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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As a retired Catholic, I don’t really care if Die Hard is or isn’t a Christmas movie. (And if we’re gonna settle that one, the film’s correct genre is “Shut Up, Just Let Alan Rickman & Bruce Willis Cook.”) But at least we past or present followers of Christ have ample Christmas crime media to pick from. Home Alone is a Christmas cozy heist film. Grant Morrison’s beautifully gory and insane “Happy!” graphic novel is set during the holiday. And both Soho Press and the once beloved Thuglit have put out Christmas crime fiction collections. But what of our friends who were only fans of the first season of the Bible and dipped out on the show after they introduced that Je…
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The CrimeReads editors select the best true crime memoirs of the year. Tracy O’Neill, Woman of Interest (HarperOne) O’Neill’s memoir absorbs and upends the form of a detective novel, with the author herself starring as both an investigator and the elusive subject of inquiry, as she tries to track down her birth mother. She starts with the help of an experienced detective who soon disappears, leaving a new trail of questions and a good foundation for O’Neill to take on the duties herself. The narrative bends and evolves into something entirely new, telling the powerful, moving story of one woman’s journey toward an understanding of family and identity. –DM Jay Nico…
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It’s that time of year again! Every December, I roll out a list of the best Crime Movies of the Year. This is my favorite list to make, because I love movies so much. It’s not easy… but someone has to do it. This year wasn’t last year in terms of movies, I’ll be honest. I have no idea what the Oscars are going to look like this year. But there were some very, very good crime movies in the mix. If the Edgar Awards still had their film category, there might be some stiff competition, this awards cycle. That’s all I’m saying. Anyway, to the movies: Strange Darling I absolutely loved Strange Darling, JT Mollner’s wild and weird serial killer movie, which was shot all on…
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In her recent essay right here in CrimeReads, the author Bonnie Kistler discusses how the classic noir film Gaslight influences her new thriller, Shell Games. Her laser focus on the myriad dynamics at play among her large, often-devious cast makes for an entertaining tale of deception and duplicity. At the start of the story, Kate Sawyer, at 70 a self-made, ultra-successful (and ultra-wealthy) real estate developer in Sarasota, Florida, is marrying her high school sweetheart, Charlie Mull. The young lovers had been separated by Charlie’s service in Vietnam and Kate’s admittance to Radcliffe. They remained apart, out of touch, for over 50 years until a fluke encounter at …
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While my esteemed colleague Drew Broussard has already made a cooler, wider-ranging version of this list, I wanted to highlight some of my favorite books this year to combine crime and mystery tropes with futuristic or fantastical settings. The following titles are a bit of a grab-bag, given the vast scope of their purview, featuring conniving fairies, rebellious sex robots, sentient trains, secretive communities, nasty little magicians, and more. Thanks, as always, for reading! Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup (Del Rey) Holmes and Watson get a new twist in this fantastical noir set in a mysterious empire in which nothing is as it seems. The high, thick sea w…
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This year brought an especially great crop of young adult horror, as well as several impeccably plotted mysteries. Some of the works below are clever, others are kind, and all are concerned with the uncertainties of the future and the evolving tropes of the present. Stephen Graham Jones, I Was a Teenage Slasher (S&S/Saga Press) With breakneck pacing and down-to-earth narration, I Was a Teenage Slasher is a tongue-in-cheek ode to the slasher’s heyday. Stephen Graham Jones’ shaggy dog of a story is set in the Texas panhandle circa 1989, where those few residents who haven’t left for the oilfields or the city are now at risk of becoming quickly deceased at the hands…
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I came to writing novels late in life but I was born to be a storyteller. It came naturally. I’m an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe, known as the Orators of the Plains. Like most Plains Indian Tribes, the Kiowa did not have books documenting our history, legends or important events. Instead, we had stories shared from one generation to the next—an oral memory chain. Storytelling has always been a major aspect of Native American lives. Through storytelling history is absorbed, legends are shared, norms are taught and cultures are preserved. Storytelling continues to be important today for most Native peoples. Stories honor ancestors, entertain while teaching the young…
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I’m recently back from a five-day visit to New York. Research for a Big Apple-set book I have coming out in 2026. With a bit of Iron Maiden at the Barclays Center thrown in. (We also caught the NYC Marathon, walked the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, ate cheesecake at Junior’s and tiramisu in Little Italy.) But . . . did I need to go to the expense of visiting New York? There must have been easier ways of getting the authenticity I wanted, right? Perhaps, but first I need to offer some context. I was born and live in Cumbria. That’s the northern most county in England (if I wanted to, I could walk to Scotland from my house. I don’t, but I could). Cumbria is the third …
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Outside, it’s a rainy May Day. Inside (literally), I’m in the world-renowned Wormwood Scrubs prison in London, looking at a scrap of paper bearing one line. The handwriting is shaky and the spelling dubious. Yet the words scream out at me. ‘I didn’t meen to do bad.’ I put it to one side with a yellow sticker note on it in my ‘possible commended’ pile and then I turn to an 80,000 word neatly-typed manuscript. It’s a novel based on the author’s life before he was given a life sentence. This, too, is moving but in a different way. The foreword expresses grief for his family because, as the author says, he has put them through pain by having broken the law. There is no…
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If you know anything about me, you know that there are few things I like more than a whodunnit, a nice, “someone in this room is a murderer” or “I suppose you’re all wondering why I called you all here tonight” whodunnit. I love all that. I also love that, at CrimeReads, I’m the point person for the books and movies and TV shows that conform to that genre. Duly, I’m honored every year to put together this list. But first, some exposition. What is a “traditional mystery”? It’s is a story in which there is a murder (or a robbery), and an investigator (either a police inspector or a plucky amateur or busybody) follows a series of clues to find the killer (or the thief). If…
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Nashville – America’s self-proclaimed “Music City” – capital of Tennessee with about 700,000 people (though it’s one of the US’s fastest growing cities right now). Nashville’s got it all in the crime writing stakes – serial killers, nosy Private Eyes, noirs, cosies and, I’ll warn you now, rather a lot of murdered country music stars!! So let’s dive straight in with LT Ellison’s homicide Lieutenant Taylor Jackson ten-book series set in Nashville, Tennessee. Start with All the Pretty Girls (2007) which introduces Taylor Jackson and her lover, FBI profiler Dr. John Baldwin. The “Southern Strangler” is slaughtering his way through the Southeast United States, leaving a grues…
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On January 27, 1943, the first American women’s expeditionary force in history landed in North Africa. This company, the 149th Post Headquarters Company, had been specifically requested by General Dwight D. Eisenhower to work at his Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) in Algiers. At the time, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Force (WAAC), was a controversial corps of women attached to the United States Army. Women in uniform were an anomaly in American life and their assignment to a combat theater was unprecedented. Initially, General Eisenhower himself opposed the use of women in uniform, but after serving in London, he had seen firsthand how British women filled out the rank…
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“I never saw it coming.” How many times have we heard these words in the context of a true crime documentary, friends and family members left shocked by allegations against someone they thought they knew. Imagine the terror of realizing you were around, perhaps even lived with, someone capable of doing the unimaginable before returning home for dinner, a kiss on the cheek for family members unaware of a hidden shoebox with photographs and mementos that would change their lives. Ted Bundy was studying to be an attorney. Many considered him attractive – even charismatic – his ability to put people at ease a weapon equal to the knife he hid among his fake arm cast and rop…
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The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best spy novels of the year. * Iris Mwanza, Lions’ Den (Graydon House) Another legal thriller! Although this one was perhaps a little less bleak, although just as emotionally powerful. In The Lion’s Den, set in Zambia and based a famous real-life case, a queer dancer disappears while detained by police after a raid on an underground gay club. Despite facing immense social pressure to drop the case, an intrepid and heroic lawyer is determined to find, and defend, her client. The Lion’s Den makes a powerful statement: no matter what you can actually achieve while fighting injustice, sometimes trying to do the right …
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As America becomes an increasingly untenable place, reading widely from a variety of cultures and languages feels ever more essential, if only as an antidote to growing xenophobia. This year brought innumerable and wondrous translations to our cursed shores, and here assembled are some of the best. Like all good crime fiction, they are meant to be read as a warning—there but for the grace of God are we when it comes to bad behavior, and we must read to explicate our own sins, not to justify our indulgences. Also in the mix are those works about giving in to our own impulses: to love, to protect, and to rebel. Genre-wise, the list is a mixture of noir, psychologicals, hor…
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I did the thing they say you’re never supposed to do. I wrote the book I wanted to read — a mystery set in Hawaiʻi. Not the kind with a cookie-cutter, tropical setting at a glamorous resort full of insta-worthy backgrounds. I wanted a contemporary whodunnit reflecting the Honolulu I remembered from my childhood living on Oʻahu in the late 1980s. I wanted to hear the lilting cadence of someone born and raised on the islands, taste the foods I learned to love. Most crime fiction novels set in Hawaiʻi treat it like a vacation backdrop, easily swapped for the Bahamas or Maldives instead of a unique maelstrom of Native Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Portugue…
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Relationships are never easy. Some can be fatal. Most of us have seen the parade of broken and dangerous marriages on Dateline. My husband refers to the television show as How I Killed My Wife And Almost Got Away With It. He’s not being dramatic. The show does feel that way. It’s 33 seasons of whatever the opposite of romance is. I’m an expert on this topic. I was a divorce lawyer for more than twelve years in the D.C. metro area before retiring to salvage my sanity. I’ve seen and heard some terrible things. Most of them are too you’ve got to be kidding to survive editorial scrutiny. If I tried to write situations like some of the real-life shenanigans I’ve dealt with I…
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While good historical fiction is never comforting, this year has made the lessons and parallels from history more abundantly clear than ever before. Paradoxically, this year’s best historicals are set further back in history than in previous lists, cutting off after the 1950s. It’s perhaps no surprise that the 1920s figure heavily; the 19th century finds plenty of representation as well, and there’s a good showing from the early modern era. While the books span hundreds of years, many feature similarly cunning characters, either tricksters who use their wit and wiles to defeat the powerful, or con artists whose scheming destroys all around them. These books also exhibit c…
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The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best spy novels of the year. * Joseph Kanon, Shanghai (Scribner) Nobody writes sophisticated, atmospheric spy fiction quite like Joseph Kanon, and his newest book, Shanghai, is one of the best entries in a storied career. Kanon’s story takes us into the hothouse of global politics in 1938, beginning on a luxurious ocean liner and soon disembarking in the bustling trading port of Shanghai, where a young man joins his uncle in a thriving casino business, but soon finds himself tangled up in the local conspiracies. Shanghai is vividly depicted, and the dread of an oncoming world war adds another layer of meaning to t…
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We all know A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella about a greedy old man whose miserly ways are changed after being visited by three ghosts, on Christmas Eve. But A Christmas Carol does not stand alone! A Christmas Carol is the most famous example of the nineteenth-century (mostly British) pastime of telling scary stories to gatherings of family and friends on Christmas Eve (and throughout the twelve days of Christmas), a fad that generally died in the beginning of the twentieth century, though the pastime is referenced in the decidedly-20th century Andy Williams Christmas song “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” And A Christmas Carol is not Dickens’s onl…
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Grotesque, discomforting, darkly humorous, and brilliant, these horror novels are the soundtrack in my mind allowing me to process reality’s growing discontents. Some of the following are notable for their direct confrontation with real-world darkness, while others serve as an antidote to demonization, a path towards self-love in a cruel world. All are gorgeously written, terrifyingly executed, and worthy of the old adage: art should disturb the comfortable, and comfort the disturbed. Stephen Graham Jones, I Was a Teenage Slasher (Saga) With breakneck pacing and down-to-earth narration, I Was a Teenage Slasher is a tongue-in-cheek ode to the slasher’s heyday. Stephen…
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What makes an outstanding mystery series? At a minimum, each book in the series must meet professional standards with respect to plot (especially important for mysteries), characters, setting and so on. There is much more to a top-notch series, however, than just a collection of well-crafted stories. The key lies in the ‘glue’ that binds individual offerings into a coherent whole. To tease out what makes a series work, I focus on the best series published in the last twenty years and categorize them under five headings: protagonist, location, period, genre, and theme. These are the most common literary devices for creating that sense of continuity so critical to a su…
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You know the shpiel. Artificial intelligence will solve all our problems. It will compute our calculus, it will write our emails, it will give us the most efficient recipe for banana bread, etc. But humans will still be around, one hopes, and so, humans being humans, there will still be greed and jealousy and hate and therefore there will be crime. But surely AI will solve that too! But why use the future tense? For over a decade now, AI has been deployed in the U.S. to prevent crime. Let me introduce you to COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), a proprietary bit of software licensed by Equivant (a subsidiary of billion-dollar con…
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Another terrible year for the world and another great year for books! While we have plenty of spinoff lists to come before the end of the year, it’s time to share the CrimeReads editors’ picks for the best crime and mystery novels of the year, full stop. The list below has a strong presence from a number of small presses, and as always with this list, leans into the editors’ shared love of noir (sorry not sorry). Another theme seems to be a sharply relevant combination of despair and hope (heavy on the despair, but then again, a little hope is always more useful than too much). There’s also plenty of love, mixed in with the suffering, and often, a cause of it. And there’s…
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Season’s readings! If you’ve happened upon this list (and obviously you have), then you probably agree that books make the perfect gift—both to give and receive. Alas, so many of them and such little time to read, let alone to curate. On that note, here you will find a round-up of recent releases perfect for bedside (or fireside) indulgence this winter, whether for yourself or others. England’s Alexandra Benedict should be anointed the “Queen of Christmas Crime.” She has now published three seasonal suspense novels in as many years, with the first two taking place at a manor house and on a train, respectively. The Christmas Jigsaw Murders (Poisoned Pen Press; October 8,…
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