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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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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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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