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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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Laura Lippman, Dream Girl (William Morrow) “Lippman never stops twisting the plot into a deliciously intricate pretzel, right up to the jaw-dropping finale. This is both a beguiling look at the mysteries of authorship and a powerful #MeToo novel, but that’s only the tip of a devilishly jagged iceberg…” –Booklist Nicci French, What To Do If Someone Dies (William Morrow) “Crisply written, intelligently plotted and has plenty to say about the necessary selfishness of grief.” –The Guardian Joe Lansdale, Moon Lake (Mulholland) “Lansdale nails the storyline, nails the susp…
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The American comic book is inseparable from foreign policy, the great twentieth-century battles between capitalism and totalitarianism, and the political goals of the world’s preeminent military and cultural power. The history of the American comic book is a story of visual culture, commerce, race, and policy. These four fields are analogous to the four colors used to print comic books: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. They lie atop one another, smearing, blending, and bleeding to create a complete image. To separate them is to disassemble a coherent whole and to shatter a picture that in its entirety shows us how culture and diplomacy were entangled during the mid-twent…
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We all know the PI. You need only rattle off the names—Spade, Hammer, Marlowe, Archer—to conjure the picture. Tough, swaggering, fast-talking, busted nose, cigs, that Webley–Fosbery revolver. They’re Bogie-like, usually, men sure of themselves and sure of their place in the world. They stand firmly at the top of society’s pecking order, even though they ply their shadowy trade by night, solo, down near the docks or in a dive bar, soaked in gin and regret. But, thankfully, the world has grown a li’l bit since Hammett set Spade off in pursuit of “the bird.” The PI has grown up, too, broadened a bit. He, or she, is not as solitary, a lot of the gumshoeing is done from the …
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When I asked suspense author Chris Pavone recently if there were any mysteries or thrillers he’d ever felt compelled to read a second time, his response was blunt: “Zero. Once the puzzle is solved, I have no interest in re-visiting it.” I get it. Part of the reason you tear through a suspense novel—even when it’s waaaay past your bedtime–is to uncover the secret, reach the reveal, finally know whodunit, and of course learn if the protagonist survives the whole awful mess. Once you have the answers, why would you want or need to go back? And yet there have been a few suspense novels over the years that I just had to revisit. Yes, I knew the ending, but I wanted to try to…
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The first time I publicly wrote about my masochism, I was fully prepared to be shamed by strangers. It wouldn’t have been the first time, after all. What I got instead were private messages thanking me for being open about my experiences and a barrage of questions about the best ways to safely enjoy pain. If I’ve learned anything about life, it’s that most of us have a darker side, whether or not we show it to the world. It was a huge driving force behind my debut Walking Through Needles (June 29, 2021, Polis Books), which delves into many types of dark desires. Tapping into those darker needs isn’t always easy (or legal) for people to do, which is the beauty of books.…
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Many of the greatest stories about fathers and children are, at heart, crime stories. Think Laius and Oedipus, or Oedipus and Antigone, think Abraham and Isaac, Hamlet and his Ghost, Fyodor Pavlovich and the sons Karamazov, Pap and Huck Finn. These relationships are built as much around murder, madness, betrayal, revenge and attrition as they are genetics and lineage, to say nothing of love. Crime lit is no less interested in the darker aspects of parenthood, although it does seem that mothers are often more central to these types of stories. Still, there are plenty of the bad dads to be found in the mystery and suspense section of the bookstore, as well as good ones tha…
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– by Laura Lippman, author of Dream Girl, coming Tuesday, June 22 My mother the (retired) librarian read my latest book while visiting me over Memorial Day weekend. We are WASP-y people—well, she’s 100 percent WASP, I’m 75 percent—so I did not expect effusive praise and I was not disappointed. She said that Dream Girl kept her attention and she would be curious to see what reviewers said. “It’s so different from your other books,” she added. I will unpack a lot of this at my next therapy session. (For the record, the book has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal, the last of which called it a “masterpiece.’) But the comment that…
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I won’t say noir. And not because I can’t bear any over pronounced French since we lost Alex Trebeck. And not because the villains of my adolescence were always drenched in its Drakkar. But because noir has rules, the same way irony does, and I really don’t know what they are. There are factions who squabble over including hard-boiled detectives or excluding any hint of redemption, and those are arguments I want no part of. I’m not a purist, in any sense of the word. For me it’s a voice and some dark stuff happening, something withheld, maybe a curl of smoke in there somewhere. So I won’t say noir. And I can’t call this list Not Quite Noir, as google just told me that’s …
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These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. —Ernie Pyle, war correspondent Between the abduction and cannibal-mutilation murder of Grace Budd by Albert Fish in 1928 and the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, “the Black Dahlia,” in 1947, a generation of future “epidemic era” serial killers was born, including Juan Corona (1934), Angelo Buono (1934), Charles Manson(1934), Joseph Kallinger (1935), Henry Lee Lucas (1936), Carroll Edward Cole (1938), Jerry Brudos (1939), Dean Corll (1939), Patrick Kearney (1939), Robert Hansen (1939), Lawrence Bittaker (1940), John Wayne Gacy (1942), Rodney Alcala (1943), Gary Heidnik (1943), Arthur Shawcross (194…
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The Canadian Paradox Some places in the world are what they call “low-trust societies.” The political institutions are fragile and corrupt, business practices are dodgy, debts are rarely repaid, and people, rightly, fear being ripped off on any transaction. In the “high-trust societies,” conversely, businesses are honest, laws are fair and consistently enforced, and the majority of people can go about their day in the knowledge that the overall level of integrity in economic life is very high. With that in mind, given what we know about the following two countries, why is it that the Canadian financial sector is so fraud-ridden that Joe Queenan, writing in Forbes magazin…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Alison Wisdom, We Can Only Save Ourselves (Harper Perennial) “Eerie and powerful. . . . the hypnotic storytelling and exploration of Alice’s character—and the character of Alice’s entire town—will draw readers in.” –Booklist Tod Goldberg, The Low Desert (Counterpoint) “These are stories Elmore Leonard would love—not just because the razor-sharp Goldberg wastes no words in cutting to the heart of his stories, but also because he highlights the humanity and inner lives of even his most bent characters . . . A thoroughly enjoyable collection by a bona fide original.” –Kirkus Reviews…
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I like to check in on writer’s houses. Not in a creepy, hiding-behind-the-hedges way, just as a diversion during the work day when I’m stuck online and wishing I were somewhere breezy with nothing but time, mixed drinks, and books. There’s a vicarious creative thrill in seeing the places where our favorite authors produced their best work. That’s especially true when a writer and a place are entwined in your imagination. I’m thinking about Hemingway’s Paris apartment on Notre-Dame-des-Champs or the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst—addresses and edifices that have survived to our day and still manage to conjure up an artistic world. In the crime fiction realm, that’s John D.…
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I have a 17-year-old son, and over the past year, I have been teaching him to drive. He’s grown up in a different generation than me, one with Ubers and Lyfts. A lot of options on how to get around. And in my day job in advertising, I often hear that many twenty-somethings at the agency don’t even own cars… a move that suddenly seemed brilliant in 2020 amid the pandemic. And so, my son asked me one day when he was first learning… “why do I need a car anyway?” My answer was simple. Movement equals freedom. Freedom exposes you to new choices and experiences. And those experiences shape your identity. With a car, you can go places you’ve never gone—and meet people that you…
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“Lion ain’t cross chasin a deer.” Rye took a long, covetous draw on his cigarette, then flicked the ash down near his boots. “Thing about him—ain’t bloodthirsty, ain’t blood-guilty. That’s a rare circumstance. All the same to him. He don’t think a whole lot of himself, see, but he thinks even less of everybody else.” “I’ve heard it told he’s a twin,” said Fozzy. “Other one March by name, owin to bein mild and quick-passin, while August is mean and takes his time.” Rye chuckled. “I heard that one myself,” he said. “I heard that one and a whole lot of others.” Next morning, under a sky blushed with a mustard hue, Gussie jibed his route northward, wanting more distance be…
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At signings and book club events, the question that comes up most often is, “What made you decide to write this novel?” The inspiration for The Godmothers didn’t come from a single source; it was more like the spokes of a wheel coming together in one pivotal spot. And as I was researching and writing this “New York” novel, I found my “center of the wheel” when I stumbled across a quote from Mario Puzo who revealed the true inspiration for his novel, The Godfather. He said: “Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth, in my own mind I heard the voice of my mother. I heard her wisdom, her ruthlessness, and her unconquerable love for her family and for life itself, qualitie…
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When Petrina arrived at Coney Island, she headed straight for the Cyclone roller coaster. You couldn’t miss it, looming above the other rides, roaring like thunder. It was made of wood, and its elegant curves had a certain beauty, if you liked that sort of thing. She felt a bit guilty; Mario had peppered her with eager questions about it when she was home for Easter, only a scant ten days ago. She’d put him off with vague promises. “You’re too young for that,” Petrina had said. “Wait until you get a bit older.” The truth was, she found amusement parks slightly silly. They were always noisy and filled with riffraff. She couldn’t see the point of eating a lot of terrible …
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You should go back to Venice. I was in Dubai, when my friend, a fellow academic at the university where I was teaching, leaned over and offered this piece of advice. We were sitting outside, in between our classes, sipping hot Earl Grey tea under the even hotter Middle Eastern sun, the humidity quickly creeping upwards so that my clothes had already begun to stick to my back, my glasses still frosted as a result of the move from the air-conditioned indoors to the outside. My friend wore a sweater, unfazed by the heat. She continued: You should go in the winter, when it’s cold and dark and rainy. And Gothic. I had been to Venice once before—at the height of summer, along…
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Chicago newspaperman Ben Hecht was about to embark on a new career as a playwright and Academy Award-winning scriptwriter when he first met the infamous Joseph Weil. In fact, the encounter took place amid the chaos and clutter of a press room that would inspire the setting for The Front Page, the hit play Hecht co-wrote in 1928 with colleague Charles MacArthur. As usual, Weil—most people knew him only by his nickname, the “Yellow Kid”—looked like a wealthy, respectable citizen. “Our town’s most brilliant confidence man…always dressed like a matinee idol,” Hecht recalled in his 1963 memoir, Gaily, Gaily, “down to his pearl-gray spats.” The mustache of his neatly trimmed, …
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“What makes a killer plot twist?” A well-executed plot twist is all about the careful delivery of information. When twists fail to work as intended, the most common criticism is that they are “predictable.” And while you should always take care to misdirect readers away from anticipating your surprise beats, it’s also far from the only thing you’ll have to consider. In my view, here’s what makes a killer plot twist. It should feel inevitable. As surprising as a good plot twist is in the moment, when viewed in retrospect, it should also be foreshadowed. It must emerge organically from what came before, and that means that all the clues should have been there. That’s the …
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Imagine this scenario: You’re in your home after a long day. Dinner is done, the dishwasher whirring in the kitchen, the children are in bed and finally, you and your partner have time to sit down, put your feet up and watch something on your streaming service of choice. After some discussion, you find a movie about a woman who discovers her husband is secretly a serial killer—you know the kind of movie I’m talking about. An hour and a half flies by and you’re entranced, entertained and then it’s done. Satisfied with the conclusion you click off the television and turn to your partner and say, ‘That would never happen to me. I’d know if you were out killing people while…
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___________________________________ Jessie Levy and the Dillinger Gang ___________________________________ During the Great Depression, there were big banks, and desperately poor people, and in between the two, a great vacuum—a vacuum that was quickly filled by the glamorous, devil-may-care exploits of 1930s gangsters like Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, and John Dillinger and his men. (Even if the exploits themselves were not actually all that glamorous, it didn’t really matter—once they hit the papers, everyone swooned.) But being a ‘30s gangster wasn’t all fun and games. Dillinger’s men ended up in jail almost as often as they robbed banks, and frequently needed …
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A look at the month’s best new true crime books and critical studies. * Murder in Canaryville: The Triue Story Behind a Cold Case and a Chicago Cover-Up, by Jeff Coen (Chicago Review) James Sherlock, a consummate detective and appropriately named, came from a family of Chicago police. After his own long career with the department, he was headed toward retirement when he came across a cold case, the murder of seventeen year old John Hughes on the Southwest Side of the city. The case, with its flickers of a broader story of corruption, came to consume him, and as he chased down leads and connected the dots, he began to see a bigger picture, one that implicated figure…
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The gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, who is both expert cat-burglar and brilliant detective (as well as a master of disguise), made his debut in the short story “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin” in July of 1905. A year later, author Maurice Leblanc thought, why not feature his genius protagonist facing off with the most famous sleuth of the day, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes? As a character, Lupin does not have much in common with Holmes, despite their enormous intellects and penchants for showmanship; if he resembles anyone in British literature, it’s the popular gentleman thief character A. J. Raffles, created by E. W. Hornung (who was, incidentally, Conan Doyle’s broth…
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“You know what I mean? You haven’t seen him, but the hairs on your neck tickle against your collar. It makes you shiver. Everything looks normal but it ain’t. It’s like you got a belly-dancer sucking Turkish delight while she blows hot breath down the back of your neck. You don’t mistake that. Maybe it’s an echo to your footsteps. Maybe your subconscious starts to recognize the same pattern of walking: the same guy, in the same shoes, still the same distance behind. But he’s on a loser, because he can’t follow you on the underground. Not if you’ve guessed. Even if you’re six foot two, like me, and you stand out in the crowd. You can lose him.” These are the opening lin…
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I heard about Tony Costa weeks before I met him. I was seven that summer of 1966, when Mom got the job at the Royal Coachman and the three of us shared a single room on the first floor near the office. Louisa and I did our best to stay out of her hair, and whenever I could, I’d tag along behind Cecelia as she made her rounds through the rooms. If she wasn’t humming some church hymn, she was talking about “my Tony.” “When my Tony gets back from his trip, I’ll have him come over and meet you.” “My Tony is a good man.” “I raised my Tony by myself after his father died in the war.” She didn’t say what war, but I figured it was a long time ago and far away. Cecelia talked ab…
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