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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Movies and television have re-fought World War II almost continuously for more than 70 years. I’m not talking about stories set during the war, or even stories about the Cold War, but the stories that have mined the aftermath of the war for thrillers. An example is “Hunters,” the Prime Video streaming series that follows a group of Nazi hunters in 1970s New York as they track Nazi leaders, scientists and concentration camp officials who are hiding in the United States and, in the series’ second season, internationally. But we’ve seen the echoes of World War II in thrillers for decades. Ground zero for a lot of these dramas was the 1960s and 1970s, but the stories began …
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Literary folk have had plenty to say about truth’s relation to fiction. Ernest Hemingway expressed his sentiments this way: “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened.” This, I believe, is the primary aim of writers. To write truthfully under fictional circumstances. To transport the reader into a story that feels more real, more acute, than the actual world that surrounds them. This sounds straightforward, but as anyone who has ever written a story knows, accomplishing this task is anything but. For starters, every reader has what I think of as a bullshit meter. When something happens in the story that breaks the reader’s trust, t…
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Montana Malik Barronette was born in 1995 in the richest country in the world. Yet by virtue of his race and gender, statistically speaking, he had from his first breath a much smaller chance than most American children of reaching adulthood alive, avoiding prison, or enjoying even modest legitimate success—a college education, say, or a steady job. If he failed to finish high school, he stood a less than fifty-fifty chance of holding a full-time job by the time he was thirty—for white Americans the chances were close to 90 percent. If he did everything right, finished high school or even college and found employment, he would likely earn 20 percent less than a white man.…
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Before I’d ever heard of crime fiction, or thrillers, or psychological suspense, I knew about detective stories. As a child, I’d sneak out of bed to swatch the opening to the PBS series Mystery!, with its iconic Edward Gorey sequence of gloomy houses and damsels in distress. Sometimes I’d manage to stick around for part of the show before my parents sent me back to bed, but the episodes themselves often struck me as slow, full of shots of dark streets and men having serious conversations while holding umbrellas. Fortunately, my tastes have changed since then. Though the adaptations of Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series never aired on Mystery!, the novels traffic in…
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The only thing better than getting lost in a library? Reading a book about one, of course. Whether it’s the Library of Alexandria, the British Library, or your favorite local branch, libraries hold a special place in our hearts and imaginations as portals to all sorts of knowledge and different worlds. If books are a “uniquely portable magic,” as Stephen King says, then libraries are a wellspring of enchantment, places where our imaginations are given license to run free. My upcoming book The Last Heir to Blackwood Library features a sprawling abbey on the windswept Yorkshire moors. When Ivy Radcliffe inherits the abbey in 1927, she arrives to find that there is a magnif…
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My new historical fiction release The Cuban Heiress gave me the opportunity to incorporate my love of suspense and history. Set in 1934 on an ill-fated luxury cruise ship the SS Morro Castle, The Cuban Heiress is the story of two women whose lives are endangered as the secrets of their past come back to haunt them. On a cruise ship filled with a mysterious cast of characters, twists and turns abound alongside the real-life enigma of the fate of the ship. My favorite historical novels are the ones that have a mystery at their core, propelling the plot forward as they send readers on a quest through history to put the pieces together. From 1920s Ecuador to New York City in…
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“Los Angeles has always been about people chasing their dreams and finding out the hard way that if those dreams come true at all, it’s always at a price. To me, that is the essence of noir: idealists bumping against the edges of a cynical world. That tension is the default setting for Palomino’s neo noir father/daughter duo Eddie & Lisette Lang. He’s a former cop, now a PI by day and working musician by night, and, no doubt, he’s a hard man (somewhere between Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen). She, at the ripe old age of 16, might be even more hardass and hardboiled than he is. However, deep inside, they both are bursting at the seams with empathy and with a burning …
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Now that Lisa Levy has moved on to a new set of columns, I’ll be taking over her psychological thriller column and recommending a few books each month perfect for the reader who knows the greatest mystery is why we do the things we do. April brings new suspenseful reads from old favorites and new voices, including a new Caroline Kepnes novel in the “You” universe, Adam Sternbergh’s take on a couple’s retreat gone sour, a reunion thriller from Megan Miranda, and a delicious debut from Disha Bose. Thanks to my colleagues Olivia Rutigliano and Dwyer Murphy as always for their wonderful blurb contributions. Azma Dar, Spider (Datura) Azma Dar has created a wickedly deligh…
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When people ask me what books have influenced me as an author, I lose my voice. I would love to be able to rattle off a long list of the classics, the contemporary, experimental authors, literary giants, exciting debuts. Instead, I’m afraid I’m quite gauche. It’s not that I don’t read — I love books, I have always loved books. A beautiful scene, a snappy bit of dialogue, a plot that leaves you breathless or makes you question everything you thought you knew, chef’s kiss. But, if I’m honest, I spent much of my twenties working two, sometimes three jobs, most of which demanded a lot of my energy and when I got home and wanted to unwind, instead of reaching for a book (you t…
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In the 1970s, I was a few years out of high school with dreams of being a writer when, in Toronto, to see a friend, I had time on my hands. The author, Morley Callaghan, lived there. I stopped at a public phone and looked him up in the phone book – remember those? I loved his work. I found his short story, “A Cap for Steve,” very moving. Callaghan was celebrated and had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I knew from reading Callaghan’s memoir, That Summer in Paris, that he’d been friends with the likes of James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Callaghan’s summer in Paris was in the late 1920s. At the time, Fitzgerald was working on Tender I…
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Midway through a three-minute magic trick, Teller, of the famed duo Penn & Teller, appears frustrated and confused. A minute earlier he made dozens of coins appear — seemingly out of thin air — and dropped them into the fishbowl sitting on an audience member’s lap. When he then empties the coin-filled bowl into a water tank, he’s clearly expecting something to happen. So is the audience, and then … nothing. Teller, seemingly befuddled, returns to the audience participant and fiddles with the fishbowl again. Finally, he goes back to the water basin and, this time, turns the coins into goldfish. It’s a beautiful, almost lyrical illusion. It’s also a reminder of th…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Andrew Welsh Huggins, The End of the Road (Mysterious Press) “An elegant crime story … packed with quirky, entertaining characters and told in flowing prose that has a life of its own…. Recommend this to action fans and to anyone who can respond to golden―if blood-soaked―prose.” –Booklist John Sandford, Dark Angel (Putnam) “The second Letty Davenport thriller will satisfy Sandford’s numerous readers, with its high-octane action and gallows humor.” –Library Journal Rick Mofina, Everything She Feared (MIRA) “Everything She Feared moves like a raging river. This is a thriller…
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Warning! When you marry a veterinarian, you not only agree to live with that person, you also agree to live the vet’s life. Divorce rate charts indicate that around one quarter of veterinarian marriages end in divorce, which is lower than the national average, but vets’ spouses might still be surprised at the demands this profession can place on their partner. The reasons cited for veterinarian divorce are often related to extended work hours, lack of family time, and stress. After forty-one years of living with a vet, I can attest that all these factors put pressure on a marriage. But the rewards can be even greater if your expectations are compatible and your veterina…
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I was fourteen when I smuggled home a Regency romance from my high school library. Given how conservative rural East Texas remains, it couldn’t have been anything too racy, and yet it was enough that when my mother discovered it, she lectured me on romance novels being the female equivalent to Playboy and that Jesus was watching. In the late-90s evangelical church obsessed with purity culture, this was a dire threat and I shelved the book. I realized it was safer to browse the mystery aisle, because while what consenting adults did could lead me right down the road to perdition, murder was somehow okay. The idea of female sexuality and pleasure has been controversial all…
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Whether you believe our future will be a utopia or a dystopia—a warmed-over planet run by bots or a new age of enlightenment and peace—chances are there will still be crime. It’s what we humans do. No matter what inventions we devise—what new technologies make it easier for us to order food from our phone or drive without driving or cheat on that history test—human nature remains a constant. And our nature often leads us to do regrettable, unsavory, and illegal things. This is one of the many reasons I’m a fan of stories that combine crime/mystery tropes with some speculative element, futuristic setting, or crazy new technology. It’s a way of imagining a fresh new worl…
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When I wrote You Should Have Known, I created an older character at a moment of great change. As the protagonist Frannie Greene moves into Ridgewood Retirement Apartments and gets to know her neighbors, she sees how they carry both the wisdom and the foolishness of their long lives. But her perspective is not limited to older folks—she is deeply involved with her kids and grandkids, and increasingly enmeshed in the lives of the young staff at Ridgewood as well. Frannie’s family has been marred by grief. Her granddaughter Bethany was killed by a drunk driver, and her daughter Iris was shattered. The accident and its aftermath have distorted the emotional shape of Frannie’…
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The central thesis of Andreas Malm’s manifesto How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire is that peaceful protests have proven themselves ineffective in stopping the widespread annihilation of the earth and its inhabitants by climate change. The book, published by Verso Books in 2021, explains that the only available option is to take more radical action, not against people but against the infrastructure that is the source of this danger. In a survey of the history of social, organizational and governmental change, Malm argues that every major movement has had to move past pacifistic stances in order to effect meaningful developments. Now, he write…
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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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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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Trouble in paradise is about as classic a concept as they come—it all started in the Garden of Eden and only got wilder from there. A dreamy but flawed protagonist filled with hope and expectation arrives in a stunning location only to discover they are still the exact same person they were at home. What could possibly go wrong? In my latest book, Before We Were Innocent, Bess and Joni’s dream vacation in Greece turns into a nightmare when their best friend Evangeline dies, and they are arrested for the crime. When the world’s media turns their attention on them, they are judged not only for the night Ev died but for every moment leading up to it. Now, ten years later, J…
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A friend asked me recently what I love most about writing; I had to stop and think for a minute, searching for a way to explain. There are, of course, many parts of the writing process that I love. There’s a week, at the very end of the structural edit, when all of the efforts of the preceding year or two spent building the book, the copious drafts and revisions, and scribbled out lines and rewritten scenes, come together at last to enact a magic—the flicking of a switch so that the story leaps to life, a three-dimensional world, with moving parts and real people, that can be looked at from every angle and reveal no holes, no leftover scaffolding, no walls waiting to be f…
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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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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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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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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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