her on a dangerous journey. McGill paints a vivid period landscape and unfolds a story that resonates across the generations. –DM Vanessa Walters, The Nigerwife (Atria) In this pitch-perfect psychological thr…
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Listen. This actually happened to the friend of my cousin’s cousin. It was years ago, mind, way before we had the internet or mobile phones, so you have to bear that in mind. And it happened in the States – you know they have big houses out there, houses with big gardens, set back from the road. Anyway. This girl, she’s sixteen, she’s babysitting for her neighbours’ kids. It’s late, so the children are in bed, and she’s sitting up getting some homework done, when the phone rings – someone is calling the landline. She answers it, expecting a parent checking up on her, but all she gets is a man’s voice. She doesn’t know him. He says, ‘have you checked on the kids?’. Our gir…
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The first time I read Frankenstein, I was unimpressed. I was freshly fifteen, slogging my way through a series of classics for English class, and desperate to be spending my time finishing up Buffy or The Vampire Chronicles instead. I found Victor Frankenstein relatable enough in the beginning; like him, I was a precocious (read: terribly conceited) student, determined to make my mark as a scientist. But as the book went on, I found him more and more pathetic in his failures and his self-loathing, unforgivable in his choice to abandon his creation – not least because, if he’d only stuck with his monster, I was sure, it would have made for a far more interesting story. I f…
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Like many poets, Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) spent much of his life toiling in literary obscurity. He helped found the Objectivist Press in 1934, which printed William Carlos Williams and other poets, and positioned himself as a writer of “objectivist” poetry, which he described as “the objective details and the music of the verse; words pithy and plain; without the artifice of regular meters.” Reznikoff is perhaps most notable for two epic works of poetry, “Holocaust” (1975) and “Testimony.” The latter has a lengthy, tangled history. Originally birthed as a slim prose volume in 1934, it grew into a massive tome of poetry (subsequent editions rolled out in 1965 and ’68…
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