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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Russians, double agents, secret police, and assassinations may all sound like elements of a Cold War novel, but they’re also part of a much earlier era—Imperial Russia. As a writer of historical mystery, I’m always tempted to include real people in my novels. When I learned that in November 1899, Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich Romanov paid a visit to London—the setting for my series, I couldn’t resist. I knew enough about the Russian Imperial family to know they’d make for interesting research—all those elements noted above and royalty. Perfect for crime fiction. But incorporating real people into fiction is tricky. The situation is fictitious, but the people have to st…
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In storytelling, we are in the middle of what I call the ‘age of the “strong woman” character’. If asked, probably everyone has a slightly different idea of what exactly we mean when we say, ‘strong woman.’ I like to think about strong women has any story where a woman main character has desires that transcend the stereotypical roles of women falling in love, keeping house, and raising babies. Many of the below novels are occupied with those familiar roles, but they explore them in extravagant, nail-biting ways that give new life to what are often old narratives about women in the domestic sphere, to breathe life and character into routines that used to be the backdrops f…
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While many of our favorite mysteries have humor in them (thank you Agatha Christie, Craig Johnson, Nevada Barr…I could go on for hours here), sometimes we need a little more humor to get us through the day. To let what hair we have left down. To tear up with laughter, preferably with a furry friend nearby. Or a glass of wine. Either way. Here are some stories where laugh-out-loud humor is a must, yet they still manage to deliver that soul-filling mystery we all crave like a carb addict craves pasta. Louisiana Longshot by Jana Deleon There’s a reason Jana’s books are beloved by thousands. Her character, CIA assassin Fortune Redding, is hilarious. The first book in the …
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Greg Buchanan, Sixteen Horses (Flatiron) In a small coastal town in England, a local detective and a veterinary forensics expert are confronted with the disturbing, seemingly ritualistic killing of sixteen horses. When a pathogen is found in the soil where the horses were buried and people who came into contact with it fall ill, chaos and suspicion spread through the town like a virus. This is the gripping premise of Greg Buchanan’s brooding, searching debut, of the season’s most powerful novels. Buchanan has a swift, impactful storytelling style and Sixteen Horses looks to be the …
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In the fall of 2014, a seismic event crippled an entertainment giant and tantalized Hollywood gossip voyeurs everywhere. A group identifying itself as “Guardians of Peace” stole massive amounts of data from Sony Pictures Entertainment in a brazen cyberattack that was elevated all the way to the Oval Office. Thanks to carefully orchestrated leaks, phrases like “a minimally talented spoilt brat” (poor Angelina…) and “the masturbatory call is a wank I have no time for” were pulled from executives’ private emails and splashed all over newspapers and gossip sites. Careers were stymied, movie releases were cancelled, and a horrific new fear was born: What if the entire contents…
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As a writer of thrillers, but more importantly, as a reader of thrillers, I’ve begun to imagine the ingredients that would go into making the perfect hardboiled detective novel—a classic of the genre that would seduce anyone who happened to open the cover on a whim and read the first few paragraphs. And having seduced that everyman or everywoman, would hold them captive until the last word and then haunt them as readers forever. What ingredients and how combined? How stirred, folded, melted, blended? How heated to perfection, rare or well-done? What is the recipe, and is it written in blood? In contemplating the prescription for the perfect crime novel, I decided that w…
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Picture us, reader, taking a walk in the park. We have masks in our pockets and variants on the brain. If we had been on this walk two years ago and I said, “I worry that the world is going to face a sustained health crisis the likes of which had never been seen before.” Reader, you would have muttered politely that I had a vivid imagination. I would have known you were trying to get me to stop talking about herd immunity and the worst-case scenario and how the hell is [your favorite unfortunate part of the world] going to make it? I would have sighed and answered, “I know, I should lighten up. It’s August. Nothing happens in August. And the books are always good becau…
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If I had a map, I would have known we were in a southern region of the Appalachian Mountains. But all I had to orient myself was an endless stretch of identical dirt and trees, dappled in the afternoon light. Miles went by without any sign of human habitation before we finally reached a double-wide trailer plopped down right in the middle of nowhere. My captors led me straight inside, where a middle-aged woman had clearly been waiting for my arrival. A plaque on a small desk spelled out an unremarkable name, Jill or Ann or Jan. She ran her icy eyes up and down before landing on my face. “Elizabeth, I assume?” “Don’t bother,” the male escort said. “She doesn’t talk.” …
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When it comes to classic and traditional mysteries, the old manor house in a remote part of England is a classic of the genre: isolated, often impoverished, and filled with suspicious characters. It’s easy to picture Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot unmasking a murderer in the parlor, surrounded by suspects. In fact, English manors, villages, cities, and boarding schools are fodder for many a modern mystery, with present-day British authors having just as much with the settings as their historical counterparts. But British authors aren’t the only ones who love a creepy moor or crumbling manor house. Authors writing whodunits from the United States seem just as likely t…
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My introduction to the concept of a hitman was in 1972 when I sat in my local New York City grindhouse, The Tapia, and watched The Mechanic starring Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent. Directed by Michael Winner, the film introduced Arthur Bishop, a cold loner who enjoyed classical music, fine art and expensive wines. If it wasn’t for the killing part, he could’ve been just another tasteful bachelor from the Playboy era hanging out in his beautiful home and playing vinyl records on his state-of-the-art system. Over the years, I’ve seen and read more than a few hitman (and hitwoman) movies and novels, but I never thought about writing my own until editor Andy Raus…
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Every writer has a bag of tricks to conjure the muse or to, as David Lynch puts it, “catch the big fish.” For some, it’s a simple ritual, such as “morning pages” or imposing a daily word count. For others, it may be a complicated mélange of caffeine, nicotine, booming opera music and a rigorous pass through the day’s tabloid reportage. Carson McCullers purportedly required a beer to start the writing day, then moved onto a sherry-tea concoction before turning to bourbon as her closer. I know at least one writer who has a standing desk/treadmill situation so he can constantly be moving as he writes—all while he has two TV screens rigged to soundlessly play movies on consta…
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Hot girl/boy/person summer? More like cold case summer! For the next three months, take your ears on a virtual crime-themed vacation (though if you can swing the real thing, might I recommend CrimeCruise?) From France to Indonesia, from the rocky cliffs of Ireland to a former pirate haven in Southern Mexico, and to the not-so-sleepy suburbs of NYC, prepare for chilling, bingeable adventures. Chameleon (Campside Media) – Season 2 premiered June 15 I’ll be the first to admit it. I was a little late to the Chameleon party. Season 1 (Hollywood Con Queen) premiered in October 2020. I didn’t start listening to this offering from Campside Media until after Season 2 (High Rol…
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Place has always been important in the books I write. My new novel, a literary psychological thriller called Fierce Little Thing, is set on a back-to-the-land commune-turned-cult in rural Maine, where a group of children are driven to a terrible, desperate act in a last-ditch attempt to save the only home they’ve ever loved. More than two decades later, the same group of five middle-aged friends are blackmailed back together and onto the land, forced to reconcile how what they did has shaped who they are, and who they will become. I’ve set my three most recent books in fictionalized versions of places I know well. My New York Times bestseller Bittersweet—about a naïve Li…
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I’d argue that seeing your friends succeed is probably sweeter than your own success—it’s less fleeting, and purer in a way. Writers tend to speed past the good times and focus on the bad. Maybe that’s what makes us who we are? But when it’s something good happening to someone else, to someone we care about, it lasts longer. This is a circuitous way of saying I was so happy to see the success my friend Pornsak Pichetshote’s had with his creator-owned comic book series, THE GOOD ASIAN, in tandem with artist Alexandre Tefenkgi. A love letter to the PI genre told through the eyes of flawed, conflicted detective Edison Hark, who is hunting a killer on the streets of 1936 Chi…
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Our moving van rolled into Seattle and brought the heat. A week of record-setting triple-digit temperatures, brutal enough to buckle the sidewalks. Had we packed the Southern California sun along with the blender and spatulas? Seattle wasn’t this hot—in both senses of the word—when we’d left the Northwest sixteen years before. In 2005, Rain City was still more or less the overcast, over-caffeinated burg of my college days. It was the combined bust-and-boom of the late aughts that first made me want to write about Seattle. The housing market crashed even as local tech companies (including a certain online book vendor) were just hitting their stride, attracting corpora…
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Whenever I receive the tried-and-true question—“Where do you get your ideas?”—I answer honestly: “A lot of the time I steal them from myself.” By this I mean, as a veteran journalist (a decade in newspapers and more than twenty years now with The Associated Press), I have plenty of material at my fingertips. For sure, I often study up on plotlines and scenarios for my mysteries about Andy Hayes, a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator in Columbus, Ohio. But more often than not, I’ve already done much of the preliminary research through my reporting. In my first novel, for example, one of the characters works at a shady healthcare financi…
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One of the favorite sports of mystery critics, historians, and scholars is trying to determine when the mystery genre began, who invented it, and what is the first story or novel in the genre. The other favorite occupation is defining what a mystery is in the first place. I am not eager to get sucked into the first controversy, in which some have claimed the Bible, specifically Cain slaying Abel, as the first murder story, though there’s not much mystery involved. Others point to Shakespeare, notably Macbeth, but murder and puzzlement turn up in other of his plays as well. The first memorable act of pure detection is often credited to Voltaire, when his character Zadi…
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There’s nothing quite as relaxing as spending time in the great outdoors, is there? Or… is there? A little over ten years ago, I signed up for a few weeks at the Banff Centre for the Arts, an arts residency high in the Rocky Mountains. It sounds ideal—all that fresh air, and so few distractions! But I’m a city girl. Once I got there, I was surprised and sometimes overwhelmed by the landscape around me, and I wasn’t the only one. You’d think the mountains would give you a feeling of liberty, possibility, wide open space. In reality, I found myself in a bowl, tall peaks on all sides. Instead of feeling on top of the world, I felt crushed by it. It was late October when I…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Samantha Downing, For Your Own Good (Berkley) Just finished reading this wonderfully dark, twisty and compelling thriller set in a prestigious private school. I raced through it, desperate to know how it would end.” –B.A. Paris Owen Matthews, Red Traitor (Doubleday) “Cold War buffs will particularly enjoy the ride, though any reader who appreciates the finer points of espionage and foreign intrigue will also be well satisfied.” –Publisher’s Weekly Daniel Silva, The Cellist (Harper) “Gabriel Allon goes after the deadliest weapon at the Russian president’s disposal—his money…
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As it’s been said lately, Netflix is all either murder or cakes. Our appetite for crime in shows, movies, or books is—and probably has always been—seemingly insatiable. Growing up, my sister was a true-crime buff, and the original Law and Order was a staple in our rotation when we got older, which I realize now is dating me a bit. Crime is everywhere and in seemingly every form: fictional, true, procedural, cerebral, violent, forensic, legal, white-collar, solved, and unsolved. But from what I’ve read and watched, one aspect is largely underrepresented: the victim’s perspective. Though many perpetrators of financial or other white-collar crimes convince themselves that t…
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Crime investigation is a daunting process. It involves numerous hours of tedious and meticulous gathering and analyzing of physical and trace (forensic) evidence, searching for and interviewing witnesses, as well as figuring out the motive, and, in some cases, the mod us operandi. After and only after the evidence is conclusively verified would the offender be tracked down and arrested. Circa 1990, before the World Wide Web (www) was made a public domain and became an integral part of our everyday life, crime was viewed as a tripartite affair. An affair confined between the victim and family, the perpetrator and accomplices and the investigator (police). Some may say, the…
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San Francisco, San Fran! What a location, what a bridge, what a history of crime and vice. From the legendarily wild Red Light district of the Barbary Coast, born out of the California Gold Rush of 1849, to today’s Silicon Valley, born out entrepreneurship and hi-tech skills (along with a little skulduggery and corporate shenanigans of course). San Francisco has survived earthquake, fire, and epidemic. It’s been city of almost constant physical, social and political fracture. It’s a liminal city—as far as you can go on the US mainland before it becomes Asia. A country that started in the east, ends in the west, pretty much at San Francisco. For those on the run it’s all t…
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Being an author requires building worlds and characters for others to see in their mind. It takes incredible skill to hone the details, pick the right setting, and to tell just enough without going overboard. You want to paint a picture—for some authors that picture is vivid, while for others it’s a sketch for the reader to fill in themselves. But for me it’s a bit different, I have to craft my stories all while I see nothing in my own mind. I have aphantasia, which means I have no inner eye or mind’s eye and cannot voluntarily create a mental picture in my mind. Think of it this way, if you tell me to imagine a banana, my mind is blank. I can’t even picture the face of …
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Cozy mysteries are a popular genre. But there are many sub-genres that capture the attention of amateur sleuth-lovers. One of those niches is the magical cozy mystery, a strange mix of murder mystery mixed with fantasy, paranormal or supernatural elements. I think my mystery series, the Enchanted Bay Mysteries, must on paper read like one of the most bizarre of the sub-genre. Mermaids. Murder. Mystery. But I think (I hope) it works because I write the series as realistically as possible. Does that seem contradictory? It might but if you create the world of your series based on reality that just happens to have magic in it… maybe not. For example, in A Hex For Danger, t…
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There’s no place like a diner, nowhere at all like a diner. A separate piece, a more focused essay, would simply muse on the ontology of “the diner,” trace the history of the diner, evaluate the American-ness of the diner. This piece is not that, but I would like to write it anyway, because diners are my favorite things, but besides that, they also have a particular, elusive mystique. What is it about the diner that is so appealing, so satisfying? Is it the cheapness, the accessibility of the diner? The local-ness, the nostalgia? That so many of the diners we encounter today are actually relics of earlier times and different aesthetics: roadhouses along interstates, break…
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