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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My first novel, For Worse, in bookstores April 2, 2024, is a domestic thriller about a vision impaired woman who’s trapped in a dangerous marriage with a husband who uses her blindness to sabotage her. Desperate for freedom, she finds an unexpected solution in a ladies chat room on the dark web, whose members have a sinister but successful remedy for navigating a bad marriage. I knew about the domestic thriller genre, but I never realized, till I wrote For Worse, that there was a subcategory called “Marriage Gone Bad.” I thought this was fascinating, and when CrimeReads asked me to come up with my top MGB thrillers, I was ready. Please note: some of these books involve …
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For more than three decades, Don Winslow has written bestselling novels about everything from the War on Drugs (with his sweeping Border trilogy) to police corruption (“The Force”) to mafia hitmen (“The Winter of Frankie Machine”). Yet even as he produced these books at an astounding rate, his muse kept directing him back to a sweeping epic set among the gangs of New England in the 1980s and 90s. That epic eventually manifested as a trilogy, concluding with the imminent release of “City in Ruins.” When this latest book begins, protagonist Danny Ryan has become a major power player in Las Vegas. He’s a long way from the Rhode Island gang war that powered “City on Fire,” …
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Write what you know—it’s a piece of advice you hear a lot. I’m not sure how useful it is. My first novel opened with a mysterious man buying a shovel so he could help a friend dig a grave in the woods. My latest begins with an eleven-year-old girl sneaking out her bedroom window for a walk under the stars and stumbling across the body of a serial killer’s victim. I’ve never found myself in either of those situations. But when it comes to choosing a setting for a story, writing what you know has its benefits. For my new novel Don’t Turn Around, I wanted to use a small college town as the setting—somewhere rural and remote. A place where my serial killer, known as Merkury…
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The Underhistory began with a box of old postcards. Written in the 1920s and 1930s, they were from an artist travelling Europe, notes back home to his wife and sons. They had a lovely tone to them. Even when he met royalty, his postcard said, ‘look after Mummy and we’ll get you a bicycle when I come home.” Sometimes Mummy travelled with him and there were letters home to the boys, who I imagined were having a great time themselves. In reading these dozens of postcards, I came to feel I knew the family, and to have an affection for them. On researching the artist, William Ashton, I found that he was famous in his day. A favorite and good friend of Australian Prime Ministe…
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Rows of orange people sit handcuffed in a beige room. One of them is my mother. I squint at the TV that the bailiff has rolled in on a cart. The people aren’t orange, their jumpsuits are. My shoulder presses against my sister’s on the hardwood bench we share, our legs shaking in unison as the heels of our stilettos patter urgently against the courtroom’s marble floor, a mix of nerves and shivers fueled by the pounding, midsummer air- air-conditioning. I tilt my head at the screen, trying to figure out which of these neon uniforms contains our mom, trying to confirm this is real. Mom is on closed-circuit television and not here in person, which blurs that confirmation. S…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Don Winslow, City in Ruins (William Morrow) “With City in Ruins, Winslow wraps up a spectacular crime fiction trilogy: a sweeping story that morphs and expands over time.” –Washington Post Harry Dolan, Don’t Turn Around (Atlantic Monthly) “Canny spine-tingler Dolan brings his pot to such a rolling boil of violence and shocking revelations halfway through that you may wonder what could possibly follow . . . Go ahead and suspend your disbelief. Every shiver will tell you it’s worth it.” –Kirkus Reviews Helen Monks Takhar, Nothing Without Me (Random House) “Monks Takhar explo…
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Some years ago, I was working on a draft of my first real mystery thriller. In the opening pages, I included a bit of description meant to establish the location of the story (my hometown, Gainesville) and the time of year (late spring, the most miserable season in Central Florida). When I submitted the chapter to a writing workshop, one of the more experienced writers in the group immediately commented: “You need to cut all this setting stuff. Thriller fans don’t care about setting. They want to get to the action, quick.” Like most writers, I passionately despise criticism of any kind, but this rankled more than most. It rankled, of course, because I knew that the write…
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Ever since Miss Marple looked up from her knitting needles and solved her first murder, fiction has loved an unconventional amateur detective. From classic children’s adventures with sleuths like Nancy Drew or the Hardy boys, to Richard Osman’s crime solving seniors in The Thursday Murder Club, millions of readers are drawn to the ‘every person’ who finds themselves at the center of a crime. Part of the reason these books are so popular is that amateur detectives are often more relatable to the reader than a hardened cop with decades of experience. In the absence of any formal training, an accidental investigator is forced to rely on their curiosity, wit and ingenuity to…
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In a maddening twist, nearly 1/4th of 2024 has already passed. I can barely remember to date things with the correct year, let alone comprehend that it’s basically April. But it is, and I have the ticket stubs to show for it. In the last three months, I’ve seen a lot of movies. Here are some fun-sized reviews of moves that didn’t get long solo write-ups, from my last three months of crime moviegoing. The Beekeeper The Beekeeper is about a lot of things, but is mostly about how, if you try to scam the elderly, you’re deserve a violent punishment. Movies shouldn’t be judged on their morals or the perceived morality of their characters, but I’m just going to say that …
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Crime novels in translation were few and far between for the first two months of 2024, but March brings with it a deluge of mysteries and thrillers from across the globe. Below, you’ll find five highlights from the month in globetrotting literature, including a brutal French noir, a haunting Japanese mystery, and a cynical Scandinavian parody, among others. Tanguy Viel, The Girl You Call Translated by William Rodarmor (Other Press) Viel’s latest demonstrates an acute sense of the imbalance of power and the gradations of control accompanying gendered violence and sexual exploitation. In The Girl You Call, an aging boxer finds his comeback disrupted by revelations abo…
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Two of my great literary loves are historical mystery and romance–especially when they star strong, complex, and messy female main characters. The kind that reviewers call unlikable, or spoiled, or complicated, and who sidestep completely the trap of “not like other girls.” My favorites are characters who are unabashed in their femininity and willing to get their hands dirty. They show tremendous growth over their arcs yet remain completely consistent with their characters. When I sat down to craft my own sleuth, I wanted to find a way to capture all of these elements and create my favorite kind of character. In A Deadly Endeavor, my main character, Edie Shippen, has …
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My husband, our young son, and I fostered seventeen dogs during the pandemic. Our son cried every time a dog went to their forever home. A couple who adopted one of our fosters was so touched by his devotion that they offered to give him back the dog. When he said no, they sent him a box of toys for his future fosters. I thought it was so sweet, until my thriller mind starting thinking, what if they liked him too much? What if they came back one day and took him right out of the driveway without us knowing? And that was how the premise of my book, What Is Mine came about. Of course, the couple is lovely and would never do that. But how many times have parents found thems…
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When Elzabeth Fenwick’s psychological crime thriller The Make-Believe Man was published in 1963, one of the novel’s many laudatory reviewers, a young North Carolina newspaper columnist named James Alexander Dunn, in the Chapel Hill News perceptively placed his finger on the signal quality of the author’s crime fiction. “Elizabeth Fenwick has successfully combined a believable situation with people who matter—not that they are important people,” he observed. “On the contrary, there is not an entity in the lot. But they are familiar people whom you would not like to be in the situation Miss Fenwick places them in.” In reviewing the same novel that year, Robert R. Kirsch…
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Cale and Ambrose Casey haven’t spoken in thirty years. The brothers at the center of Brendan Flaherty’s The Dredge became estranged after traumatic events upended their adolescence. Over the next decades, each has crafted a life in which to protect himself and survive. In Hawaii, Cale sells waterfront properties and can’t seem to commit to a relationship. In rural Connecticut, Ambrose still lives in the house in which the brothers grew up, now with his pregnant wife and young daughter. When their old neighbor’s pond must be dredged to allow for a developer’s expansion plans, the brothers are forced to reconnect to ensure old secrets remain buried. Meanwhile Lily Roy, w…
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The truth is often stranger—wilder, more volatile, and somehow even more unbelievable—than fiction. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to true crime. As an author of mysteries for adults and young adults, I’m always scouring real-life, historical events for the seeds of my own stories. Here are a few true crimes that were stranger than fiction—and the books they inspired. One of the first true crime books I ever read was Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. Set at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the book’s narrative snakes between the Fair’s renowned architect Daniel Burnham and the “devil” t…
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I’ve long wanted to write a story where I take something that is considered a universal positive—the love of a parent for their child—and super-charge it and challenge it to the point where that love becomes dangerous. In my experience, we will do things to protect the ones we would love that we would never do, that we could never justify doing, on our own behalf, and that makes for a powerful starting point for a story. In my new book, What Happened to Nina?, a lovely young couple go away for the weekend, and only one of them comes home. For me the story was never so much about what happened to the missing Nina, or even so much about whether or not her accused boyfriend…
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A look at the month’s best new releases in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers, via Bookmarks. * Ben H. Winters, Big Time (Mulholland Books) “A weird and wonderful cautionary tale … It features the month’s most engaging investigator, a schlumpy bureaucrat roused to action.” –Sarah Lyall (New York Times Book Review) Colin Barrett, Wild Houses (Grove Press) “Barrett’s dialogue, spiked with the timbre of Irish speech and shards of local slang, makes these characters sound so close you’ll be wiping their spittle off your face … The craft of Wild Houses shows a master writer spreading his wings — not for show but like the stealthy attack of a barn owl. Despite m…
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There once was a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, “You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.” He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother’s throat. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” I came across this Grimm tale while conducting research for my novel, Monsters We Have Made, a story which also begins with a terrible crime committed by children: in this case, two young girls who fall under the sway of a mysterious creature they discover on the Internet. Like the fairy tale, my story, too, explores questions of boundaries: pl…
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In my new novel SLEEPING GIANTS, the director of a children’s home uses a draconian new treatment method. Despite being without any scientific backing, this treatment has been heralded as the latest cure for troubled children. It’s cruel, invasive, and dangerous, and has already been implicated in the deaths of several children. Like so many who commit harm, the director is convinced she is doing the right thing. She thinks she is helping, not hindering. She believes she is on the right side. Even as her harm becomes obvious, she refuses to admit she is wrong. Instead, she doubles down, and commits even more violence to protect herself. It’s an issue that haunts me, as …
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When I was young, I spent Friday afternoons at my maternal grandmother’s house with the pages of supermarket tabloids spread out in front of me on the living room floor. You know the ones: The National Enquirer, The Weekly World News, The Weekly Globe, and others of that ilk. Some had stories just unbelievable enough to feel true to a child of the Christ-haunted South, where we felt the supernatural lived with us cheek-by-jowl, close enough to smell the sharp tang of sweat mixed with Aqua Velva on a preacher’s neck as he spoke in tongues on a Sunday morning. With those pages splayed out before me, I was subject to a slew of adult-oriented advertising. Virginia Slims cigar…
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On the first day I joined the Select Committee Investigating the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, I was told to watch my back. An administrative aide and I were walking from Capitol Hill’s main campus to our own intentionally nondescript, off-the-beaten-path office building after collecting my ID. I noted that I would be walking to work every day: an envious 15-minute commute door to door. He advised me to switch up my route. Daily. “You know, in case you’re being followed,” he said. I had come directly from serving as a homicide prosecutor. I had held murderers and gang members to account for years. Made them and sometimes their families upset with me. I had he…
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Years ago, I was describing the Lunar New Year celebrations to a friend of mine. I told her how huge my family is—my father has six siblings, my mother has eight, and every single sibling had multiple children, which means I have seventeen first cousins on my father’s side, twenty-five on my mom’s side, and too many nieces and nephews to count. During Lunar New Year, or as we call it within the Chinese community—Chinese New Year, we gather and give hong baos—red packets—to children and unmarried relatives, and it is utter chaos. We all have varying levels of organization when it comes to the red packets. Some of my more organized relatives actually specify each individu…
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When I started writing a novel about conspiracy theorists, I had a pretty good idea what to make of them. I was a cynic. I had followed the lawsuit brought against Alex Jones by the families of the Sandy Hook victims. I had read tweets doubting the authenticity of the bombing at the Manchester Evening News Arena in 2017, where 22 people were killed in my hometown. I started writing Day One in lockdown, as I watched anti-vax protestors target medicine watchdogs, hospitals and NHS test centers. I walked past lampposts where their stickers were pasted, describing immunization and face masks as the Incremental Steps to Total Enslavement. I rolled my eyes and kept walking. Bu…
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I may be just a wee bit obsessed with reality TV competition series – or so I’ve been told. Survivor (the OG), The Amazing Race, Big Brother, Alone, and most recently, Squid Game – The Challenge – are all addictive, guilty pleasures to binge-watch with a bowl of popcorn and a glass of wine (awful combo, I know). I even decided to set my latest thriller, Everyone Is Watching, against the backdrop of an over-the-top reality show where secrets, revenge, and the quest to become the one lucky winner turn deadly. I mean, when you think about it, reality TV has all the elements of a great binge-read: A cast of wildly unpredictable contestants, some you love, some you love to ha…
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Impeachment. Charges of sedition. A president with a very low approval rating. Treasonous members of Congress. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff leading a movement to oust the president in a coup. All of those stressful plot points are from director John Frankenheimer’s 1964 political thriller “Seven Days in May,” and ably demonstrate why political thrillers are not only well, thrilling, but also sometimes predictive and all too believable. That film is one of the best films and greatest paranoid political thrillers in movie history. Each of the films I’ll cite here are not only entertaining bangers but also reflective of – or prescient of – the political turmoi…
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