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 dream I see blood.” When she was 20 years old, Christy Pinnick came home and found her father, Ray Pinnick, dead on the floor of the kitchen of their Muncie, Indiana home. He’d been killed that cold evening in February 1994 while Christy was working the cash register at a drug store. Nearly 30 years later, Christy is still haunted by what she saw that night. She talks about how she still has nightmares about finding her father’s body. She still wants the men who killed her father to pay for their crime. That night, Christy is certain, those men who killed her father came into the drug store where she worked. She’s been told many times over the past 30 years, by p…
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I’ve never been much of a reader. As a published writer I suppose I should be embarrassed to confess such a thing. But it’s true. As a lad I was too impatient to nuzzle down with a good book. There were too many distractions; girls to chase, balls to kick, cigarettes to choke on. I relied on television and cinema to stoke my cultural development. Those were the days when the TV had to warm up before you got a picture. There were only two channels. For the modest cost of a television license, you could enjoy the dramatic marvels of the BBC and watch hours of sport. Then there were the affordable Saturday morning picture shows. I was a proud minor of the ABC cinema on Wimbl…
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As the title of our new historical thriller The Lawless Land suggests, plenty of crimes are committed in the story. Since our book takes place in 1351—not long after the worst of the Black Plague and during the Hundred Years’ War between France and England—lawlessness reigned over wide swaths of Europe where civilization had been pushed to the brink, so the title is well-earned. It’s fascinating (and rather appalling in some cases) that human nature never really changes. Even though our book takes place more than 670 years ago, many of the crimes we featured in the plot are just as relevant today: murder, kidnapping, embezzlement, bribery, price-gouging, and theft by cut…
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I wish I had a better reason, but the story of how I came to be interested in stories that feature collective narration is a bit petty, really. I was speaking to a good female friend who had recently started dating a man who, as it happens, I had also dated many years before (it adds a certain frisson to say that as a bisexual woman I don’t tend to fall for straight women, but it just so happened that I had an active crush on this straight female friend, because, hey—sometimes life just isn’t complicated enough). I talked to my female friend about the unusually warm weather. She said, declaratively, ‘We’ll go to the pool this weekend, it’ll be beautiful’. ‘Great!’ I said.…
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Colombo—a city of five and a half million people and the largest city by far on the island of Sri Lanka. The city is also a port and a harbour, an ancient sea trade crossing in South Asia, an integral part of what is now known as the old Maritime Silk Road, and, after 1815 (following the island being under both Portuguese and later Dutch control) to independence, a part of the British Empire and the administrative capital of Ceylon. The country’s recent history has been marked by insurrections and civil war since independence as well as the devastating tsunami of 2004. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand people died in a quarter century of civil war that ended in 2009. …
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Usually if I get a book way out of the perimeter of my admittedly scattered interests, I put it in the Little Free Library pile. But Flung Out of Space was such a cool idea: a graphic (as in with pictures, not with smut) biography of Patricia Highsmith focused on the time when she sold Strangers on a Train and felt like she could quit her day job working in comics and become a legitimate writer. Thus the story of Highsmith’s quest for legitimacy is not just about her sex life, it’s also about her career; not a word applied to women in her time, but the right word nevertheless). There is also a same-sex love story evocative of Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, a romance betwe…
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I’m on the record with all my lavish praise for what Colson Whitehead is doing, which is nothing short of a monument to crime fiction—and to New York City. I’m not sure what else there is to say about the man’s work except, I suppose, to urge readers once again, if somehow they haven’t already been persuaded, to give themselves over wholly, unreservedly to the wild pleasures of Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy: first Harlem Shuffle, now Crook Manifesto, and a third novel still to come. In the new installment, Whitehead returns to the misadventures of Ray Carney, quickly ascending to the status of éminence grise in the small business community of 1970s Harlem, but with that cro…
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There’s the New York we see. The streets and neighborhoods, townhouses and office buildings, stoops and bodegas. That’s a damn good city, electric and irrepressible, but there’s another place just beyond that surface and it’s populated by our ambitions. A city of nighthawks and hustlers. Around every corner, a new scheme. That’s the heady undergirding of Colson Whitehead’s newest novel, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021). Whitehead is author to ten books and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (twice, for his last two, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys), but Harlem Shuffle marks his first entry into the world of crime fiction. It’s the story of Ray Carney, a…
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As a character, Los Angeles police detective Lt. Columbo was famous for turning, just as he was about to leave a suspect, and asking, in a faux-confused tone, about “just one more thing.” But in the years before Peter Falk helped “Columbo” creators William Link and Richard Levinson forge one of the most memorable characters in all of fiction, Link and Levinson seemed to have repeatedly stopped just short of the door to the office of Hollywood producers and executives and, in effect, proposed “just one more” early version of Columbo. It’s not unlike how “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry returned to the concept of an “emotionless” being learning how to be human, from S…
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At the start of his career, Christopher Nolan directed three films that embraced the tropes and spirit of noir. Beyond the shifty characters and underhanded betrayals and sudden violence, he imbued these works with a sense of neurotic fear and fatalism that harkened back to the great originals of the 1940s and 50s. Filmed for an ultra-low budget, the black-and-white “Following” (1998) is about a young writer who follows strangers around London; he’s soon noticed by Cobb (Alex Haw), a slick criminal who quickly becomes a mentor figure—but a double-cross awaits. Nolan’s next film, “Memento” (2000) is a twisty mind-bender about a brain-damaged man (Guy Pearce) pursuing his …
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“Lost” was a sensation when it aired on ABC for six seasons, from 2004 to 2010. Millions tuned in every week and talked afterward, in online forums and at the fabled workplace water cooler, about the show’s many mysteries. But you know all that. Like millions of other viewers, I found the series riveting television. I loved the characters and situations and twists. The polar bear. The hatch. The slowly-unfolding story of the Dharma Initiative. And I was never more horrified at a TV plot point than when “the Others” kidnapped young Walt. The intense reaction the series inspired in me and others backfired, though, when “Lost” ended with a disappointing final season and a…
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In 1974 when I published The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, I had two distinct advantages: though there had been occasional Holmes pastiches before, I essentially had a clear field, my only real competition being Doyle himself, and… I had the novelty of a story in which Holmes encounters and joins forces with Sigmund Freud. As much as any innate quality the book possessed, I believe it was its novelty that startled and delighted. No more. Nowadays my competition is a host of imitators imitating me imitating Doyle. Novelty per se is no longer the criterion by which Holmes pastiches are judged. What those criteria now are, I suspect, is subject to endless debate. The word pastic…
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If I could only recommend one movie from this past month, it would be Confess, Fletch, a movie of epic coolness and smoothness featuring Jon Hamm in his best role in a long time. It is so relentlessly enjoyable that I was positively shocked it didn’t have a wider release. Indeed, if you want to see it, you’ll have to hustle over to some faraway theater to catch a showing, or (like me) ride a million escalators to the top floor of the Times Square AMC, but it will be worth it, I promise you. Confess, Fletch, directed by Greg Mottola and co-written by Mottola and Zev Borow, is an adaptation of Gregory Mcdonald’s 1976 novel of the same name, the third in his series about a …
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I’ve got a secret, one I’ve never been willing to reveal in my twenty plus years as a librarian. I hate to burst the readers’ collective bubble, but here is the plain unvarnished truth, and you can trust a librarian to give you the correct answer, even if it’s painful. Here it is. Librarians are not allowed to read in the library. I’ve never pulled a book off a shelf and curled up in a chair even if there is a blizzard outside and no chance of a customer snowmobiling up to the front door. Sure, I can dip into a book to answer a customer’s question, but otherwise, no reading. It would be considered unprofessional. However, there is no rule against plotting murder. That I c…
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Today the Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of the 2021 Edgar Awards, one of the mystery world’s premier honors. This year marks the 75th annual presentation of the awards. For more on the nominees and special award winners, check out our roundtable discussion: The State of the Crime Novel in 2021, Part One and Part Two. Congratulations to all this year’s authors. ___________________________________ BEST NOVEL ___________________________________ Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (Penguin Random House – Random House) Before She Was Helen by Caroline B. Cooney (Poisoned Pen Press) Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Penguin Random Hou…
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When I agreed to write a magazine article on past-life regression therapy, I had no idea that my research would inspire my first thriller. The assignment did not get off to a promising start. Picture this: A damp, chilly church basement on New York’s Upper West Side where forty people hankering to get in touch with their previous incarnations lay on rubber mats spread across the floor and, with eyes closed, were sinking into a hypnotic trance. “Feel your muscles melt into the floor. Focus on your breathing. In. Out. In. Out,” the workshop leader intoned, his voice so melodic he was practically singing. “Now visualize yourself in a hallway with closed doors on either side…
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Agatha Miller was born on September 15, 1890, in Torquay, England. By her own account, she “had a very happy childhood.” By 18, she had written her first short story and begun work on Snow upon the Desert, her first novel. She never sold it, but she never stopped writing. At age 24, she met and married Archibald Christie, a British military officer. During the Great War, he fought overseas, and she worked in the Torquay Red Cross Hospital, first as a nurse and later as a dispenser in the pharmacy. Here, she formed a lifelong fascination with poisons, which guided her through many murders over the next 60 years. A fan of detective novels—which had begun in 1841 with “The …
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If there is one truth in this life, it’s this: in Texas, it’s hot as hell in the summer. Scorching, unrelenting, and punishing, summertime calls for icy swimming holes, cold beer, and most of all, scorching thrillers. Lowdown Road by Scott Von Doviak “Pursuit doesn’t get any hotter” is the tagline for Doviak’s latest, masterful white-knuckle suspense, a Dukes of Hazard-esque thrill ride set in the summer of 1974 in which two cousins form a plan to drive a taco truck full of marijuana, stolen, nonetheless, across state lines to where Evil Knievel aims to jump over the Snake River on his motorcycle. The NYTimes recently raved, “with its’ hapless good ol’ boy antiheroes …
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Five hours and twenty-five minutes. That’s how much time the novel you are holding in your hands will take. Not how long it takes to read—that will vary, depending on the reader, and whether you have opened this book while browsing in a bookshop, on a short ride home after buying it, or tucked up in bed with a cup of tea. Rather, it is the story itself that unfolds over exactly five hours and twenty-five minutes. And we know this because the author not only alerts us to the time, he makes each chapter heading another click of the hands, (1:39…2:52…) so that we are precisely, at times excruciatingly, aware of those precious minutes running out. “A ticking clock” indee…
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The key to pulling off a good con is to keep things moving briskly—pause for too long to collect your thoughts or give extra information and you’ll end up showing your marks exactly how you’re playing them. Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s splashy new film about a shifty carnival huckster-turned-famed mentalist, doesn’t follow its own guidelines about pacing or economy; it is too slow and too long—clocking in at 150 minutes—and by the end of the film, you’ll have counted enough of its seams to confuse it with a striped big-top tent. But this isn’t so grave a sin, because the film isn’t trying to trick its audience into thinking it’s something it’s not; ultimately, t…
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The release of No Time to Die marks the retirement of Daniel Craig’s James Bond, a man made taciturn and morose due in part to the loss of a great (and complex) love at the end of Casino Royale. As we bid farewell to this self-styled “grumpy” Bond, it’s worth revisiting the other Bond film about a great and lost love, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. This film is generally viewed as an outlier in the franchise. It gives our playboy agent a plausible, affecting romance—think of it as “The One Where Bond Gets Married”—and features a one-off performance of 007 by Australian actor George Lazenby. Despite these oddities, I have long maintained that Secret Service is th…
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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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When people ask me how I came up with the idea for An American in Scotland, I’ve never wanted to share the real answer. But the truth is: I wanted to run away from home. At the time, I had no plans to write a mystery set in Scotland. I just wanted to out of my house and to be anywhere else in the world. Normally, when I create worlds for my books, it just comes to me out of the ether—or I channel it from higher power. I’ve never questioned the process it just happens. Out of the blue a character starts talking and the stories play out like a movie in my head. The town and the people come alive for me, and I just write down what happens. That’s my process. There was a …
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When I tell people that I write cozy mysteries, the most common question I get is “Who are you and why are you knocking on my door at three o’clock in the morning?” The second most common question is “What are cozies?” Cozy mysteries are fun, light-hearted adventures—with a side of murder. A reluctant sleuth in a quaint town filled with zany characters follows a twisty trail of suspects and clues to uncover the unlikely killer. Compared with their more hard-boiled mystery cousins, cozies have surprisingly little blood with their murders, and limited adult situations—with no strong language and no sex. The first full-length cozy mystery appeared in the 1930s, featuring A…
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I love to garden. I always have. But there came a time when my shoulders wouldn’t let me do the heavy lifting. Planting planters was about as difficult as I could manage without injuring myself. But one day when I was at a Renaissance Faire, I came upon a woman who was selling fairy gardens, and my eyes lit up. Instantly, I became enamored with the art. I’m not a crafty person—I can sew and bake and color inside the lines—but until now, I had rarely used a glue gun, so designing adorable cards or making jewelry or furniture were out. However, fairy gardening was right up my alley. There were twinkling lights and pretty plants and the most adorable fairy figurines in eac…
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