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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In the first episode of My Favorite Murder, podcast hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark talk about the way they bonded over true crime at a party. At the time, true crime still felt like a niche interest, but the genre quickly bloomed into a mainstream obsession. Like most people in 2015, I listened to Serial and watched Netflix’s Making a Murderer, but as true crime grew in popularity, a question of ethics began to play on my mind. I’d always been a morbid person, but as I watched Etsy explode with cutesy slogan t-shirts and serial killer colouring books, it all began to feel a little distasteful – a little vulgar. I still wanted to read the books that interested…
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One of the things that has always fascinated me about history is those individuals who just, by the narrowest of margins, miss out entirely on fame and fortune. The scientist pipped to the post by a rival in another country. The writer whose forthcoming book is identical in theme to one that has just been published to massive acclaim. Even the space race! All of history is littered with examples, both large and small, of intriguing also-rans. When I first came up with the idea for The Gifts, my debut adult novel, set in Victorian England, I knew I wanted it to focus both on the lives and experiences of women, but also on the sort of figures who get forgotten about in his…
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Once again, the Edgar Awards are upon us! And as usual, I asked the nominees for the Edgars to weigh in on the state of the genre on the eve of the mystery community’s most prestigious award ceremony. Because 38 (!) authors contributed answers to the discussion this year, I’ve split the interview into two parts. Part one asks the nominees to reflect on the wider world of genre. What are the rules these days? What is the state of the genre? And how do we respond to the growing issues of book bans? Part two, running tomorrow, will address craft, readership, and classic crime fiction. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed, and special shoutout to Kathy Daneman for on…
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For my latest thriller, With My Little Eye, I wanted to write a creepy, twisty, funhouse-ride of a story that also let me examine our national unhealthy obsession with celebrity, the insane beauty standards we put on women (especially as we age), and what privacy looks like in the age of social media. The idea of being watched is both enticing and terrifying for everyone with an Instagram. “Look at me—but not too hard, and not too long!” If you are an actor—or a dancer, or a musician, or even a writer—you can’t opt out. You have to put yourself out there. As I began to write what I thought would be a many-voiced story, the character of a working actor decided take cent…
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“Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighbourhoods.” – John Updike John Updike clearly understood one of the main appeals of the bookstore. As readers, we can easily picture our favorite bookshops as forts. Our ramparts are built out of wooden shelves and a kaleidoscope of book spines. When we pass through the door, we are gratefully walled off from a chaotic and noisy world. Why, then, is this utopian structure lonely? Bookstores are lonely in the same way a lighthouse is lonely. It sits on its scrap of real estate, shining like a beacon in a storm, and guides us to our safe harbor. It offers us asylum and hope. So, what …
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My favorite season is spring, with its tender, fragrant early flowers, its pale baby leaves, its scudding clouds in blue skies, its breezes, and then, as summer pops, more pungent and colorful flowers. This spring, we can wander through an entire garden of cozy mysteries. Imagine reading them beside a window, with arrangements of flowers on the windowsill. Easter Bonnet Murder by Leslie Meier We’ll start the season with a cozy mystery that features an occasion that should be lighthearted and fun—an annual Easter Bonnet Contest. This one is held at the Heritage House Senior Center in Tinker’s Cove, Maine. Unfortunately, the winner of the previous Easter’s contest, who…
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The bonfire is burning brightly now, its heart molten gold. ‘I’m a fire starter,’ says Cathbad. ‘Everything’s so dry,’ says Emad, ‘that’s why. It hasn’t rained all week.’ ‘Boring.’ Emily throws leaves at him. ‘We should give thanks to the gods,’ says Leo. ‘We should pray to Grim, the hooded one.’ ‘Leo,’ says Amber, who is sitting huddled in her blanket, ‘it’s nearly Easter. It’s Palm Sunday, for goodness’ sake. Have some respect.’ ‘Easter was a pagan festival first,’ says Leo. ‘People have celebrated equinoxes and solstices since prehistoric times.’ But he smiles at Amber and, when the wine is handed round in plastic cups, his hand touches hers. ‘Grim’s Gaben.’ Leo …
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Few writers are so inextricably linked to a place as Dennis Lehane is to Boston. For many, he’s come to define the modern understanding of the city, its people, and its tragedies. But it’s been a while since he gave us a Boston book. Lehane has been busy writing for TV and most recently, showrunning Black Bird. This month, the wait is over. Lehane is back with a powerful new novel that takes on one of the city’s most turbulent moments: the desegregation of public schools by busing. Small Mercies follows a mother’s journey as she searches for her missing daughter in the dangerous days leading up to the start of school in 1974. Before the book’s release, I talked with Lehan…
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When I wrote The Crossing Places in 2009, I didn’t think that it would be the start of a long-running series. I was only grateful that it was published at all. My first four books, written under my real name of Domenica de Rosa, were romances and my publisher didn’t want a crime novel. Luckily, my agent suggested a name change and a new publisher. Jane Wood at Quercus took a chance on the unknown Elly Griffiths and I will be forever grateful. The Crossing Places tells the story of forensic archaeologist Dr Ruth Galloway who is consulted by the police when a child’s bones are found on the Norfolk mashes. The bones turn out to be over two thousand years old, but Ruth is dr…
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Affairs are perhaps the original literary trope. You can go all the way back to the oldest surviving piece of English literature, Beowulf—or you could go even farther back to the Bible—and you’ll find an affair or two…or thirty-five. Sure, this is a case of art imitating life; people do have affairs. However, I doubt they think about the why of it very much. This is where good literature comes in. They are a great plot device, too, as, generally, affairs don’t end well for the characters involved (anyone remember Fatal Attraction?). Throw an affair into any story, especially in the crime genre, and murders are likely to happen. A lot of time we only learn about them as re…
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Kyle Decker is a musician and teacher, whose years playing in punk bands inform his new book, This Rancid Mill. Like the genre that inspired it, Decker’s This Rancid Mill embodies a punk ethos of DIY, not giving a shit, social critique, and a heavy dose of sardonic humor. Daniel Weizmann has written about punk culture and music for fanzines and newspapers, and now brings his considerable knowledge of the music work to his new book,The Last Songbird, about a failed musician turned cabbie who is searching for answers after his favorite client, a faded folk musician, disappears. We asked these authors to talk about music and mystery, which turned into of the most intriguing …
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Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I’m not sure I fully buy that—my cell phone is pretty advanced, and yet, when I access the internet on it to double-check this quotation, I don’t feel like I am doing a spell. It might look impressive, but I’m pretty sure no one working at Apple is an actual wizard, and I don’t imagine any of my contemporaries would mistake what I was doing for magic. Still, it’s pretty clear that we are living in a technologically advanced world, so much so that things that might have once looked magical, or even miraculous, are now quotidian. One might even wonder w…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Alice Slater, The Death of a Bookseller (Scarlet) “Very dark, character-driven, slow-burn suspense … Slater explores the ethics surrounding our obsession with true crime and questions how we should handle other people’s stories. This highly original, whip-smart first novel will have crime lovers second-guessing their next read.” –Booklist Taylor Adams, The Last Word (William Morrow) “An outstanding psychological thriller…As the tension rises, spectacular plot twists open up new possibilities while effectively demolishing existing expectations. Along with the nail-biting suspense, …
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Fourteen-year-old David Drew was the poster boy for horror comics in the 1950s, in the worst possible way. Drew made headlines across California and around the country when, in May 1955, he admitted bludgeoning and stabbing a seven-year-old boy in Oakland. The police said he had a simple explanation for killing Stanley R. Frank Jr. “I get an urge just like that once in a while,” the Associated Press quoted Drew as telling police. Drew said he and Frank were in an argument about building a fort in their neighborhood and when Frank refused to leave, Drew tied him up, then accidentally hit the seven-year-old in the head with his hatchet as he was chopping at a tree limb. …
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When I was six, I wrote a story called “An Adventure of the Past.” A fast-paced thriller (written in multiple colors), the story goes like this: a knight tries to save a lady accused of witchcraft, is given four days to prove her innocence, instantly falls in love and proposes, she says yes, they get arrested for witchcraft and burned at the stake, and their ashes live happily ever after. Whew. It’s the closest I ever got to a happy ending. All the stories I wrote as a kid were quite dreadful and sad. There was one about a bunch of animal friends trying to find the sea. A lot of them curled up and died along the way. There was another about a wistful girl who was actual…
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Aspiring authors are often told to forgo dream sequences. It’s stressed that a single night terror might derail your story, annoy the hell out of readers, and result in your novel being condemned to the fiery pit of bad tropes. Meanwhile, the opening scene of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier illustrates how a superbly crafted dream sequence can enrich a novel’s voice, magically deepening its tone. If art imitates life, then just as our characters work, bathe, eat, and sleep, they also dream. Dream sequences earned their bad reputation because writers attempted to replicate the opaqueness of nightmares, filling entire pages with distorted images. All it takes is a few…
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My grandmother used to watch the Weather Channel all day. Her recliner with the landline next to it was her command central; she’d call and ask if the front had me hit yet, knowing the forecast where I was two-thousand miles away long before I did. We speculated this was because she was raised on a farm. I have to say though, skies are a preoccupation of mine, too, in real life and in fiction. There’s something about being at the mercy of forces outside your control, that potent mix of terror and beauty. Bad weather is inevitability, it is ruthlessness and chaos—a disaster will bring out the best in some and the worst in others. I wanted to write about a flood. While liv…
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Calling all Nancy Drew Fans! Grab your magnifying glass and hop in Nancy’s convertible as we adventure back through Nancy Drew’s most famous and memorable cases. With over 600 books published since 1930 in the original series and various spin-offs, there’s a Nancy Drew mystery for every generation. The classic 56 Nancy Drew series published from 1930 to 1979 and still in print today due to its popularity, has inspired these Sleuth-tacular Nancy Drew action figures from Wandering Planet Toys. Fans will remember fondly the mysteries the figures are based on and enjoy seeing Nancy Drew come to life right off the infamous mystery covers. Some of the following titles are acco…
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Rex Stout began writing before Hammett, Chandler, and Gardner did. Between 1912 and 1917, he published more than thirty stories and four novels, most in pulp magazines. At age twenty-seven, Stout gave up writing to run a company that arranged for schoolchildren to set up savings accounts. The earnings from this business enabled him to move to Europe and launch a second writing career. The first fruits of that effort put him among authors who were adapting modernist techniques for a wider readership. How Like a God (1929) was called “an extraordinarily brilliant and fascinating piece of work,” and Seed on the Wind (1930) made “the Lawrence excursion into sexual psychology…
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2014’s “A Most Violent Year” had a lot going for it from the jump. Its lead, Oscar Isaac, was fresh off his acclaimed performance as the titular sadsack folk singer in “Inside Llewyn Davis” and his career was about to enter the stratosphere, while co-star Jessica Chastain had already been in the stratosphere since around “The Help” three years before. Director J.C. Chandor, too, seemed to have big things in store, getting raves for his financial crisis thriller “Margin Call” and the Robert Redford survival drama “All is Lost.” There’s no such thing as a sure thing, of course, and all of this pedigree translated to $12 million on a $20 million budget and zero Oscar nomina…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Nick Medina, Sisters of a Lost Nation (Berkley) Nick Medina’s debut is told from the perspective of Anna Horn, a young Native girl who works at her town’s local casino and starts to notice a pattern when it comes to the reservations’s many missing women. A gripping and timely novel informed by a rich tapestry of myth and legend, Sisters of the Lost Nation marks the entrance of strong new voice to crime writing. –MO Vanessa Cuti, The Tip Line (Crooked Lane) A woman takes a job at a tip line thinking she’ll work alongside some local law enforcement types and find hers…
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True crime has come to dominate our thoughts—for better or for worse. Whether by news notifications pushed to your phone, suggestions to stream on your platform of choice, or videos that pop into your social media feed thanks to the Algorithms That Be, we are fed true crime stories that capture the public consciousness. Often times, we select that favorite meal ourselves. My newly released thriller The Family Bones follows the Eriksens, a family of psychopaths known in True Crime circles, as they gather for a reunion at a mountain resort in eastern Oregon. Although a relatively recent phenomenon, True Crime has been around in one form or another for as long as there has …
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Reader, I’ve been keeping a secret from you. Perhaps my insistence on writing endlessly about the Elizabeth Holmes case at the start of each round-up has been an effort to obfuscate the truth. (Speaking of Holmes, as of this writing, the husky-voiced huckster has given birth to bébé numéro deux and requested a delay on her upcoming 11-year bid.) But now, with winter’s end approaching and “spring cleaning” initiatives about to flood our social media feeds, I feel a duty to, as my favorite songstress Hilary Duff croons, “come clean.” Here’s my secret: I’m losing my hearing. Relax. It’s just in one ear (my right). My left ear is fine. Let me give you a bit of backgr…
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Growing up, we lived a ways out in the country and never had any unplanned trick-or-treaters. But my aunt and uncle would bring my young cousins, and we would exclaim over their costumes then load them up with candy. It wasn’t a bad tradition, and as a teenager, I looked forward to seeing them. One year, we flung open the door to find my uncle smiling. “You went all out for us this year,” he said. We must have appeared puzzled because he continued. “That man with a chainsaw is really realistic.” My father went to investigate, and sure enough, there was a man standing at the end of our dark, gravel driveway with a chainsaw. He explained that his truck had broken down, an…
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“I once received a lovely letter from a lady who told me how she had got this book [of mine], made herself a cup of tea and drawn the curtains because it was a dismal cold day. Then she’d set a fire in the fireplace and sat down and read my book. Isn’t that a nice goal for a writer to think about? It certainly keeps me at my typewriter.” —Mystery author Charlotte MacLeod in “Murder, She Writes,” Interview with Peter Gorner of the Chicago Tribune, 11 February 1988 His attack was lightning fast. Whitey seized [Debbie Davis] by the throat with his hands and began to shake her like a rag doll. Debbie, gasping for breath, was dying…. Whitey was still not done with th…
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