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 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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If journalism is the first rough draft of history, fiction is where a writer gets to rewrite that draft and reorder the world to his or her liking. Journalists who write fiction enjoy the best of both worlds, which might be one reason there are so many of us writing mysteries and thrillers. “In journalism if you make stuff up you get fired. In fiction if you don’t make stuff up you get sued,” said Brad Parks, who has written eleven thrillers that have garnered numerous awards (Shamus, Nero, Lefty) after a career writing sports, news, and features for the Newark Star-Ledger and The Washington Post. Although many journalists turn to writing fiction after long and distingui…
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A desolate moor, haunted by incomprehensible supernatural beings. Chains rattling in a dark castle, ghosts prowling the ramparts. A grisly corpse, hands chopped off and tongue sliced out. For any horror-lovers, whether the Gothic classics or the contemporary greats, these tropes will ring familiar. They come, of course, from Shakespeare. In fact, after more than a decade of teaching his work, I’ve come to see Shakespeare—at least when he’s writing tragedies—as primarily a horror writer. He might perhaps be the most significant influence in the entire English language to the Gothic, and consequently the modern, horror tradition. On the surface, no play epitomizes this m…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * C.E. McGill, Our Hideous Progeny (Harper) “Fans of Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and historical horror with a queer feminist twist will not be disappointed…In this immersive, richly detailed novel, Mary is an enthralling heroine with whom readers will empathize, and owing to assured, luscious prose, whose plight they will champion.” –Library Journal Tim Mason, The Nightingale Affair (Algonquin) “Time-travel through the gilded halls and sinister streets of Victorian London and onward to the horrors of the Crimean War as a determined detective tracks a ruthless killer. Pol…
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Agatha Christie is called the Queen of Crime for a reason; her novels are masterpieces of mystery, often hooking readers by trapping characters in an enclosed space to solve a crime, using red herrings to misdirect, building suspense by slowly revealing secrets, and shocking them with double-whammy twists. These hallmarks, popular to this day, keep readers up late into the night — they simply must know how it ends, sleep be damned! That’s why I was so excited to write Lying in the Deep, a loose retelling of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile — a story of jealousy, love, and betrayal on a luxury cruise. This was the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book. In Lying in the …
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Listen, when it comes to gore and jump scares, I’ll be the first one covering their eyes. I hate being scared in a movie theater. I don’t like getting super tense and I really don’t like my brain trying to tell my body that I’m in actual danger. But every once in a while, I come across suspenseful and spooky media that’s so compelling I keep watching even when I’m scared out of my mind. If you’re on the fence on watching scary stuff, try what’s on this list first. Just keep in mind that if you’re anything like me, you still might find yourself hiding behind a pillow on the couch to stay “safe” from whatever’s happening on screen. From a spicy book to a true crime …
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During a key scene early in Nicholas Ray’s romantic thriller In a Lonely Place (1950), our hero, brilliant but volatile Hollywood screenwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart), presses a starry-eyed hat check girl—whose strangulation a few hours hence will place Dix under a cloud of suspicion that won’t lift until he’s already sealed his dire fate—into service by having her recount the plot of a novel she’s just finished reading and which he’s been hired to adapt. This scene is one of several meta-layers that helps set In a Lonely Place apart from other LA-set noirs, with Dix’s casual disregard for the book he’s tasked to translate to screen mirroring that of director Ray…
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The mix of political maneuvering, terrorism, murder and the volatile dynamics of marriage makes for great thrillers. The TV series “House of Cards” very well might have perfected this recipe. Now comes “The Diplomat,” which at times plays like “Scenes From a Marriage” mixed with “Jack Ryan.” The eight-episode Netflix series, which debuted April 20 and hopefully will see a second season because of how effective it is and also because it ends with a cliffhanger, is the latest in a bunch of new political thrillers like “The Night Agent” that plays to the strengths of the genre while subverting it, not unlike the 2022 series “The Old Man.” Instead of the patented globe-hopp…
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Just past 10:30 p.m. on Thursday April 27, in the darkened hall on the fifth floor of the Marriott Marquis Hotel on Times Square, the Edgar Award for Best Novel was announced. I sat with several of the other Best Novel judges a few yards away from where Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution, spent the evening among friends waiting to hear if she had won. When her book was announced from the distant podium, she jumped up and was enthusiastically hugged and congratulated before making her way to the podium where she gave a brief acceptance speech. The novel braids together alternating narratives of a killer, his victims, and the upstate New York detective whose …
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I started my writing career in romantic suspense — twelve books where readers knew that the two main characters would fall in love and be together by the end of the book, even with all the danger and violence in their lives. I love the genre because bad things happen … and we all want to believe that even when your life falls apart, there is a happily ever after at the end. The mystery and the romance are entwined, and the resolution of each storyline provides readers with satisfaction. Romantic entanglements also work well in all genres, because readers like characters who are human. D.D. Warren from Lisa Gardner’s series is better with her husband Alex to bounce ideas …
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On October 4, 2022, legendary author Peter Robinson, creator of the long-running Inspector Banks series, passed away after a brief illness. Beginning with Gallows View in 1987, Robinson delivered a novel in the series, or short story collection, almost every year until his death. He also managed to find the time to write three stand-alones. All told, he completed 34 books, 31 of them either Inspector Banks novels or related short story collections. His new, posthumously published Banks novel, Standing in the Shadows is now available. And while all of Robinson’s Banks stories can be read out of order, this book also completes the “Zelda” trilogy, and represents some of Ro…
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It’s summer in New England. The sun is just peeking over the mountains, but cars and trucks are already rolling into the parking lot of the local flea market. The vendors rush to unpack and setup. The first customers hurry down rows of tables and tents, hoping to spot a rare collectable or antique at a low price before other buyers arrive. Many of these customers are antique dealers, others are collectors, some are local homeowners or tourists. Before the morning is done, any or all of them may purchase something they’ll later regret. My name is Trish Esden. I’m the author of the Scandal Mountain Antiques Mystery series and a full-time antique dealer, a profession I’ve…
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I’m writing my seventh thriller, and six of them have been set in Seattle. What is it about Seattle, and the Seattle area, that makes it such a compelling place, such an attractive place to write thrillers? Why do I always come back to Seattle when I could write about New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago or Paris, other places where I have lived? For me, Seattle is a hidden jewel, an original, never-ending cache of unexpected surprises. I love writing about Seattle’s eccentricities, its quirks, its unique culture, its vibrant street life, the kids who are trying to create a place for themselves, the high school children in the young Shakespeare workshop producing his …
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“The height of the Bush era was a weird, giddy time.” -Stephen Thomas Erlewine on Milli Vanilli’s Girl You Know It’s True (1989) Cop Rock (ABC, 1990) was a real television show that existed. It was a police procedural with musical numbers. The plot of the show chugged progressively from episode to episode like any police procedural. The songs in the show occurred with clockwork regularity, as in any musical. The characters—police officers, suspects, lawyers, bureaucrats—resembled characters in fraternally related shows like Law & Order, except that they sometimes burst into song. I promise this is true. I first learned of Cop Rock from a video posted almost as …
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The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best new fiction coming out this May. * 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. –MO Molly O…
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When people ask me how I came up with the idea for An American in Scotland, I’ve never wanted to share the real answer. But the truth is: I wanted to run away from home. At the time, I had no plans to write a mystery set in Scotland. I just wanted to out of my house and to be anywhere else in the world. Normally, when I create worlds for my books, it just comes to me out of the ether—or I channel it from higher power. I’ve never questioned the process it just happens. Out of the blue a character starts talking and the stories play out like a movie in my head. The town and the people come alive for me, and I just write down what happens. That’s my process. There was a …
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SEPTEMBER 27, 1988 ISOLATION CELL, MAXIMUM SECURITY U.S. PENITENTIARY, LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS Don’t wear a tie, unless it’s a clip-on,” Associate Warden Lee Connor warned me. “Silverstein might grab it through the bars to choke you.” Connor unlocked the solid steel door that led from the prison’s administration building into the bowels of the ancient penitentiary. I was being taken to interview Thomas Edward Silverstein. It would be the first and only time a journalist would be allowed to speak to him face-to-face during his lifetime. He was being held in a dungeonlike basement cell isolated from the rest of the prison population as punishment for murdering a correctiona…
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Ahead of the launch of Out of the Ashes, my first book for adults, the question I keep getting asked, more than any other, is: What difficulties did you encounter writing this novel, as a YA writer? Before my adult debut, I published seven mystery novels for teenagers. It seems natural that readers would be curious about the difference between writing for adults and writing for teenagers. But in certain cases, the phrasing of that particular question has an undeniable subtext. What some people really seem to be asking, is, was it hard, writing your first real book? The bias against young adult literature has been discussed at length in the book community and within pub…
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Readers become writers the moment they glance away from the page, distracted by their own inner voice announcing, Hey, I can do that. In my case, it took a few nanoseconds more to sense that my first protagonist, would be, like me, a suburban Long Island mom. She’d have left behind a stimulating job (in my case, as a magazine editor and freelance political speechwriter) for the stay-at-home life. She’d be bright. Curious. Sardonic? Sure, why not? She adored her kids yet sometimes she yearned for discourse more elevated than pre-school repartee. Without a doubt, she was someone with whom I could identify. The year was 1978 and Judith Singer became the protagonist of Compr…
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Every town or county has its version. In all the corners of North America, for a short time each year, in mall parking lots or yellowing fields on municipal outer limits, an otherwise unremarkable space is transformed. The endless strings of incandescent lights with their sequenced colors. The tinny royalty free music and the roar of the rollercoaster. The smell of hot friar oil and the exhaust of diesel generators. Most of us have, in some corner of our mind, memories of our local carnival or fair. In my hometown of St. Albert, Alberta, straddling the 53rd parallel north on the cusp of the Canadian prairies, we had the Rainmaker Rodeo. For one (true to the name and ofte…
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When people speak of women’s power, they tend to think of three things. Political influence. Financial clout. And of course, sexual power. Three things that have one thing in common: these things generally serve a capitalist patriarchy, in which – with a few exceptions – a woman’s value is closely tied to her desirability. In fiction, women characters tend to follow a similar trend. Young women still dominate in almost every genre; and although we expect more independence and drive from our fictional heroines than we once did, most protagonists are young, while older women occupy secondary, often domestic roles. Older women are mothers, grandmothers, their power passed o…
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In the morning, I write dark, twisting murder mysteries, and during the day, I work at a church. I have no theological background. I’m in charge of facilities. I’m the one who calls the handyman when something goes wrong. Sometimes I try to fix the problem on my own, watching YouTube videos about how to change out a faucet. I muck around with a wrench, fail, call a plumber. Sometimes I write in the chapel before punching in. One day, the pastor asked if I wouldn’t mind joining her. A member was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, and the pastor wanted me to sit in on their conversation. I get this question at least twice a year. Not from the pastor, but from friends.…
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