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 dizzy spells should have been the first warning. A year after launching my debut novel, I was vaccinated, caffeinated and hard at work on my second book. By age thirty, I’d achieved almost every goal I’d set for myself in my teens: I was self-employed, lived alone, had cash in the bank. Hollywood was (literally) calling. I worked out five days a week. I ate organic. I was doing everything right. Yet every few weeks I found myself muddled with bouts of dizziness that took minutes, then hours, to clear. More troubling, they were soon joined by bouts of confusion and brain fog that made routine tasks like emptying the dishwasher or folding laundry into endless, laby…
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I’ve been a fan of Jordan Harper’s ever since I first read She Rides Shotgun, his Edgar Award Winning debut novel published back in 2017. I was so taken with that book, I even tweeted out a barrage of my favorite lines as I was reading it. Lines like: “She wore a loser’s slumped shoulders and hid her face with her hair, but the girl had gunfighter eyes.” There were more lines. Way more lines. All from Jordan Harper, this white-knuckle author who dropped double adjectives like atom bombs and wrote sentences sharp enough to cut. Needless to say, I was impressed. So much so I ended up reading She Rides Shotgun a total of four times, trying to suck as much magic as I c…
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Before Jack the Ripper, before The Devil in the White City’s H.H. Holmes, the world’s deadliest serial killer was the Canadian Doctor Thomas Neill Cream. The graduate of McGill Medical School murdered as many as ten people in Canada, the United States, and Britain between 1877 and 1892, escaping suspicion and even a life sentence in prison to kill, again and again. In this excerpt from The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer, published by Algonquin Books, author Dean Jobb follows Cream from the gates of an American prison to the streets of England, where the ruthless poisoner is about to unleash his wrath on the women of London. Jo…
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The lull of waves lapping to shore. The scent of salty breezes, suntan lotion, and saltwater taffy. Flip-flop warm summer days with no agenda. This is the hidden promise when I find a cozy mystery with a waterfront cover. Instantly, I sense respite and escape, with a sprinkle of intrigue tucked inside. The waterfront setting. I desire it, in both reality, and fiction, and I know I’m not alone. We readers want this. Don’t we? We long for it. What is it about those cozy mysteries with the waterfront covers that lures us in? Doesn’t matter if it’s a sandy beach, a rocky cove, or a lake hidden within the pines. Doesn’t matter if it’s saltwater, fresh water, or a rambling rive…
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My writing career began with seventeen standalone crime fiction novels, including Oblivion, End of Story, A Perfect Crime, Lights Out, Hard Rain, and Nerve Damage. You’ve probably guessed already these are not cozies, in fact, are shifted to the dark end of the spectrum. Correct! Bad things happen to the good and the bad, and when justice is served the meal is on the haphazard side, messy and sometimes indiscriminate. But the plots all makes sense, I hope, since a story with a plot that doesn’t make sense is ruined for me, no matter how admirable its other qualities. Back to darkness. In End of Story, where aspiring writer Ivy lands a gig teaching writing in a men’s pris…
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When I was in high school, a friend invited me for Sunday services at the church where her father was pastor. There was much that intrigued me (including the fact that her mother had been “saved” in this church—and could never again wear pants). It didn’t occur to me to ask what religion they belonged to—I jumped at the chance to visit a place I’d secretly come to associate with belonging and authenticity. You couldn’t really be Black in my all-Black Long Island neighborhood unless you went to church—period. My block formed the north side of a cul-de-sac loop, where the houses were green and evenly-shingled and pleasant; on the south side, the homes seemed shabby and unmo…
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In 2015, American writer Robert Stone passed away in Key West at the age of 77, and the world lost a literary lion. Stone was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, once for the PEN/Faulkner Award and five times for the National Book Award for Fiction. He always let his books do his talking and he rarely sought the spotlight. His passing was noticed by aficionados—Bruce Weber’s obituary in the New York Times was especially good—but, in general, the event made few ripples on the world stage. As a devotee who had read, and re-read, all of Stone’s eight novels, including one that I believe is among the very best American crime novels, I wondered if the great writer’s legac…
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We are going to play it a little differently this month. There are so many big-name thrillers in July I could easily write a column which tells you what you already suspect, you sly minxes: new books by Laura Lippman (Dream Girl), Megan Abbott (The Turnout), Liv Constantine (The Stranger in the Mirror), and B.A. Paris (The Therapist) are all excellent books. These writers do not disappoint. Special nod to relative newbie Samantha Downing, whose For Your Own Good has already been snatched up by Hollywood in the form of Robert Downey, Jr. That said, I’m going to talk about titles by lesser-known writers, including a couple of debuts. But first, a controversial opinion: T…
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Serial killers are super cool. They’re in every moody Scandinavian crime show and lurking on the pages of every single grimdark mystery novel, but only a few leave a lasting impression. I read an unhealthy number of murder books when I wrote The Final Girl Support Group and I want to take a moment to introduce you to some I can’t get out of my mind. Big Gurl in Big Gurl (Thomas Metzer & Richard P. Scott, 1989) Years before Joyce Carol Oates and Bret Easton Ellis wowed readers with their big important literary novels, Zombie and American Psycho, told completely from a serial killer’s point-of-view, Metzger and Scott gave us Mary Cup, aka Big Gurl. We’re never quite…
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The New Yorker editor reached Randy Wayne White at his historic waterfront home high atop a historic Indian mound on Pine Island on Florida’s Gulf Coast. “We’d like you to write a story about the Everglades for us,” she told him over the phone. Randy was in a foul mood. The Outside magazine columnist was also a fishing guide working out of Tarpon Bay Marina on Sanibel Island, just across the bay and salt flats from his home, and it was the height of fishing season. “I’d been fishing something like 48 days straight,” he says. “So much has been written about the Everglades, I don’t know of anything else to write.” He told her thanks, but no thanks. He went on with his…
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(This article contains spoilers for Psycho and Les Diaboliques. And The Sixth Sense.) This year marks both the 60-year anniversary of Psycho and the 65-year anniversary of Les Diaboliques. Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, has become one of the most famous movies of all time. Its brutal murder in a shower and its jolting all-strings score by Bernard Herrmann have acquired the status of memes. Even people who haven’t seen the movie have mimed stabbing movements while emitting staccato screeches to evoke the idea of a psychopath. Les Diaboliques, made 5 years before Psycho by French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, isn’t as well-known these days, though we might not ha…
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When Valora first stepped through the door of my office, the smell of cigarettes followed, along with a palpable physical tension. He was in his thirties but looked older, with a tight, tense frame, deep creases in his face, and bags under his eyes. His thin, sinewy arm muscles twitched under his skin, and his fingers beat a rhythm against each other as he fidgeted to find a comfortable position. He spoke in a staccato voice, interrupting himself when his train of thought outpaced his speech. He had a million questions for us. Who were we? What did we want to know? Where should he start? Did we know about his pending criminal case? He didn’t care if helping us helped him …
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Draw a circle. The space inside the circle represents the positive space in the drawing. The negative space would be the shape made by the outside of the circle. It’s most noticeable in cut paper art or silhouettes or even those Nagel prints that were so popular in the 1980s. Positive and Negative Space exists within other forms of art as well: ceramics and sculpture, for example. Since writing is also an artform, the theory of Positive and Negative Space also applies to literature and, specifically in this case, world-building or setting. Often, readers and new writers assume that world-building is what the author describes in detail—whether that’s the history of the fi…
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Traveling the world from the safety of our armchairs is the only travel most of us get these days, so it’s a good thing that publishers continue to bring out plenty of works grounded in far-flung locales to keep our imaginations, at least, from being stuck at home. This month’s offerings include a carefully plotted German thriller, a thoughtful Ghanaian mystery, a cynical Italian noir, and two new Scandinavian crime novels. Melanie Raabe, The Shadow (Spiderline/House of Anansi) Translated by Imogen Taylor Melanie Raabe made international waves with her tricky revenge thriller, The Trap, in which a shut-in author must venture outside after being granted a new chance t…
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There have been many times in the last ten years when I’ve watched a movie or read a book created before the twenty-first century and had the reaction, “You just can’t do that now.” Usually this was in response to a character who, for lack of access to a telephone, was in dire trouble with no way to summon help. Perhaps their phone line had been cut. Or maybe they were dodging a bad guy and couldn’t risk making a mad dash toward the nearest phonebooth. I recently read Harvest by Tess Gerittsen (published in 1996) and was constantly aware of the aspects of the book that were dated due to advancements in how we communicate. With its medical setting, there was a prolific u…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Lisa Gardner, Before She Disappeared (Dutton) “… a sharply-written, tension-filled yarn full of twists readers are unlikely to see coming. The most compelling element, however, is the character of Frankie, a recovering alcoholic whose obsession with the missing is a penance of sorts for the burden of guilt and grief she carries over a past trauma that took the life of a man she loves.” –Bruce DeSilva (Associated Press) Anders Roslund, Knock Knock (Putnam) “With a story stretching from Stockholm to Montenegro and back, this is definitely a tense and detailed thriller, giving some inter…
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This January, the Collins Crime Club issued a new edition of Rudolph Fisher’s classic crime novel The Conjure-man Dies, originally published in 1932 and considered to be the first detective novel by an African-American author, as well as being steeped in the literary culture of the Harlem Renaissance. The Collins Crime Club, a historic British imprint, was relaunched a few years ago with the intention of bringing lost and little-known classics back into print, focusing on Golden Age writers. We asked David Brawn, the publishing director for the Collins Crime Club, a few questions about the imprint, its history, and its latest reissue, The Conjure-man Dies. CrimeReads: Br…
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Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA offers an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. When I was getting my degree, I read countless essays where genre fiction was referred to as “escapist fiction.” The essays we read were (of course) written by proponents of literary fiction who made it clear that genre fiction was something common and vulgar which should only be sold from seedy shops in back alleys. Genre fiction wasn’t true literature (affect a snobbish accent and be sure to look down your nose). Genre or popular fiction was deemed insignificant and those who read it weren’t as cultured as readers of literary fiction. At the time, I didn’t pay the labels much attention. Di…
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When considering the great artistic accomplishments of England, what often comes to mind first is English Literature. Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, the Brontes, Jane Austen, Dickens—names that hold as much or more relevance today as they did when these authors lived. Their brilliance is as well-documented (the work speaks for itself, really) as it is undeniable. Their words live on era after era, with each subsequent generation of readers finding new meaning and understanding, new insight, and new revelations, in these centuries-old works. English literature is without doubt among the world’s great treasures. A cultural treasure needs, above all, to be enduring, to withs…
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As the marshals’ search for the Commander sputtered during the first months of 2012, there was no way for them to know that the key to solving this mystery sat in a drawer of a metal filing cabinet at the New Mexico State Library in Santa Fe. Had Bill Boldin and his team known where to look, they could have found, alongside back issues of the Ruidoso News, the Carlsbad Current-Argus, and the Bernalillo Times, a blue-and-white box containing microfilmed issues of the Gallup Independent from July and August 1997. As it had for more than three decades, the masthead on the August 8 edition of the local newspaper proclaimed that, inside, readers would find “The Truth Well Tol…
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I’ve taken countless writing classes and joined many groups, but for me, the best writing education comes from reading. I love it when I’m reading a book and the author makes a choice—a plot point, a character trait, a scene or line of dialogue—that takes my breath away, that provides a lesson in craft that I can’t help but try to apply to my own writing. Here are seven books that taught me how to be a better criminal (writer). Jane Harper – The Dry This is an easy one. It was the first book I read in the genre nicknamed “outback noir,” and in addition to its appealing protagonist and well-plotted mystery, it’s a fascinating example of how to use the setting of your s…
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As a historian of American crime, I spend an unhealthy amount of time poring over old newspapers—in archives, on microfilm, and, increasingly, online. While researching a book on Belle Gunness—the infamous “Lady Bluebeard” who slaughtered an indeterminate number of victims at her Indiana “murder farm” in the early twentieth century—I had occasion to consult the July 7, 1902, issue of the Fort Wayne Daily News. Along with stories on a strike by twelve hundred railroad freight workers, a visit to the United States by the Crown Prince of Siam, a local man who survived a shark attack while swimming off a pier in Atlantic City, and an elderly “negress” who inherited four hund…
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Perhaps it makes me a cliché, my bookshelf bursting with le Carré, Follett, Clancy, and Ludlum. Like many of my ilk—spinners of spy stories, that is—I grew up reading the classics. Give me a cloak-and-dagger, cat-and-mouse twisty tale any day. Modern critics might lambast the trope-filled material, but I still find sparkling nuggets of originality buried within the familiar character archetypes and well-worn plot arcs. That said, this foundational espionage literature shares a great deal of common DNA. These novels are intelligent, often witty, and almost entirely about defeating the Soviets. Then, when that ugly wall crashed down, we ticked ahead on the cosmological tim…
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“One of the most authentic, gripping, and profound collection of police procedurals ever accomplished.” – Michael Connelly Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were pioneers. First of all, they virtually created Scandinavian noir, and all the giants who followed them happily admit it. Second, with Ed McBain, they revolutionized the police procedural, emphasizing the squad as a whole, people who sometimes argued and fought and failed again and again, but who ultimately complemented one another as a team: “normal people with normal lots, normal thoughts, problems, and pleasures, people who are not larger than life, though not any smaller either,” in the words of Jo Nesbø Third, and…
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1. We are the Bolan sisters. Calliope, Lorelei, and Serafina. If our names sound like they were plucked from a fairy tale, it’s because they were. Momma wanted, above all things, to live in a fairy tale. We have pale, freckly skin and dark auburn hair, which we refuse to cut. It falls in long jumbles down our backs—thick and wavy for Lorelei and me; wispy curls for Serafina. We are tall for our ages, respectively. We are clumsy. We have mammoth feet and delicate wrists. We see the world with perfect vision. Lorelei and I have green eyes. Serafina’s eyes are brown. When we are together, we collect stares we’d rather return. See? It’s the Bolan girls. The ones who surviv…
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