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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The setting is easily visualized: a leaf-starred campus, buildings beset with ivy, dorms packed with teenagers who may have just met for the first time but for whom friendship feels instant and intense. It’s a time of life when everything feels like the most important thing that will ever happen, each mistake monumental in scope and each victory a magnified triumph. It’s a heady cocktail of intellectual challenges, emotional complexity, a dynamic social life—maybe even a public reckoning. With these memories so easily conjured, is it any wonder that we’re so drawn to campus novels, and thrillers in particular? In my debut adult novel, The Girls Are All So Nice Here, eigh…
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Most mystery lovers know of Wilkie Collins, beloved for his classics “The Woman in White” and “The Moonstone,” old-fashioned tales meant to be savored page-by-page by the fire late at night. Beyond that, however, one might accuse readers of what amounts to criminal neglect. The evidence? While the two classics noted above have hundreds of thousands of ratings and thousands of reader reviews at goodreads.com, and their titles can be dropped into conversations among book readers with confidence that others will have read them, or at least plan to, the same cannot be said for his many other works. “No Name” and “Armadale,” both excellent novels written during the same creat…
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CrimeReads editors select the best new crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers coming out in October. * Hannah Morrissey, Hello, Transcriber (Minotaur) I’ve been looking forward to Hello, Transcriber for months, just based on the cover design alone, but the plot is just as compelling. Hazel Greenlee works the graveyard shift as a police transcriber in Black Harbor, Wisconsin, a rustbelt city plagued by addiction and hopelessness. Her days are filled with her husband’s hunting exploits, and her nights are taken over by clinically precise descriptions of lurid crime scenes. She tries to keep her emotional distance, but one case in particular—and the mysterious detectiv…
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New Jersey’s most dangerous women can be found in a four traffic-light town not reachable by public transportation. From Newark, take Interstate 78 to Clinton, turn left at the traffic light. Across from the Walmart Plaza lies the entrance to the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility. EMCF is a two-hour trip by car from Manhattan, but for those visitors without vehicles there’s a prison bus that leaves from Midtown on Friday evening and arrives eight hours later. All must prepare to be searched and to stow their possessions in a locker before visiting an inmate. No water, no sodas, nothing but your flesh covered appropriately, i.e., no halter tops or bustiers. Seen from th…
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Quiet Time, my first mystery, was a fictionalized version of the brutal murder of a suburban housewife. Not just any housewife, but Betty Frye, on the eve of my marriage to her son. Back in 1973, he and I were college students at CU in Boulder, practicing karate and living together on the Hill. The morning Betty was murdered, I spoke with her; hours later, I saw her killer. Her death made me a crime writer. Quiet Time was my lab for learning fiction craft. The manuscript underwent twenty-odd drafts, each more heavily fictionalized. I wasn’t imaginative enough to invent brand-new characters, though I did change the killer. And the ending was entirely made up, since in rea…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jonathan Lee, The Great Mistake (Knopf) “An exceptional work of historical fiction about one of the key figures in the development of 19th-century New York City…A highly satisfying mix of mystery and character portrait, revealing the constrained heart beneath the public carapace.” –Kirkus Reviews Leonardo Padura, The Transparency of Time (FSG) “Dressed in the grungy trappings of a crime drama, this literary tour-de-force from Padura offers a colorful cultural history of Cuba and the island’s historical contact with Europe that helped to shape its people’s religious belief…
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A silver-haired man in a black jacket prowls the arid streets of Los Angeles, shouting in indecipherable cockney, brandishing a large silver pistol at anyone who gives him grief. His name is Wilson, and he’s a British ex-con with a reputation for serious violence. He wants to kill whoever murdered his daughter, Jenny. He thinks a record producer named Terry Valentine is responsible. If you’ve never seen Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey” (1999), you might read that barest description of its plot and assume it follows the usual framework of a revenge flick: the protagonist, wronged, murders or ruins the source of their anguish. It’s a story as old as the Bible, extended to …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stacey Abrams, While Justice Sleeps (Doubleday) “While Justice Sleeps is a mesmerizing legal thriller that does the rare thing: It uses the novel to get at the truth. Stacey Abrams is a powerful new voice in fiction.” –Michael Connelly Lara Bazelon, A Good Mother (Hanover Square) “A Good Mother is a high-stakes legal thriller packed with intense courtroom drama, but it’s also a story about the complicated sacrifices and compromises that mothers face. In this impressive debut, Lara Bazelon’s talent for both storytelling and the law are on sharp display.” –Alafair Burke LR Dorn…
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Ah, the thrilling wives. Sometimes they’re the first, sometimes next, and sometimes they’re last. Often, they know too much. They are charming, hunting, haunted and lovely. Sometimes, they’re found in the twilight, or upstairs. These are the wives of domestic suspense, and no matter who their spouses are, these captivating women are the stars of the show. If you’re looking for your next thrilling read, look no further than The Real Wives of Domestic Suspense. Consider these popular episodes: My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing Samantha Downing knocked it out of the park with this particular housewife. Millicent and her husband are living the suburban dream. She’s a rea…
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Some years ago I was invited to a fancy literary dinner where I was seated between Erica Jong and a senior editor of a mega publishing company. Having just exhausted with Erica the infamous topic of the “zipless f—k,” I turned to the editor and asked, “What do you look for in a manuscript that crosses your desk?” Frankly, I thought he’d give me a yawn and turn back to whomever he had been talking to. But he replied seriously, “I want to be intrigued by the first sentence and gripped by the time I reach the third paragraph. Thereafter, I want it to sing.” No doubt I’d overly participated in the several rounds of Beaujolais to which the table had been treated. For I said,…
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September 1905 Hampshire, England Unable to bear the stench of bananas, horse dung, smoke, and salty air, Jesse James Prescott pulled the red bandanna up over his nose. He stretched his shoulder blades, sore from leaning so long against the clapboards, and shot a glare up at the bunches of yellow fruit dangling above his head. Nasty things. Made him choke the one time he’d tried one. What had he been thinking, suggesting Snook’s as the rendezvous point? Sure, in the chaos and bustle of the ship’s arrival, the fruit merchant nearest the wharf, with its flashy displays of exotic produce enveloping the entire storefront, was an eye-catching landmark no one could mistake. B…
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Sweden has a proud tradition as a country of exports. American homes are not only decorated with furniture from IKEA— their bookshelves are bursting with suspense novels from a morbid country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean with a disproportionate number of crime writers per capita. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö paved the way with detective Martin Beck in their socially critical novels, published back in the sixties. Hennig Mankell walked the same path a couple of decades later, and then, in the beginning of the 21st century, Stieg Larsson took the sensation of Swedish crime to a completely new level. His Lisbeth Salander novels have sold close to 100 million copies…
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We were up in Calgary doing final re-writes on our first movie and staying in a fancy hotel and just doing that screenwriters getting their first movie made/showbiz thing, which feels real nice when it comes along. Now when I say “us,” I mean me and “Golds” aka Michael Goldberg my old writing partner. Golds was a sweet Philly kid with a strange mathematical gift for how stories work. He also had a wild, open face and this red-brown ponytail that made him look like the Jewish Thomas Jefferson. So, as I said, we were up in Calgary on our first movie, and these were exciting times. But our success, though we enjoyed it, had a little shadow over it because I was a heroin add…
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“Crime writers are the nicest people.” I’d heard this for years, and it puzzled me. Really? How is that possible? People who spend their time dreaming up the grisliest, most ghoulish acts of human barbary. If they’re such nice people, what on earth drives them to write such ghastly things? Now suddenly I was one. And still asking the same question. Hey, I’d spent more than a decade of my life writing nice, quiet nonfiction books about agreeable things. Leadership. Motivation. Personal development. Some memoirs, mostly of business leaders overcoming hardships to carve out careers making quiet contributions to society. Hell, I’d coauthored the sequel to Who Moved My Chees…
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One of the bright spots of the past year has been the ability to travel virtually via the books that we read. So what a joy it was to travel from the comfort of my own couch to the world of diplomats (and their local associates) in Embassy Wife by Katie Crouch. I became obsessed with Katie’s focus on parenting and relationships and how they are complicated by being in a wildly new setting. How children become surly, how spouses become resentful, how new friendships are made. All of these things are happening in such hilarious relief in Embassy Wife. I was dying to catch up with Katie—we worked together many years ago—about so many things that we now have in common—being n…
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I love reading (and writing) books with small towns, and houses set in the woods, and a setting that feels like a character. I’m a huge fan of atmosphere, and I find myself repeatedly drawn to themes of the past, and hidden secrets lurking under the surface of a picturesque façade. So maybe that’s why reading gothic fiction always transports me—particularly that tone, where the setting feels alive, and the secrets and the past feel alive as well. In my latest book, Such A Quiet Place, I wanted to pull the boundaries of a small town setting even tighter, make it feel inescapable, even though there are roads leading in and out. I was thinking about all those same elements …
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“Your father was working for the CIA,” said Bogdan, husband of my second cousin, a provocative person, especially after several bottles of local Slovenian wine. Nine of us were finishing a pleasant dinner in Ribić, a seafood restaurant on the Adriatic coast near Trieste in 2010. We were reminiscing about the years our American and Slovenian families had known each other, a relationship that began in 1951, when I was brought to Yugoslavia as a ten-month-old. My parents were in London for a year on a Fulbright grant when my father decided to visit the Slovenia mountain village his parents left in 1911. Bogdan’s claim stopped the conversation. “Preposterous, out-of-th…
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“It is impossible to drive anywhere in America today without encountering a patient, droop-shouldered chap who stands by the roadside and continuously jerks his thumb across his chest. He is the hitch-hiker, one of the strangest products of the auto age, and he is getting to be a prominent part of the American landscape. He is also getting to be an intense pain in the neck. Just why it should be considered proper for a man to stand by the roadside and beg free transportation from total strangers is a mystery….But the hitch-hiker is something more than a nuisance. There are times and places when the hitch-hiker is an actual menace to public safety….[M]urders of motorists b…
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My recent novel, Blood Will Have Blood, was driven in part by my fascination with protagonists who find themselves in dire exigent circumstances, facing predicaments where recourse to conventional protocols and laws simply fails. Sometimes dialing 911 isn’t an option. One of my favorite movie examples is Cape Fear (the original, with the inimitably noble Gregory Peck). Here is an officer of the court, an upstanding man of laws, stalked by Robert Mitchum’s vengeful ex-con, whose mayhem cuts through any notion that societal restraints can keep the order of things. How starkly this reality eventually strips Peck of his norms, leading this good citizen down a decidedly dark p…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Ashley Audrain, The Push (Pamela Dorman) In Ashley Audrain’s slow-burn suspense thriller about motherhood, Blythe Connor doesn’t have much of an idea about how things are supposed to go–after all, her own mother left when she was a young child. She’s determined to be the perfect mother she never had, but she can’t ignore the worries caused by her eldest’s many outbursts. Something seems…off, about the child, something that she’s never felt about her darling youngest. As her checked-out husband reassures her that everything is fine, Blythe becomes increasingly certain that…
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___________________________________ The Life and Crimes of Marie Dean Arrington ___________________________________ Marie Dean Arrington had been taking matters into her own hands for her entire life. So when she found herself in a minimum security jail cell—well, what was she supposed to do? Just sit there? Marie was thirty-five, and she’d been committing crimes for over a decade. At 23, while working at a motel as a maid, making 75 cents an hour for scrubbing floors, she suddenly realized that she could make a lot more money if she just robbed the motel instead. So she robbed her boss, and then she tied herself to a chair. When the police arrived, she said that she w…
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My first novel gave me my breakthrough in Germany as an author of psychological thrillers. It was also a type of self-therapy, and all without my knowing it. When I gave my good friend Thomas the first draft to read, his eyes opened wide at me and he said, “You’re essentially describing exactly what we experienced with Paul.” That experience I had with my best friend and mentor back then was probably the decisive factor in my becoming interested in the mysteries of the human soul. I wouldn’t be an author today without it. Due to our big age difference, Paul was like a second father to me. Unfortunately, Paul was very sick. It wasn’t like cancer eating away at you on the …
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Ain’t that America home of the free, yeah Little pink houses for you and me – John Cougar Mellencamp What I thought I knew was that by building a house, I had attained The American Dream. And by “building a house” I do not mean that I felled a small forest of trees and constructed my own dwelling, not in the least. I mean to say that I paid a crew of hard-working and weary men to build the house for me. Funny now, as I write these sentences to think that my own American Dream was only actualized by, what was, in the end, an expensive financial transaction. That my Dream was purchased. Growing up middle-class in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, so many aspects of the larger Am…
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This started as a normal piece for CrimeReads. You know the one: the author, dutifully shilling their newly released title, assembles a lively roundup of books that are sorta-kinda like theirs, with a headline that involves a number and some click-baiting tease (Eight Thrillers That Will Help You Pick Out Better Drapes, or Twelve Cozies You Can’t Bring Home to Mother, or whatever). This is usually achieved with a minimum of fuss. At the end of it, the author’s publicist is happy for the extra exposure, the author sells a few books, and CrimeReads gets some free content. Everybody wins. That’s all I was looking to accomplish for my latest thriller, Unthinkable. The book…
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Non-human animals are among the most vulnerable members of society. Even their inclusion in this term – ‘society’ – is not without controversy, and perhaps unsurprisingly so. We slaughter thousands of them every day to provide food and other products, routinely ignoring the often barbaric conditions they are kept in prior to their deaths. Arbitrary divisions are made between the behaviour of animals deemed consumable or those placed in the category of ‘pet’, while pets themselves – whether beloved or mistreated – are considered mere legal property. Some of the most popular breeds on the planet are created in such a way that limits their ability to breathe. It is interes…
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