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 Place de la Cathédrale was packed with tourists. They stood shoulder to shoulder, studying the gargoyles as their guides droned on about history, the quality of the stones, and the mastery of the craftsmen. Helena skirted the periphery, stepping around tables and chairs, children with ice cream cones, waiters with trays, and a range of well-behaved dogs. She continued to the south side of the cathedral, past the lineup for the public toilets, past the cathedral’s museum where there was no lineup, and down Rue de Rohan to the quay where the tour boats waited. She bought her ticket for the Batorama boat scheduled to depart at noon. Passengers were already waiting, four…
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Decision to Leave, the atmospheric new film from the great director Park Chan-wook (the writer-director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden), is a near-perfect neo-noir: a spiraling detective story laced up with a burning star-crossed romance, the whole thing soaked through with senses of dread and doom and death. It is the story of two characters—one straight-laced insomniac detective, and one beautiful woman suspected of murdering her husband—trailing and circling and obsessing about one another until they derail each other’s lives, and of course their own. The film follows Busan police detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il), an unhappy officer who spends nearly every night on a sta…
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When I was writing The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, a novel of haunting love and loss set in an Indian community on the east coast of South Africa, it didn’t immediately occur to me that it was a gothic novel. Looking back, it seems obvious—it had all the conventional genre tropes—the haunted house on the hill, the wild landscape, odd characters, ghostly elements and the disjointed rhythm of unease. It didn’t occur to me because these were simply features from my life growing up in my South African Indian home. It was only when I started to pick at the origins of the genre that I realized how much of the gothic existed not only in my life, but also far beyond the western …
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I first noticed something wrong with dad one Sunday during a visit. We were watching a football game. I sat on the couch, and he crooked one leg over the padded arm of an easy chair. I don’t recall discussing the game or who was playing. But he suddenly asked a question that hit like a bolt from the blue. “Is it three downs or four?” Dad and I had watched football together for more than 40 years. He knew teams had four downs, but I could see he wasn’t kidding. At that time, he was in his mid-seventies, a former truck driver, a star baseball player back in high school, a U.S. Marine who came home from Okinawa after World War II. He was a quiet and kind man who enjoyed re…
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Fictional characters are immortal, their creators, not so much. Authorial death be damned: fans, both longtime and new, often want more. And the truth is, in excavating crime fiction’s O.G.’s there are more cases to solve, more dirty deeds to dig up and more gimlets to drink before the day is done. To The Second Murderer, Mina brings Philip Marlowe’s congenital truth telling, his disregard for convention, and his acceptance that he is a man not of the times. In contrasting Marlowe to the other lost souls one character says “they’re broken. You’re sad.” Equipped with his intrinsic integrity, Marlowe can live with that. Like the Second Murderer in Macbeth, “I am one/whom …
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Few writers are so inextricably linked to a place as Dennis Lehane is to Boston. For many, he’s come to define the modern understanding of the city, its people, and its tragedies. But it’s been a while since he gave us a Boston book. Lehane has been busy writing for TV and most recently, showrunning Black Bird. This month, the wait is over. Lehane is back with a powerful new novel that takes on one of the city’s most turbulent moments: the desegregation of public schools by busing. Small Mercies follows a mother’s journey as she searches for her missing daughter in the dangerous days leading up to the start of school in 1974. Before the book’s release, I talked with Lehan…
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There are some movies that promise a great time and satisfying trip in the first shot. “Out of Time,” the 2003 potboiler starring Denzel Washington is such a film. When the camera pans onto the quiet, neon-lit, and palm tree lined main street of Banyan Key—a fictional Florida Keys town—it is impossible not to feel an overwhelming urge to crawl inside the screen, light a cigarette in the doorway of the “Scuttlebutt,” Banyan Key’s neighborhood haunt, and step inside for the first buzz in a new life. You might make a big drug bust. You might have an affair with a beautiful, but married woman, or you might find yourself deceiving and misdirecting all of your colleagues in loc…
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I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ordinary people being put in extraordinary situations. I’m ordinary, after all. I find it relatable. Could I land a plane? Fight off a shark? Stop a country-crippling cyber attack? (Spoiler: No, probably not.) But I like thinking about people who have, or who could, or who, quite unexpectedly, might. But these scenarios aren’t always heroic. What about ordinary people who find themselves in difficult situations who choose extraordinary (maybe not “good” extraordinary) solutions to those perceived problems? What do they do when they’re backed into a corner? What do they do when they decide enough is enough? Too many true crime s…
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For the past twenty-six years I have been writing a series of detective novels about English novelist Jane Austen, whom I unleash upon various blood-soaked criminals throughout the Kingdom, armed with her insatiable curiosity and her mordant sense of humor. The books begin in 1802 on the eve of her twenty-sixth birthday, and follow her life through various upheavals and calamities, both real and fictional, to her death at age forty-one in July 1817. We’re not quite there yet, in my imaginative rendering—but the fourteenth book, Jane and the Year Without a Summer, brings us to the threshold of Jane’s mortal illness, in May, 1816. This was an epically awful spring, not jus…
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“‘I have never liked fog,’ said Miss Marple.” ——At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie The history of mysteries and detective fiction includes several instances of authors and characters falling victim to dementia. If the intersection of detective fiction and dementia is so striking, it’s because they’re like a matched set of mirror opposites. This essay looks at four examples. In the classic sense, a mystery begins with a puzzle or number of unexplained circumstances. Typically, at the outset, someone is killed. The killer and the motive for the murder are unknown, and the circumstances for the crime are shrouded in mystery. As the story unfolds, a detective sorts t…
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I dare to suggest that Detroit has a bit of an image problem these days. But I’m an outsider, so what do I know? Here’s Michigander author Stephen Mack Jones’s character August Snow, a man very dedicated to Detroit, a true son of the Motor City, returning to his hometown after a couple of years of self-imposed exile: ‘So I returned to a city where happiness is usually a matter of finding contentment in an acceptable level of intangible fear, unfocused loathing and unexplainable ennui.’ August Snow is a denizen of Mexicantown, in southwest Detroit, but finds himself trawling throughout the city, the barely inhabited former industrial wastelands to the luxury mansions of …
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I’ll say upfront that there is nothing quite like the firm economy of Die Hard, a Christmas-set movie about how German terrorists commandeer a fancy Los Angeles high-rise, hold hostage all the people currently attending their office holiday party inside, and are slowly picked off by the one partygoer who had managed to stay hidden during the initial raid: a scrappy NYC cop named John McClane (a Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis). Although it is now thought of as a quintessential action movie, with a big-budget franchise in its wake, I like the first Die Hard for the—when you think about it—tightness of its conceit. The Nakatomi Plaza building is locked-down, and so the movie …
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In June 1934, when a war with Germany seemed a remote prospect, one of Philip Conwell-Evans’s English colleagues found himself in a Berlin suburban garden having dinner with Heinrich Himmler. Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the elite unit created as Hitler’s bodyguard, and already one of the most powerful men in Germany, Himmler would later be responsible for the conception, direction and execution of the Holocaust. The English colleague was Ernest Tennant OBE, a businessman, decorated Great War veteran and amateur butterfly collector. Their host was Tennant’s closest German friend, Joachim Ribbentrop. A politically and socially ambitious businessman, the forty…
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Juan Pablo Granda stepped into a small office in a middle-class neighborhood in the permanently foggy city of Lima, Perú, on February 18, 2013. The lights were off. He couldn’t see. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Granda began to make out menacing shapes: two men, short and squat, with handguns strapped to their hips. Behind them, their boss sat at a desk. A single-barreled shotgun leaned against the wall. Granda, a thirty-one-year-old Florida State University graduate with degrees in international business and management, wasn’t there to buy cocaine or weapons, as the room’s bristling tension might suggest. He was there to buy gold, the metal that has mystif…
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Bleak, bone-chilling settings. Dark days and darker nights. A cheerless snow globe filled with tormented characters doomed to collide. Where brutality rings as true for the elements as it does the violence these characters do unto one another. These are the components of Nordic Noir, a subset of crime fiction that often takes place in Scandinavian countries such as Norway, Denmark, and Sweden—to name a few. But what about the Midwest? Come along with me, and we’ll explore my world of Black Harbor, writing as a social experiment, and the Midwest’s endless potential as a setting for crime fiction. Midwestern Noir: It’s a thing Quite simply, Midwestern Noir is what hap…
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Fire Bones begins with a mystery: a Lebanese-American ferry pilot and Pentecostal preacher from the Arkansas Delta named Amra Boustani goes missing after a transatlantic flight. Back home, a poet named Greg Brownderville and a filmmaker named Bart Weiss investigate her disappearance, crossing paths with the townspeople of Thisaway, Arkansas: Amra’s friends, a ragtag bunch of outsiders and misfits and schemers, men and women who have walked out of a medieval pilgrimage tale into the carnivalesque contemporary Deep South. But what exactly is Fire Bones? Let’s start with what it isn’t. It doesn’t seem to be a chair or a telescope. It’s not a fake Christmas tree or one of …
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On the book’s front cover, a white-shrouded figure with hollow eye sockets menaces from beneath a gothic arch. On the back, a hooded shape retreats into a snowy landscape. Both unsettling images are surrounded by a darkly cross-hatched sky. Both are imagined as reflections in oval mirrors whose frames seem to be trimmed by patterns resembling heavily lidded eyes—all in keeping with the book’s title, The Haunted Looking Glass. This volume, published in 1959, was my first introduction to the matchless Edward Gorey and to many of the classic ghost stories found within that he had chosen. One of best of these stories, to my mind, is “The Signalman” by Charles Dickens. While …
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Being trans means that you compare a lot of things to being trans. Getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, for example— that feeling, “nobody is ever going to mention me or study my medical outcomes,” is so familiar that I sometimes have to remind myself that cis people also got the J&J vax. Fanfic, moving in fan circles, is similar: “I know how you talk about us when you think we’re not around.” Despite a lot of progress on this issue—Publishers Weekly wrote that my new novel, Dead Collections, “charmingly evokes the fanfic genre,” and you’d better believe that I’m carving that on my gravestone along with “***Starred Review***”—it’s still easy to dismiss a work o…
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Historical settings can give mystery and crime novels added depth and texture. In this list, set everywhere from a post-WWI Welsch village to the freezing Arctic, our protagonists have to navigate the threats of clever murderers. But they do so on frozen tundra or in an early Plymouth colony already on life support from disease and scarcity of food, and it raises the stakes in such a dramatic way. I’ve always been drawn historical fiction with a mystery or suspense undertow, ever since my gateway book back in 2001, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks. Set in 17th century England in a village that quarantines itself to stop the spread of the disease…
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Yes, DNA technology is amazing. Roughly 99.9 percent of human DNA is identical from person to person; the other 0.1 percent is what distinguishes each of us, and scientists have long sought to pinpoint those differences. Advancements in DNA testing allow us to identify the source of a genetic profile with unparalleled accuracy and from ever smaller quantities of biological material like blood, semen, hair, saliva, or skin tissue. As a result, the tool has proved the innocence of 375 convicted criminal defendants and led to their exoneration. But DNA testing is a relatively new phenomenon. The first exoneration based on that technology didn’t occur until 1989. Also, biol…
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One of my favorite activities in a library is roaming through the stacks and finding a book I didn’t know I needed in my life. Such happy accidents! There are great reads waiting to be discovered around virtually every corner. Look! Here’s a nonfiction book about badly behaving women in history that I haven’t seen before. I love those books. And I didn’t realize that a certain bestselling author had a new book out. And that’s just a short summary from my last trip to the library. I always bring a large tote bag with me to the library to fill with books. Browsing bookshelves at a library or a bookstore is one of my best ways of discovering new reads. However, our public…
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People think they have the lowdown on the down-low life of mid-century American writer Cornell George Hopley Woolrich (1903-1968)—author, primarily during the Thirties and Forties, of over a dozen crime novels, including his celebrated series of “Black” mysteries (The Bride Wore Black, The Black Curtain, Black Alibi, The Black Angel, The Black Path of Fear and Rendezvous in Black) and more than two hundred pieces of short crime fiction, including such classic tales as “After Dinner Story,” “The Night Reveals,” “Three O’Clock,” “Momentum,” “Marihuana,” “Guillotine,” “Post Mortem,” “Murder, Obliquely” “The Living Lie Down with the Dead” and “Speak to Me of Death.” Cornell W…
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Do you follow every rabbit hole in true crime podcasts or watch serial killer documentaries religiously? Does the Forensics Files or Cold Case Files theme songs ever get stuck in your head? Do you pour over each detail in Only Murders in the Building looking for clues so you can figure out the killer before our heroes Mabel, Charles, and Oliver do? Then you, my friend, are an armchair sleuth! You’re by no means alone. Up to 50% of podcasts right now are based on true crime. Murder mysteries—real and fictional—are topping the charts of Netflix and Hulu. We can’t get enough of it, which is a good thing because I’m an avid reader (and writer!) of cozy mysteries. If you’re b…
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The medical world is an ideal backdrop for thrillers because it is bursting with life-or-death emergencies. Medical thrillers count on our fear of disease, something everyone has to face, and they make us ponder our own mortality. Many doctors have been inspired by their fascinating worlds and have felt the need to put pen to paper. Several of the qualities defining a good doctor overlap with what makes a successful author, such as the ability to “read” people, meticulous work in confronting high-stakes situations, investigative talent, and the ability to integrate many clues into a meaningful sum. One of the first rules of writing is “ know the field you’re talking a…
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As someone who reads widely across genres, I’ve found the books I most enjoy tend to transcend genres. This is, of course, a personal preference and there are lots of readers who love the predictability of tight genres that hew close to conventions. As a writer, I find the whole notion of identifying genre at an early stage is suffocating to ideas and creativity. As a result, I largely ignore it until the editing process. It does make it difficult to pitch a new idea, so often I just have to write the book and then let my agent work out where to go from there. I have common trends: strong female characters, relationships between characters that have real depth, emotional …
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