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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Like many poets, Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) spent much of his life toiling in literary obscurity. He helped found the Objectivist Press in 1934, which printed William Carlos Williams and other poets, and positioned himself as a writer of “objectivist” poetry, which he described as “the objective details and the music of the verse; words pithy and plain; without the artifice of regular meters.” Reznikoff is perhaps most notable for two epic works of poetry, “Holocaust” (1975) and “Testimony.” The latter has a lengthy, tangled history. Originally birthed as a slim prose volume in 1934, it grew into a massive tome of poetry (subsequent editions rolled out in 1965 and ’68…
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On August 10th, 2023 I was given a small metal chip to celebrate a year of sobriety. It was the first full year of sobriety I’d experienced since 1977. I’d gotten high for the first when I was ten, courtesy of a lung-busting hit off a device called The Neutron Bong. Despite that name, it was not Cheech and Chong who served up the opportunity. An older cousin and my big brother were the ones who turned the matching keys that armed the aforesaid nuclear bong. In this situation, both “older” and “big” are relative terms. My cousin was in high school and my brother was only two-and-a-half years older than myself. While some months shy of his thirteenth birthday, my brother …
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What draws readers to espionage fiction? It’s a question I’m asked again and again, at events, and in conversation, when I describe my novels—for want of a better descriptor—as part spy-thriller, part domestic noir. Objectively speaking, the answer might be obvious: the world of international espionage with its seductively glamorous settings and endless scope for subterfuge, is as alluring for readers as it is for writers drawing audiences into their darkly alluring worlds, and then wrong-footing them at every turn. With double lives straddling—and sometimes blurring—the lines between good and evil, hero and antihero, the inner workings and often outlandish actions of th…
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Many noir tales feature infidelity as the motive behind mayhem and murder. More than a few of my favorite novels, films and songs have been motivated by cheating partners whose adulterous lust leads to broken hearts, cracked heads, stolen money or dead bodies. A few of the cheating narratives I’ve admired over the years include the Billy Paul song “Me & Mrs. Jones,” the steamy flick Body Heat and James M. Cain’s masterful debut novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). Cain’s hardboiled story was about a miserable woman named Cora Papadakis who has an affair with java gulping hobo Frank Chambers, who’d recent been thrown off a “hay truck.” Click to view slideshow…
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Say cheese—and if murder and mayhem don’t come to mind, say it again, this time with murderous intent. Because as every true turophile knows, cheese plays a lethal if unheralded role in crime fiction. Cheese has been around nearly as long as murder. A 3,200-year-old cheese was found in the tomb of Ptahmes in Egypt. Ptahmes served as the mayor of Memphis back in the 13th century BCE. But the real mystery is why people are clamoring up to sample the poisonous dairy product, which contains bacteria that could cause brucellosis. I myself discovered the dark side of fromage while researching my newest Mercy Carr mystery, THE WEDDING PLOT, which opens on a Vermont goat farm k…
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The megalopolis of Chennai Formerly known as Madras, and capital of Tamil-Nadu, the most southerly state of India on the Coromandel Coast. India’s sixth biggest city with over 12 million people. Home to terrific hot curries, and also known as India’s healthiest and safest city – not that that means there’s no decent crime writing. Before we get into modern Chennai, first a little old Madras. Brian Stoddart is a writer of fiction and non-fiction based in Queenstown, New Zealand but who has written extensively on India and south Asia. A Madras Miasma (2014) was the first in a series of four books set in 1920s Chennai featuring Superintendent Chris Le Fanu, who happens to…
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Kellye Garrett interviews Cheryl Head about her new novel, Time’s Undoing, a searing and tender novel about a young Black journalist’s search for answers in the unsolved murder of her great-grandfather in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, decades ago—inspired by the author’s own family history. Time’s Undoing is both a passionate tale of one woman’s quest for the truth and, as newfound friends and supporters in Birmingham rally around Meghan’s search, the uplifting story of a community coming together to fight for change. Time’s Undoing is forthcoming on March 7, 2023. Cheryl Head (she/her) writes the award-winning, Charlie Mack Motown Mysteries whose female PI protagonist…
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“Girl Drowned; Escort Missing.” This headline, on the front page of The Syracuse Herald’s July 13, 1906 edition, launched a crime story that still reverberates in popular American culture. The body of Grace Brown, a twenty-year-old factory worker from upstate New York, was recovered from the waters of Big Moose Lake, a fashionable boating spot in the Adirondacks. The cause of death was drowning, but cuts and bruises were found oIn 1908n her face and head, indicating she’d been beaten before falling into the lake. During the post-mortem examination, the county coroner discovered something else: Grace Brown was four months pregnant. So began a murder case that would come …
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If Chris Bohjalian were to write a memoir—or a manifesto on craft—it could be called: I was a teenage magician. It’s a history that has served him well. A master of misdirection, Bohjalian—the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books including The Lioness and The Flight Attendant—occupies unique territory in the literary landscape. While his novels often incorporate crime, they aren’t often considered crime novels (which is why you’ll usually find them shelved in Fiction as opposed to Mystery). And yet Bohjalian considers crime his MacGuffin, or the pistol that marks an opening salvo. Case in point: While Bohjalian’s newest genre-bender, The Princ…
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Chris Cander found national success writing character-driven novels whose struggles play out in remote and evocative locales. The USA Today-bestseller has transported readers to such places as West Virginia, Chicago, Soviet Russia, and the California desert. But for her fourth novel, A Gracious Neighbor, Cander turned her novelistic gaze on her own neighborhood: West University, an affluent tiny city within the sprawling expanse of Houston Texas, home to business executives, doctors from the nearby medical center, and professors from Rice University—the U in the titular WEST U. At home during the pandemic, Cander found inspiration in her surroundings, transposing the 1917…
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The beauty of being asked to interview Chris McGinley about his new book Once These Hills was I knew I was going to read it anyway and knew I was going to read it as soon as it hit my hands. Chris is a writer of very specific passions—classic Appalachian literature and crime fiction—and he has married the two beautifully as I suspected he would. I spoke to him recently to find out just how he did it. WB: The first thing that struck me about your amazing book Once These Hills is that it’s two things at once. It’s a gripping crime novel dressed up in the clothes of a classic Appalachian yarn full of superstition, hard-living, haints, wildlife, mountain characters, and all …
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In the opening chapter of Christopher Bollen’s immersive, intricately constructed new novel, aptly titled The Lost Americans, a “weapons tech” named Eric falls to his death from his hotel balcony in the pulsating city of Cairo. Did he jump or was he pushed? The scene shifts to his grieving sister, Cate, back in The Berkshires of Western Mass. Struggling to find meaning in her brother’s death, she bristles at Polestar’s explanation that Eric either committed suicide or had a drunken accident. “Cate would accept an accident. In the worst case, she even take murder.” As a villainous presence, Polestar makes for an ideal embodiment of evil, and Eric and Cate had clashed ov…
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“Think Downton Abbey meets Sneakers, but in World War II!” That’s how a Hollywood bigwig might pitch the story of Bletchley Park, a remote English country manor stuffed with codebreakers, all laboring under dire secrecy to break the supposedly unbreakable Axis military codes. But Bletchley Park’s extraordinary achievements are no Hollywood screenwriter’s fever dream; they’re real…and would never have happened without thousands of extraordinary women. A university campus, a Wonderland, “the biggest bloody lunatic asylum in Britain”: BP, as it was casually known by insiders, resembled all three. A Victorian country house chosen for its remote location and its railway proxi…
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In visions of the dark night I have dreamed of joy departed— But a waking dream of life and light Hath left me broken-hearted. –A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe Even before relocating to Baltimore in the summer of 1978, I was an Edgar Allan Poe fan. In my Harlem boyhood I’d seen the Roger Corman films on Creature Features, devoured The Raven when I was twelve and drooled over the drawings Berni Wrightson did for his brilliant “Black Cat” adaptation in Creepy #62 ” (Warren, 1974). Though I’d visited Aunt Charlotte and cousin Marie in Baltimore a few times since childhood, I never dreamed that the city where my literary hero died in 1849 under mysterious circumstan…
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Four fifty-three in the morning was too early for anything. Alfie had said so to Donny back when it was four eighteen and they were still on the freeway. But at least they’d be early, maybe catch a nap before unloading. Donny, as usual, had smiled and said nothing. Which was fine with Alfie. If you had to be sharing the cab on a long haul with someone, a guy who didn’t talk much was a good deal. They’d spent the last five days together, hauling a big house full of stuff from Pepper Pike, Ohio, to La Jolla, California. Rich doctor moving stuff from one dream palace to another. In La Jolla, the guy was waiting for them, smiling and waving like they were old friends. Big …
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It was painstaking work, creating that fort out of a large thicket at the bottom of the hill. The opening was small and cut through the side so it couldn’t be spotted by anyone who might wander by. A tall cinder-block wall, about ten feet in height, stood a few feet in front and stretched across part of the bottom of the hill and down the road toward the Corniche. It surrounded an old, abandoned peppermint-stick lighthouse. The wall made for good cover and didn’t restrict our view to the other side of the hill and down the same road to our apartment building, which was a couple of blocks up from the Corniche, and the Mediterranean Sea. The fort became our hideaway. We na…
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Sometimes novels inadvertently reflect some aspect of the current zeitgeist, and Irish writer Claire Coughlan’s first one is this kind of story. Set in 1968 during the Christmas season, Where They Lie is a complex tale with a large cast—both living and dead—about the mysterious disappearance in 1943 of a theatre actress, Julia Bridges, and a former mid-wife, Gloria Fitzpatrick, who may or may not have played a role in that disappearance. Gloria was also a patron of the theatre where Julia performed. While never charged with a crime related to Julia’s disappearance, in 1956 Gloria was sentenced to hang for performing a backstreet abortion. Fast forward to the night befo…
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