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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I have worked in the film industry for nearly four decades in various capacities—from pyrotechnics to location scouting to screenwriting. Several years ago, one of my friends from Hollywood had purchased three adjoining apartments in one of the oldest parts of Paris that he wanted to renovate into a single living space. Because he lived abroad and traveled constantly, he asked me to oversee the construction. I knew absolutely nothing about building permits and construction but, for some reason, I agreed. One day, the workers tore down a wall and uncovered a small room containing just a table, a chair, some shelves, a whole lot of dust, and an old bottle filled with black …
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What scares us? What really scares us? It’s not the form outside the window or the noise in the basement. It’s not the unexplained howling or the abandoned building that might or might not be populated by angry ghosts. Or it’s not just those things. What we find most terrifying is the wondering of what those things might be and the idea that whatever darkness lurks just out of sight, it’s so powerful, so sinister that we never stand a chance. The darkness—it’s coming for us. And when it gets hold, there will be no escape. That’s horror. And horror gets a bad rap—limping monsters, and shlocky movie effects, gore, and blood-curdling shrieks. But I have long been a fan of …
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Who doesn’t love a good villain who has a single-minded prize in mind and will stop at nothing to get it? From Patricia Highsmith’s infamous con man Tom Ripley, to Gillian Flynn’s deliciously duplicitous Amy Dunne, these characters, oftentimes outright anti-heroes, can have readers, despite their better judgements, rooting for them in all their glorious conniving and underhanded ways. Here are five favorite psychological thrillers that revolve around crime characters who are driven by their naked ambition: Our Kind of Cruelty, by Araminta Hall Mike Hayes is in love with Verity Metcalf and is convinced they are destined to live out their days together in harmony. No m…
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Imagine that one day your sister asks you to spit into a vial, which you do because even though she’s crazy, she’s your sister. Following her instructions, you pack up the vial and send it to a DNA-testing site that promises to reveal everything you’ve ever wanted to know about your ancestry. Six weeks later, you discover that your crazy sister is only your crazy half sister. Not only that, you learn that about a dozen people you’ve never even heard of are all related to you. So, you call your buddy, a millionaire ex-cop who does “favors” for his friends and ask him to look into it without telling anyone because A) you’re sure it’ll mess-up your family and B) there mig…
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Magic is mysterious, and mystery is magical: we are enthralled by that which we don’t (yet) know, and many of us are under the spell of a near-visceral compulsion to learn the truth—“solve” the mystery. It’s a natural instinct, to wish to know. Problems exist to be solved but mystery is ever elusive. Even if we know who has committed the crime, we need to know how; we need to know why. Beyond that, we crave to know meaning. In magic, the ingenious magician is one who not only knows how to perform magic but knows how to deflect his viewers’ avid attention from the workings of magic itself, which are (of course) illusory—the magician is the “illusionist.” Of magic it is co…
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“You were right, Nalam,” Ralph Daniels said as soon as Joshua Nalam picked up his call. “Diane Connors did show up on Eve Duncan’s doorstep today. I was staking out the cottage when I caught sight of Connors and another woman walking into the place. I wasn’t sure what you’d want me to do so I just maintained surveillance. She stayed and talked to Duncan for an hour or so and then left. That’s what you wanted me to do, right?” Joshua Nalam swore beneath his breath. “No, you idiot. I also want to know what they were talking about. You were there for a full day and didn’t bug the cottage?” “I’m not an idiot,” Daniels said with deadly softness. “You might be able to talk to…
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No longer playing the victims across every literary trope, the plight of female characters have taken a turn, especially in the horror and thriller genre. Now readers are getting the chance to see women as the monsters exacting violence—and sometimes, even delighting in it. And audiences are eating it up. Growing up in the cinematic era of iconic slasher films, it seemed that although the female lead could survive until the end, often there was a monster jumping out of the lake, some psycho with a chainsaw, or an otherwise final moment of “Yeah, sorry…. You did great and all, but we still have to kill you. Awesome screams, though!” Of course, films have changed dramatic…
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Istanbul is a beautiful city with a fascinating past, and not only due to its name change from Constantinople to its current moniker. (Do you have the song in your head now? Good—I did for nearly the entire time I wrote this book.) I spent a delightful long weekend exploring the rolling hills, gorgeous mosques and the gloriously overwhelming bazaar. Was I talked into buying a rug? Yes. Do I have regrets? I do not. And even though my research trip to Istanbul was short, I learned to love the city in that time, and was so happy that I’d chosen it for the location of my fourth Jane Wunderly mystery Intrigue in Istanbul. The city is poised at the meeting of two continents, As…
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As winter storms batter much of the country, and treacherous films of ice cover the roads, we’re even more homebound than usual this month, which means it’s the perfect time to indulge in some far-ranging reads. Each month, CrimeReads selects the best international new releases for crime fans, and espionage and thriller fans should be especially pleased with these wintry offerings. Looking for some order in society? Check out a new procedural from China. Ready to feel terrified in your own home? We’ve got just the German thriller for you! And wondering how authors keep coming up with fresh new tales of Eastern European intrigue? Here are three new books that prove the top…
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When I sold my first YA novel nearly a decade ago, a friend asked me, “Do you think you’ll ever write a real book?” When I looked at her askance, she clarified, “You know, a book for adults.” There’s a pervasive misconception that books written for children are somehow smaller. That they take less work or are less challenging to craft. Too many people view content for children as less, but anyone who spends time with young people knows they’re more—more challenging, more skeptical, more demanding. Young consumers are passionate, but their attention can be difficult to capture and even harder to hold. Those who’ve never read YA are quick to judge it. They wouldn’t know th…
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Everyone loves a good Cold War thriller. For two seasons, the TV series “Counterpart” gave us not only a Cold War thriller but a Cold Worlds thriller. The chilly Berlin locations—not filmed with a blue filter like the London of “Sherlock” but still sufficient to make you want to put on a sweater—restrained performances and the coldly-calculated plot hold us at arms length while they draw us in. The credits of “Counterpart” set the tone for the series. They are by turn intriguing and mundane: Shots of impersonal office settings juxtaposed with tantalizing looks at an isolated figure walking through cavernous, stylized underground landscapes. The latter are meant to sug…
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My hometown, Oxford, is a city of bookish ghosts. Its honeyed streets—now spookily empty—hold shimmery echoes of its literary past. And I’m not talking about the obvious here: Inspector Morse or His Dark Materials, or even the University’s 45 Colleges with their medieval cloisters and chapels and gargoyles. I’m talking about the characters that haunt the little alleys, nooks and crannies, the tunnels and vaults, the hidden graveyards. One of my favorites spots is an unobtrusive doorway right in the city centre where a lion’s face is carved into the wood, two golden fauns perched above him: a physical inspiration, so I’m told, for C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Another…
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Kid Guthrie—I’m sorry, Andrew Guthrie—my pint-sized young protégé at the paper and I went to the memorial auditorium for Larry McKnight’s speech in November. It had been a little less than a week since the senator flooded the state with his press release about the Capital News and the Communist on its staff. Though he named no names, he meant me of course, Randall Harker, Dell for short, the city editor who happened to be writing a series on the sorry-ass job McKnight was doing in Washington. I was mostly just chronicling his career—his disinclination to show up on the Senate floor even during important votes, his constant campaign-financing irregularities, the bribes he…
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If I were a comic book heroine-or villain-the following would be my origin story: When I was seven years old, my teachers called my mother in for a conference, informing her they didn’t think I was going to cut it at their fine academic institution. It was a small, Hebrew day school, with only twelve kids in my graduating class. Half the day we focused on our secular studies and the other half praying, studying Talmud, and learning how to read and write Hebrew. Think of it as the Jewish equivalent to Catholic school-equal amounts of guilt, but no penguins with corporal punish kinks. I would sit in class and stare off into seeming nothingness: eyes glazed with my mouth ha…
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Fred Van Lente and I have a lot in common. We both write comics, that’s an obvious one. But we also spend a lot of time in the world of prose — crime fiction, to be exact. Like me, Fred has written a pop culture adjacent murder mystery — The Con Artist, a crime novel set at a comic book convention, felt very much in conversation with my own comic book noir, Secret Identity. Now, Van Lente is back with a historical noir that weaves through actual history – Never Sleep. Never Sleep is set in and around the Civil War and spotlights the first female agents in the Pinkerton National Police Agency, wo come together to derail an assassination attempt on President Lincoln. We w…
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Reading about dysfunctional families is one of my absolute favourite pastimes, especially when the setting is just as creepy and unsettling as the story itself. For my latest book, The Soulmate, the cliffside setting overlooking the ocean was inspired by a well-known suicide spot in Sydney, Australia. I like to think that, in the book, the cliff becomes almost a character in itself – and that’s how I feel about some of these deliciously twisty crime reads. Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty Everyone’s heard of Big Little Lies thanks to the fantastic TV series starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon. While the series was set oceanside in California, the book is set i…
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A light breeze salted the Brighton seafront when the taxi carrying Patrick Magee pulled up outside the Grand Hotel. The driver opened the boot and gave a cheerful warning to the porter who reached for the case. “You’d better hold onto your nuts for this one, you’ll need ’em.” It was just after noon on September 15, 1984, and it felt like the last day of summer. Sunshine burned through a residue of clouds, warming the pebbles on the beach. The English Channel glistened, serene. The Grand soared over King’s Road like an overstuffed wedding cake, eight stories of eaves, cornices, and Victorian elaboration coated cream and white. A Union Jack fluttered from the roof. Bu…
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She could feel the damp evening winds coming in through the cracks around the windowpanes. Only a few years earlier, an income ing draft in this room—her childhood bedroom—would have been unthinkable. Her mother had a discerning eye for detail that would have twitched at the slightest imperfection in a home, especially if it affected the comfort of someone sleeping under her roof. And her father had been the best realtor on the Cape, the kind who had become an expert handyman over the years as an added service to his clients. But it wasn’t only the seams around the windowsills that had cracked lately in the Eldredge family. Eager to find sleep, Melissa stepped from the b…
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What do the following have in common: rituals shrouded in mystery; a closed circle of suspects; backstabbing intelligentsia; built-in power structures; and beautiful settings, from the gothic to the bucolic. They could be features of many crime novels, no matter the genre, but they’re also some of the reasons why academia has proven such a rich source for crime fiction. Here are six standouts (five novels and one true crime). Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers (1935) I teach a course called Women Crime Writers as part of the Emerson College MFA program. Sayers’ novel was the first book I added to the syllabus (paired with her fantastic essay, “Are Women Human?”). Set in O…
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The beloved character Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief who moonlights as a detective, was created as a direct result of the popularity of Sherlock Holmes, which surged throughout Europe and America towards the end of the nineteenth century. As scholar David Drake notes in a 2009 article on Lupin, though Holmes had been introduced in the 1887 novella A Study in Scarlet, he did not become a sensation until author Arthur Conan Doyle published six Holmes short stories in The Strand Magazine from July to December 1891. With queues of excited readers forming at newsstands on release dates, the stunned Conan Doyle agreed to write another six. But quickly bored of his character, …
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In crime and mystery novels, predictability is one of the most complicated elements of the narrative—but balancing it correctly is often essential for the page-turning, satisfying read that I’m always craving. Predictability is a tightrope walk; if I guess the twists too soon, that can make the lead up feel hollow or the climax feel low-stakes, but if the set-up doesn’t accurately reflect the reveal, the twists or ending seem totally bonkers. My favorite twists are ones I didn’t see coming, but seem obvious (or, at least, reasonable) when I look back on what I’ve read. I don’t mind guessing a twist if the characters are engaging and the scenes are still full of delicious…
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When I set out to write my first mystery, I knew two things: 1) There would be dogs—my admittedly lofty ambition was to be “Julia Spencer-Fleming with dogs”; and 2) The dogs would not be golden retrievers. Why not? Because everyone writes about golden retrievers. Goldens are one of America’s favorite dogs, ranking #3 in popularity in the AKC’s list of 195 breeds. Only Labrador retrievers and German shepherds are more popular—and you wouldn’t know that by looking at our entertainment, as goldens predominate on TV and film and in books. From to Air Bud and Golden Winter to Homeward Bound and Marley & Me, the media are gaga about goldens. To be fair, they are nice dogs…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Elizabeth Brooks, The Whispering House (Tin House) “… atmospheric and creepy, and as needy, nostalgic Freya is pulled deeper and deeper into its shadows, the reader’s worry for her grows—and, with it, the novel’s suspense. Freya is haunted by words she wishes she could take back, the sister she lost, the love that never was, the hopes for the future that she couldn’t attain; all of these materialize in the deep shadows and shifting portrait-eyes of Byrne Hall. Brooks has crafted a slow-simmering, psychological, gothic novel about grief and longing.” –Leah Von Essen (Booklist) Viet Than…
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The 1920s—roaring as they were—were quite an evocative time period. So much so that when I sat down to write my debut novel Murder at the Mena House (followed by Murder at Wedgefield Manor, releasing March 30th), there was no question about when I would set the Jane Wunderly Mystery series. After all, what period paints a mental picture more easily than the 1920s, with its flappers, cocktails, and jazz? It’s been suggested, especially recently, that the social flavor of the 1920s was a reaction to the Spanish Flu pandemic that swept the globe in 1918 and 1919. Millions of people worldwide died, and when it was safe to congregate again, they did so in style. Combine that …
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Several years ago, I was hired to write an animal trafficking movie for Leonardo DiCaprio, who was hoping to shine a light on that particular issue. The elation of getting the job was soon followed by panic at the discovery that almost is nothing is known about how animals are actually trafficked. This was surprising, because animal trafficking is one of the largest illicit markets in the world, along with drugs and guns. But unlike drugs and guns, animals are not a law enforcement priority, so what little is known about poaching/trafficking is limited to stories in magazines like National Geographic about poachers in sub-Saharan Africa and ivory markets in Asia. But bare…
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