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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It was a freezing day in January 2016 when I passed through a long-locked door and first set foot into what had once been St. Joseph’s Orphanage. The beautiful, spooky old hulk of a building was dark and frigid, and as I walked through the hallways, the sound of my feet against the worn wood floors was amplified in the long corridors. In the cold winter light, the basement dining room, once an optimistic yellow, had an uneasy green tinge. Here and there the paint blistered. I tried to picture all the children sitting here at their little tables, eating their food and keeping their heads down, dreading the consequences if they got sick. I walked up the stairs, above th…
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When you work at the CIA, you’re taught that everything you do is a secret. You need to be invisible. But when I sit down to read a spy novel, it’s difficult to divorce my experiences from what I’m reading. I’ve had some courageous former CIA colleagues tackle both fiction and nonfiction and I’ve been impressed. But what I find fascinating is when authors manage to capture the true essence of espionage after having never worked in intelligence. Below is by no means a comprehensive list of spy thrillers and nonfiction works. It is a sampling of the spy books that I’ve picked up over the years and my thoughts on how they hold up against real spy work. Fiction: The Kill…
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Anna Cser lay on the floor of her living room. Her back was red and crawling with an itch. She had been lying for hours on the sackcloth the midwife had laid out for her, and the burlap had left a platoon of faint crosshatches imprinted on her skin. Maddening bits of the flax were clinging to her. She was cloaked in a thick hide of summer sweat, and all the impossible bits of filth she had failed to clean from the room had floated to her, freckling her with speckles of dirt and dust. Her stringy brown hair hung wet around her neck and shoulders. She took quick swipes at her forehead to push the strands from her brow, but they soon found their place again and plunked b…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Gigi Pandian, The Raven Thief (Minotaur) “Excellent. . . Pandian’s clever solution matches the challenge she sets for her endearingly imperfect lead. This brilliant homage to classic golden age authors such as John Dickson Carr augurs well for a long series run.” –Publishers Weekly Annette Lyon, Just One More (Scarlet) “The transparency and straightforward structure of the prolific Lyon’s first thriller are key to its potency. Two intimate first-person narratives run on parallel tracks, and suspense is added drop by drop against a backdrop of female bonding and contemporary women…
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Some years ago a good friend, a well-known author, approached me to vet an idea for his next novel. The book was a thriller, and the plot went something like this: a hostile country devises a scheme to wipe out America’s air traffic control network in the blink of an eye. If the plot succeeds, he tells me, the outcome will be hundreds of airliners crashing into one another and falling out of the sky. He ran it by me because of my background—I’m a pilot with both military and airline experience. My answer, unfortunately, wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “The sky is a very big place . . .” I began. I explained that when communications with air traffic controllers are lost, p…
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I don’t know who showed up to Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre with lofty expectations, but I was not one of them. No, I went to the movies at the end of a long, hard week because I wanted—I needed—to watch scenes full of computer screens blinking with face-matching algorithms, and bald men growling into earpieces, and the slain bodies of henchmen rolling down flights of stairs, and people typing really fast on keyboards before announcing “I’m in,” and this seemed to be the kind of film that could give those things to me. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre did not get rave reviews across the board, which I think is a bit unfair, because it is a movie that seems exactly l…
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My third Canadian winter is my first with Permanent Residency, my first with provincial health insurance, my first real attempt to enjoy winter via talking up cross-country skiing. I’m not good at it, but I hope someday I will be, which is a fairly accurate description of how I approach new ventures. Not with anything as hokey as beginner’s mind, but with the confidence that between my reading and thinking and writing I can find something new to say. Unfortunately, I cannot read, write, or think myself into becoming an excellent skier. I wax philosophically because I am stepping down from my perch at Lit Hub/Crime Reads. Seven years ago, when Jonny Diamond contacted me …
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Let’s say Paco goes to the dentist and gets a root canal. Did your skin crawl in goosebumps? Perhaps you don’t know Paco enough to care. Or (lucky you!) dentists and root canals don’t whip up particular horrors. Maybe, you did feel a nasty prickling. Something visceral, your body conjuring up a whirr, a metallic taste, a prick, a pull, a crack, your watery eyes in a tight grimace praying pain won’t come, your jaw exhausted. Even if you didn’t feel anything before, I imagine you now sense something in your body tighten, a sort of bracing. Now. Let’s say a light blinds Paco. Two shadow figures hover above him, their words muffled by a sucking machine sucking right by his …
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In the greatest TV news since this announcement, probably, the streaming service Peacock has announced that there will be a Monk movie! Yes, a Monk movie! It is to be called Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie and written by original series creator Andy Breckman. The release date is currently unknown, which is a blessing… and a curse. Here’s what happened. Apparently, this mystery will be, according to the official announcement, “a very personal case involving his beloved step-daughter Molly, a journalist preparing for her wedding.” The great Tony Shalhoub will be returning as the brilliant obsessive-compulsive detective, as well as producing. And everybody else will be …
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Even if you’ve never heard of Nita Prose, I’d bet you a milkshake you’ve heard of her mega-bestselling debut, The Maid. I was lucky enough to read The Maid a couple months prior to its publication, long before it became a #1 New York Times bestseller as well as a bestseller in Canada, Australia, Germany, Finland, Croatia, and the UK. Though the book was outside my regular reading wheelhouse—a Clue-like locked-room mystery—the story’s protagonist, Molly Gray, instantly captured my heart. I was so smitten with Molly “The Maid” I passed that early copy along to all my local reading friends. The cover came back tattered, the spine creased, but everyone who read it felt the …
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In 1916 the White Enamel Refrigerator Company published, doubtlessly with an eye toward promoting sales to servantless ladies of its fabulous labor-saving devices, a book prosaically entitled Housewives Favorite Recipes for Cold Dishes, Dainties, Chilled Drinks, etc. “Most of the hardships of kitchen work come from the fact that it deprives many housewives of the pleasure of entertaining,” the editors of the gastronomic tome warned forebodingly. “The thought of going into a hot kitchen, after an evening at the theatre, to prepare a luncheon destroys all the anticipated pleasure of such an event.” Happily, however, with Housewives Favorite Recipes in her culinary arsenal a…
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I honed my detective skills on the pop culture of the late 70s and early 80s—not that the stuff from that era was stronger or more instructive than the movies and TV and comics that came before or after. The opposite is true—all of my easy entertainment options seemed second-rate, and finding the good stuff required committed effort. For me, this is a story typical among Gen-Xers. We have fond memories of our era not really because so much fabulous creative works were on offer, but because the time-consuming hunt for good stuff led to so many intriguing and surprising places. Determined to learn more about Nick Carter, or Peter Lorre’s Mister Moto movies, or The Shadow (…
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I wrote Our Best Intentions, a novel anchored in the suburbs of the Northeast and featuring a fifteen year old protagonist, while 7,900 miles from New York and two decades after my own freshman year of high school. It was only after becoming an expat and approaching middle age that I was able to articulate an honest, at times nostalgic, at other times critical, perspective on living in “progressive” American suburbia and the agony of being an adolescent girl. I’d moved to Johannesburg, South Africa in 2015, having lived in the Northeast (Connecticut, Boston, New York) for most of my conscious existence. The reasons for my move, how I navigated a different country and new…
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If you thought last month’s casting of Helen Mirren as Patricia Highsmith was a sexy choice, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Everyone’s favorite smoldering short king, Oscar Isaac (recently seen playing the Handsomest Divorced Professor in the World in the Ingmar Bergman remake/extended knitwear commercial, Scenes From a Marriage, and sporting the greatest beard ever committed to celluloid in the David Lynch remake/extended sand commercial, Dune), is in discussions to play a pre-fame Kurt Vonnegut in the upcoming eight-episode crime thriller, Helltown. As reported by Variety: Helltown centers on Kurt Vonnegut (Isaac) before he was a renowned author and cultural lightning …
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Years ago I participated in a writer’s conference where I was required to read a certain number of pages from various attendees’ manuscripts. Afterwards I was required to have one-on-one meetings with the authors to give them my evaluations. Some of the manuscripts showed promise, but one of them stopped me cold. The story was what the author referred to as a “genre-jumping murder mystery.” My first issue with the story had to do with the idea that a group of time-traveling homicide investigators would not do so with three-inch thick paper files in hand. It seemed to me that if they could do time travel, they’d use tools somewhat more tech-savvy than pen and ink. And th…
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Here are some of the best feel-good crime reads I read in 2022. It’s so hard to do crime right, especially crime that leaves you feeling cozy and restores your faith in humanity. Luckily, 2022 was a good year for feel-good crimes. As my own cozy mystery, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murders, is slated to come out this year, I’m honored to share with you a few of the best crime books I read last year. FINLAY DONOVAN KNOCKS ‘EM DEAD, by Elle Cosimano The highly-anticipated sequel to Finlay Donovan is Killing It does not disappoint! I couldn’t imagine how Cosimano was going to top her explosive first book in the series, but she not only comes up with an equally zan…
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Inspiration can come from the strangest places. Or sometimes it creeps into your imagination from simple, ordinary events. Recognizing those everyday moments as inspirational is often the key to discovering a story idea. This is accomplished by observant awareness combined with the facility to squirrel away notions and ideas in your own mansion of memories. My short story collection, The Refusal Camp, includes two speculative tales, a bit of a departure from my historical fiction wheelhouse. Both came about via everyday inspiration. Cemeteries are great places for name hunting, and during a stroll through the aptly named Riverview Cemetery in Essex, Connecticut, my wif…
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Jon Gutiérrez faces the top flight of stairs at No. 7 Calle Melancolía (in the Lavapiés district of Madrid) in a really foul mood. The captain wouldn’t explain anything when Jon asked him about Mentor. “Where the hell did he come from? The National Intelligence Center? The Interior Ministry? The Avengers?” “Do what he says and don’t ask.” Jon is still suspended without pay, but the charges against him have been dropped for the moment. And the video showing him planting the junk in the pimp’s car has disappeared as if by magic from the TV and newspapers. Exactly as Mentor had promised if Jon accepted his strange proposal. People are still talking about him on social m…
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