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 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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Charles Manson’s Body, Or, How I Ended Up Paying For the Notorious Cult Leader’s Funeral
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When I was 29 years old, I pushed Charles Manson’s corpse into an incinerator. There’s something mean about cremation, to make a body completely useless. “Ashes to ashes” is just a metaphor for the quantum universe, not a recipe. We aren’t really made of stardust. Manson once said, “Sanity is a small box; insanity is everything.” Maybe funneling his ashes into a little carton would somehow restore sanity to the world. * He died in November, the month of gratitude. In 2017, Charles Milles Manson, or “Charlie,” expired in Bakersfield’s Mercy Hospital after eighty-three years on Earth. He had been transferred there from the California state prison in Corcoran, where he …
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Among the many tropes associated with the Old West, environmental activist hero isn’t one of them. But the world has transformed since the days of range wars, road agents, and train robberies and so have the dangers. If it wasn’t obvious before, then it certainly is now, that there is an unavoidable interdependence between metropolitan and rural America—and it’s all the more relevant due to the public’s focus on headline grabbing issues such as climate change. In the twentieth century, totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Communist Russia arguably posed the greatest threat to human civilization. And fiction authors Jack Higgins, Tom Clancy, and Joh…
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A tower stands alone. J. G. Ballard’s modern fable High-Rise is almost fifty years old. In the past few decades, its potency has come closer to resembling prophecy, yet Ballard’s obsession with affluence and self-isolating communities isn’t limited to this novel alone. Novels like Super-Cannes, Concrete Island, and Cocaine Nights all invoke similar themes of alienation, isolation, and unrestrained affluence from the depths of his back catalogue, the rich coiling tightly around one another to block out the pressing realities of the wider, poorer world. Yet High-Rise remains a singular invocation, summoning a sturdy mental image with ease, a fraught zoo, a series of stacke…
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In a recent novella I’ve tried to reimagine the Christian Gospels from the point of view of the Devil. This posed a number of problems, most immediately how to represent a so-called unreliable narrator as reliable. As quaint as that sounds to the postmodern ear, I think any narration involves an initial negotiation between writer and reader over some ground rules. On the most basic level the reader wants to know how reality works in the story, which is not to say that the author is shackled to realism, just that he has to be consistent. If animals speak, they speak, and don’t suddenly go mute. There are no hidden characters, no “then-I-woke-up-and-realized-it-was-all-a-d…
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Jonathan Rosen and his best friend Michael Laudor grew up in bookish households in New Rochelle, N.Y. in the 1970s. They were expected to do meaningful intellectual work, and for a while, Rosen writes in The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, things went as planned. Both went to Yale. After college, Rosen worked in journalism—he’s since authored several books—and Laudor got a lucrative job in management consulting, even as he struggled with his mental health. In his 20s, Laudor was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Though he would spend months in a psychiatric hospital, Laudor graduated from Yale Law School—an achievement heralded …
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I live in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, which has a magnificent medieval core, and I’m currently working on the fourth mystery in my Polizei Bern series, which is set in and around the city’s Gothic church, the Berner Münster. Over the Münster’s central doors is a fifteenth-century Last Judgement scene made up of over three hundred colorful sandstone sculptures. It shows men and women who emerge from their graves, are judged by a stern Jesus, and then find themselves sent on their separate ways by the archangel Michael, the saved rising to heaven and the damned falling into hell. The sculptors had a great time with hell, portraying it in gruesome detail with flames, …
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A few things were constant in my life—my folks both loved books and with my dad being Scottish and my mom having come from Ireland, I had access to their shared libraries and wound up first loving European history, then American history, and then all kinds of stories. I also had a whimsical great grandmother who loved to tell tales about banshees, leprechauns, and fairy folk, so I loved fantasy, mystery, romance, you name it! At the same time, they loved the theater. From a very young age, I went to every possible play we could find and also fell in love with the performing arts. In college, I majored in theater, dance, and music. Then I spent several years doing dinner …
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Expatriate is a hard term to work with. In Europe it’s almost become an insult. No matter, for my purposes I’ll take it to mean those poor, unfortunate sods who reside in a foreign country or simply end up there exploited by intelligence services of one hue or another — or else they are powerless observers of a tragedy unfolding around them. They dot spy fiction like mothholes in a tweed jacket and for several books they seem to have been Graham Greene’s stock-in-trade … The Third Man (1949), Our Man in Havana (1958) — Wormold is probably the archetype of ‘unfortunate sods’ — and … The Quiet American (1955); Viet Nam, not long before Dien Bien Phu. A book I have read sev…
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C. S. Harris is the bestselling author of the Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries, set in the first decades of the 19th century, as well as several other series. Her research is impeccable, and what’s more, she captures the romance, energy, intrigue, and spirit of a chaotic time in British history. In her latest, Who Cries for the Lost, the wait for news about Waterloo is the backdrop to a complex murder mystery. Harris was kind enough to answer a few questions about her approach to historicals. Molly Odintz: Who are some of your influences, when it comes to writing historical fiction? C. S. Harris: I suspect most writers are heavily influenced by the books we read as childre…
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Don Winslow has written his last novel. That was the unavoidable takeaway from our latest conversation, which came in the weeks before the release of City of Dreams, the second installment in Winslow’s trilogy following the life and times of Providence’s Danny Ryan. The new book, picking up after a bloody gang war, takes Ryan and company west, orbiting around a splashy Hollywood adaptation of their recent exploits. The story follows a structure tied to Greek epic poetry, conveyed through Winslow’s knowing, streetwise prose, all with a relentless sense of momentum powering toward the next tragedy in the sequence. Which brings me back to that first revelation. Winslow is on…
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What makes a horror story scary? Is it a monster? An act of random violence? The spilling of blood? Or is it what those things symbolize that crawls under our skin to send a chill down our spines? The monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) isn’t just a collection of random human parts, it’s a symbol of the arrogance of man, a reflection on the potential consequences of pursuing knowledge and power that mortals might not be equipped to handle. The titular character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) doesn’t exist just to make you watch your neck. The Count’s move from Transylvania to England exposes fear of the other, exemplified by a cast of upstanding English chara…
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Four days until Christmas. The rest of the day in the shop is busy. My two after-school workers come in around four; Bennet the math whiz with his wild head of curls and lanky frame, and Van, who is transitioning and who is working on his first graphic novel. They’re both sweet, woke, smart, very their respective things, and reliable Gen Z worker bees. Love them. We’re all running ragged, making recs, ordering whatever we don’t have in stock and promising it by Christmas Eve, wrapping, helping folks to their cars. Inside this store, it’s another universe for me. Surrounded by books, the real world with all its violence, injustice, and unhappy endings seems like the imagi…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * John Lawton, Moscow Exile (Atlantic) “Lawton infuses the entire troupe with sparkling life, using crackling dialogue and rapier wit to bring a Technicolor sheen to the moral ambiguity of the Cold War.” –Booklist Don Winslow, City of Dreams (William Morrow) “The second volume in Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy delivers on all the promise of its predecessor. . . the Danny Ryan saga draws great power from its consummate portrait of a man whose unshakable humanity imperils him just as it offers the possibility of salvation.” –Booklist V. Castro, The Haunting of Alejandra (Del Rey)…
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The ancient capital of Tibet, its name literally translates as “place of gods,” a religious centre as devout as the Vatican, Mecca, or Jerusalem. One of the highest cities in the world, invaded by Britain now occupied by China but still the centre of Tibetan Buddhism. Contested territory, the Dalai Lama forced to live in exile and not the imposing Potala Palace that looms over the city of monasteries, temples and palaces against a backdrop of the Himalayas. We all know that no lesser figure in crime writing than Sherlock Holmes spent time in Tibet after falling from the Reichenbach Falls. The Tibetan political activist and writer Jamyang Norbu wrote The Mandala of Sherl…
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“All great literature is one of two stories,” according to the quote usually attributed to Leo Tolstoy. “A man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” Where the journey is concerned, perhaps no other text has had as much influence on writers or been borrowed from so frequently as Homer’s epic, The Odyssey. It’s true in my new crime novel, and many other books—from literary fiction to mysteries—by authors whom I admire. For starters, of course, look no further than James Joyce’s Dublin-set Ulysses for a modernist example of a writer mining Odysseus’ ten-year journey to return home. But over the years, allusions to the Odyssey have populated numerous other novels, …
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Spring is the perfect time for romance, even in a mystery novel. Love adds balance to a book with dark themes. It also humanizes sleuths, often solitary people who put their investigations above all else. In Murder in Postscript, my sleuth and agony aunt, Amelia Amesbury, becomes obsessed with finding the murderer of one of her readers. The reader is to meet her in St. James’s Park, where she will divulge a murder. But when Amelia finds her dead, she must piece together the past. Luckily, she’s not alone in her pursuit. She has Simon Bainbridge, a marquis and friend of the Amesbury family, to help her. He not only assists in the investigation but also encourages her perso…
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“What if Dracula’s long-suffering, bug-eating lunatic henchman Renfield finally got fed up with the abuse wrought unto him by his master, and decided to quit?” is, objectively, a very good premise for a movie. It’s got the three best things a movie can have: room for a rich character arc, a clear source of conflict, and Dracula. “What if Renfield goes to a support group for people in abusive or dysfunctional relationships, and his new friends help him on a journey of self-discovery and encourage him to leave Dracula?” is another good idea, a good way to develop this premise, love it. Additional good ideas include,”what if this movie is styled after and positioned as a se…
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7 DAYS BEFORE “GO ZERO” BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS The full-length mirror in the lobby, there to lend a sense of light and space to the cramped entrance hall, is spotted with age, the corrosive grime picking at the silvering like a scab. Still, it works well enough for the rent-controlled residents—teachers, low-level civil servants, the owner of a bakery, and half a dozen retirees just grateful that the elevator works most of the time. They can pause and check themselves before going out, take one final glance to make sure skirt hems aren’t snagged in stockings, flies are done up, chins bear no toothpaste, hair isn’t hysterical, toilet paper isn’t clinging to shoes before t…
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There hadn’t really been uncensored newspapers in Myanmar since the military coup in the sixties. The Myanmar Times publisher, a bald-headed, ruddy-faced Australian, bragged that he had smuggled the mint-green printing presses in from New Zealand in 1999, right under the junta’s nose. Back then, when the paper first started printing, it was illegal to own something as innocuous as a photocopying machine. His first Burmese business partner had been in jail on retroactive censorship charges for the last five years. He liked to think of himself as a subversive thorn in the side of a repressive government; his critics saw him as an opportunistic apologist who published govern…
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At the recent Left Coast Crime conference in Tucson, Arizona, an author panelist was asked how long she could keep writing stories about her early 20th-century character. Half-jokingly, the author replied that she could perhaps kill them off soon: “After all, the Titanic sunk in 1912!” Titanic was just one of over 1,600 vessels built at the still-working Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, in the north of Ireland, yet despite the fact it happened over a century ago, no other oceanic story still fascinates us as much as this tragedy. Countless movies, programs, websites and documentaries have explored every conceivable aspect of the disaster, while the many hund…
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Ask a casual reader what springs to mind when they think of Jane Austen, and you’ll likely hear some combination of Mr. Darcy and balls and comedy of manners. And these are, of course, all part of Austen’s enduring appeal (over 200 years and counting!)—but if you dig a little bit deeper into her oeuvre, you’ll stumble upon the curiosity that is Northanger Abbey. This occupies a strange place in her bibliography: it was actually written before all of her other published works, but only published posthumously (in a set, along with Persuasion). Once you’ve read the book, you’ll likely understand why: it’s a bit different from her others, in that while it is, ultimately, a co…
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Marriage has always been a theme in literature, but there’s been a rise, in the last few years, of thrillers centered on disturbing and toxic relationships between husbands and wives, domesticity infused with lies, betrayal and murder. In my new novel, Spider, the main character, Sophie, an aspiring actress, has been married three times, and now Tariq, her most recent husband, has gone missing, having vanished on his way to work one morning. As heartbroken Sophie tries to uncover the mystery of what’s happened to him, the narrative switches between past and present, and is told from the perspectives of Sophie and each of her three husbands. There’s her childhood sweethe…
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James Bond has two origin stories. One starts on a February morning in 1952. Seeking distraction from his upcoming wed- ding, Ian Fleming sat down at his Royal portable typewriter in Jamaica and wrote what—after a few amendments—would become an immortal line in literature, and my favourite opening of any novel: ‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.’ The authority of this sentence hints at the other, earlier origin for James Bond, more than a distraction from impending married life. When World War Two broke out, Ian Fleming went from a career of exciting journalism, and then boredom as a banker, to joining naval intelligence. In…
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As a lifelong fan of James Bond and the spy genre, I am honored to take on the mantel of 007 in a new saga expanding the Double O section. While introducing a new female Double O in Double or Nothing, I looked to other writers for inspiration and discovered and re-discovered so many brilliant leading ladies. I can’t possibly rank them, so here are my ten espionage novels centering women’s stories in chronological order. N or M? by Agatha Christie (1941) Agatha Christie writes a spy novel! What more could a person want? Set during World War Two, N or M? explores the fear of ‘the enemy within’—Nazis posing as ordinary citizens within Britain. The Intelligence service ca…
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