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 heist is one of my all-time favorite plot devices, familiar and yet constantly open to reinvention. There are so many scenes we expect to see: a master thief taking on a last job, often reluctantly; the assembly of a team of criminals, each with one specific but impressive skill; the planning of the job complete with a visualization of everything going right, even though we know it won’t; the last-minute betrayal that upends everything and tests the moral character of some member of the crew. The pleasure of a good heist comes not from inventing new scenes but from employing these expected ones well: heist fans want to see an interesting crew with impressive abilitie…
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August’s roster of international crime and mystery includes everything from straight-up thrillers to magical parables and more. Whether you’re in the mood for slow-simmering suspense as the summer drags on, or high-octane action to make it pass more quickly, beat the heat with these releases from around the work. Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train Translated by Sam Malissa (Overlook) This book is so much fun!!! Bullet Train reads a bit like if Elmore Leonard was hired to adapt Murder on the Orient Express and it was directed by Bong Joon Ho. Several groups of criminals converge on on train headed from Tokyo to Morioka—an odd couple protecting a gangster’s son and a suitcase…
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I’ve spent a lot of time researching art theft and forgery. One in particular—the notorious 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum. Here’s how it went: a recently fired employee hid in a closet overnight, emerged at dawn on a day the museum was closed to the public, took the painting off the wall, stashed it under his jacket and walked out. No Tom Cruise-like dangling from a high-wire, no digitally scanned replications to take the painting’s place. Its disappearance was in fact not noticed for two full days! We are talking about the Mona Lisa, possibly the most famous painting in the world, its reputation enhanced by the theft and the ensuing media frenzy. I …
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Once I watched a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and it put a knot in my brain. The director, Franco Zeffirelli, was universally lauded for his naturalistic translations of important works of the western canon into masterpieces of film. Among his early triumphs were both The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet. I was a fan. My expectations were high. The performances were strong, the production values top notch, and the cutting of the play captured the heart of the story. Still, something left me deeply unsatisfied. It felt wrong. From my reading of Hamlet, the tension in the play arises from the young prince of Denmark’s indecision over action versus inac…
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Recently Naomi Hirahara and I, fully vaccinated, met up at a local soda fountain. In between discussion of pandemic tragedies and the bright spot of MariNaomi’s stop AAPI hate mural, the first AAPI public artwork in the San Gabriel Valley, we found we were co-contributors to the upcoming Akashic Noir South Central edited by Gary Phillips. We chatted about her stunningly prolific life as a writer, and her groundbreaking novel, Clark and Division. Set in 1944 Chicago, her latest novel tackles Japanese American life post incarceration in US concentration camps. This interview has been condensed for clarity and space. Désirée Zamorano: I always want to know, when an author w…
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Michael Mann’s “Heat” (1995) is widely considered a cinematic masterpiece. Not only do we follow as L.A. detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) chases ultra-disciplined thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) across the city, but we also dip into the lives of characters tangential to that pursuit—wives, daughters, hustlers, marks, cops, and criminals who are often fully realized despite having relatively little screen-time. Like many masterpieces, “Heat” didn’t emerge fully formed. You could argue that much of Mann’s cinematic career up to that point was a rehearsal of sorts, allowing him to work on character and story points. This progression begins in 1981, when Mann rele…
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“Often in literary criticism, writers are told that a character isn’t likable, as if a character’s likability is directly proportional to the quality of a novel’s writing.” ― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist If there’s anything I’ve learned from my experience as both a lawyer and a human (while the two are not mutually exclusive, I am unwilling to say that they’re completely overlapping Venn circles) even truly decent people tend not to act their best under extreme duress. Good and kind folks can be selfish, defensive, and lash out when pushed too far. That doesn’t prove them bad as much as it shows them to be, well, people, albeit perhaps unlikeable in that moment. Someone …
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The telephone rang, waking Captain Marianne Augresse with a start. For a brief instant, her eyes remained fixed on her cold, naked skin, then she removed her arm from the bath where she had been dozing for the past hour and picked up the phone. Her forearm knocked the little tray of toys balanced on the laundry basket and plastic boats, wind-up dolphins and small fluorescent fish scattered over the surface of the water. “Shit!” Number unknown. “Shit!” the captain repeated. She had been hoping it was one of her lieutenants: JB, Papy, or one of the other duty cops at Le Havre police station. She had been waiting for a call since the previous day, when Timo Soler was spo…
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There was the time I was in the hospital and my dad called to tell me that he’d just spoken with the sheriff of Desolation Valley; unbeknownst to us, my sister was missing—one of several backpackers who’d gotten waylaid by a snow storm in the Sierra Nevada. There was the time my family went backpacking in the Grand Canyon and for a period of hours we were each alone in the dark; my sister and I spent the night together, clueless as to where our parents were. There was the time my sister and I went camping in the Finger Lakes at the tail end of hurricane Ike; we laugh about it now, but it was a harrowing night in a tiny tent with constant ferocious winds. There was the …
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Married couples are a staple of the crime-fiction world, where husbands and wives are forever realizing that the person they thought they knew best is effectively a stranger they didn’t know at all. In many an opening chapter, cracks are starting to show in a hitherto happy union. Dark secrets simmer beneath a delicate surface tension, threatening to boil over and break through. At least one half of the couple knows something is terribly wrong, but doesn’t know quite what it is yet. The fun for the reader is in finding out not only what the thing is, but how it could have been hidden from the one person with whom you’re supposed to share the most. I’m thinking of everythi…
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“Can I come in?” asked Fazio. “Yeah, come on in. So you’re only getting back now?” “Chief, would you believe it if I told you I didn’t even have time to eat lunch?” “Where were you?” “Still at Trincanato’s.” “Did something happen?” “First, two of Spagnolo’s kids came. Spagnolo was the worker who hung himself. But the guards didn’t want to let them into the hangar.” “Are they minors?” “No way! One’s thirty, the other’s twenty-eight. Both without jobs. Sacked. At any rate, things could have got out of hand if we hadn’t been there . . .” “And then what?” “And then, when the prosecutor and Dr. Pasquano were done and the body was taken away, Giurlanno, Spagnolo’s old…
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For me, summer is a perfect time for a deep dive into mystery, especially cozies. As a traditional mystery writer, I love the puzzle at the heart of a cozy—the twistier, the better. But a good cozy is much more than just that puzzle. What makes the cozy mystery genre such a delight is that it’s about the things we enjoy—good food, beautiful (or at least interesting) locations, beautiful things, good books, great friends, family. Yeah, okay, there’s that dead body in there that messes up the character’s enjoyment of all these wonderful things, but we’ll work on that. Then there’s the pets. Since pets are a major part of family life — even when that family is one person l…
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Stephen King, the master of horror, is also a big crime reader… * ARIEL S. WINTER First-novelist Winter stunned readers with his mammoth 180,000-word debut, The Twenty-Year Death, which tells the story of a disintegrating marriage as told, successively, in the manner of Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson. Stephen King called it “bold, innovative, and thrilling,” writing “The Twenty-Year Death crackles with suspense and will keep you up late.” DONALD E. WESTLAKE “A book by this guy is a cause for happiness,” King wrote about the man who, under the pseudonym “Richard Stark,” wrote the dark-as-dark-gets Parker novels and inspired the name of the mur…
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Lone Star Sleuths: An Anthology of Texas Crime Fiction from the Wittliff Collections (UT Press, 2007) included a bibliography of 196 Texas authors, past and present. Likely there are enough now to fill every one of the state’s 254 counties. Among the names—from Texas or writing about Texas—were some of the best in the business: Jim Thompson, Joe R. Lansdale, James Crumley, Rick Riordan, Patricia Highsmith, James Lee Burke, Harry Hunsicker, Rolando Hinojosa, Walter Mosley, Jay Brandon, Kinky Friedman, Lee Child, Dan Jenkins. An updated list today surely would include Attica Locke, Cormac McCarthy, Meg Gardiner, Nic Pizzolatto, Kathleen Kent, Lisa Sandlin, and Fernando Flor…
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Stories about settling old scores thrive in the thriller genre, and in literature generally. As humans, we are hard-wired to feel revenge—it’s a primal emotion arising from a place of pain and suffering. There’s an element of proportionality involved, a sense of wanting to restore balance by meting out an equal level of suffering to the person responsible for causing this pain. Fantasising about how we will ‘get our own back’ on someone who has wronged us activates the brain’s reward center and offers a degree of relief from the intensity of our emotions. This ‘relief’ is, of course, illusory. By focussing on revenge, all we’re really doing is keeping the emotional wound …
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Colombo—a city of five and a half million people and the largest city by far on the island of Sri Lanka. The city is also a port and a harbour, an ancient sea trade crossing in South Asia, an integral part of what is now known as the old Maritime Silk Road, and, after 1815 (following the island being under both Portuguese and later Dutch control) to independence, a part of the British Empire and the administrative capital of Ceylon. The country’s recent history has been marked by insurrections and civil war since independence as well as the devastating tsunami of 2004. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand people died in a quarter century of civil war that ended in 2009. …
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Pick up a copy of any book in my Cajun Country Mystery series and you’ll see a basset hound on the cover—sometimes crafty, sometimes woebegone, but always there. In the series, the Crozat family pet is a male hound named Gopher. In real life, she was our beloved Lucy, who we adopted through the Basset Hound Rescue of Southern California. Lucy crossed the rainbow bridge in 2010 but will live forever on bookshelves, thanks to the talents of my wonderful series’ cover artist, Stephen Gardner. I’m not the only mystery writer whose four-legged friend has served as a cover girl or boy. Here, seven cozy authors share the artistic inspiration they derived from their beloved fu…
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12 August 1961 – Rügen Island, East Germany Joachim pulls his foot back from the water. It’s cold, even in August. His friends are splashing in the sea, teasing him, calling him to come in, but he hates cold water and they know he won’t. He thinks back to last night. Workers beer. Sweat. Bodies tightly packed in against each other. Fumbling and kissing in the corner. He’s never had a holiday like this, not once in his twenty-two years and he doesn’t want it to end. Bright green forest covers the chalk cliffs behind him, white-tailed eagles wheel overhead and the sea is so clear he can see tiny fish flitting through the water. Just one week left, then it’s back to East…
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Just seeing the words “Wes Anderson movie” will probably make you picture a very specific, highly-stylized aesthetic comprised of, among other things, symmetrical mise-en-scene, bright colors, old-fashioned intertitles, exaggerated acting patterns, quirky children who are more emotionally intelligent than their equally quirky adult counterparts, and probably Owen Wilson. Anderson’s famous cinematic style (created in concert with cinematographer Robert Yeoman, among other artists) has been the subject of art shows, parodies, and even an Instagram account-turned-book called Accidentally Wes Anderson, which assembles photographs of real-life locations that look like they cou…
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As my dad tells it, he was a third-year graduate student in Lubbock, Texas (my birthplace) interviewing a candidate for a faculty position. The candidate: a woman from Pennsylvania. The setting: not Pennsylvania—with Lubbock’s two-dimensional landscape, a blue sky stretched out until it is cellophane thin, and a deep deep dark come a moonless night. Not long into the interview, the woman paused before asking my dad: How are you not afraid to live out here? You can see everything. She’s right—you can see everything in west Texas, just like you can see everything if you stand in the middle of some stark open plain across much of the West. And while I can’t know the source …
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How much of an expert do you have to be to write a Sherlock Holmes novel? It’s a question that has occupied my mind for the last year or so. When I was asked to suggest plots for Holmes novels that would be faithful to the canon, my initial response was one of horror at being woefully unqualified. But my mind began to turn over, mysteries bloomed out of seeds of ideas, rough synopses became more intricate with every pass. All writers experience imposter syndrome, but in my case it’s usually been relegated to after completion of a novel, at the point when I’m required to coerce others into reading it. On this occasion, once my synopsis had been approved I found myself par…
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Agatha Christie once said that, “the best way of getting down to work is in a very bad hotel where there is nothing else to do but write, for there are no distracting comforts to indulge in, no good meals or interesting guests.” If anyone was an expert on the best way to “getting down to work” it was the Queen of Mystery—although I doubt that her version of a “bad” hotel would come close to mine! It’s not surprising that many of Christie’s novels were written in, or inspired by, hotels. She was a passionate traveler and in 1922, Christie took a ten-month voyage around the British Empire with her first husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, as part of a trade mission to pr…
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I first discovered Philip Kerr’s excellent Bernie Gunther series seven years ago. The experience of walking the streets of Nazi-era Berlin to watch Kerr’s good-hearted detective solve a murder mystery while trying to stay true to his moral compass in that snake pit felt exhilarating, challenging, and strange. Reading another of Kerr’s Gunther novels this year, shortly after the Jan. 6 insurrection and an election in which democracy itself seemed at stake, felt altogether more chilling. *** I’ve long been a fan of the sliver of crime fiction that I’ve dubbed totalitarian noir: stories of cops and detectives who try to ply their difficult trade while living within the …
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The name may not ring a bell to those who aren’t criminologists, but Tony Parker greatly contributed to the literature and representation of criminals. In 22 books, this unassuming British gentleman chronicled all sorts of criminals—murderers, sex offenders, con men, and more—as well as underdogs and outsiders, from single mothers (In No Man’s Land) to miners (Red Hill), to people living in housing estates (The People of Providence) and small towns (A Place Called Bird). His method: to step aside and let people speak for themselves. It sounds so simple, but Parker excelled at it. Whenever he talked to someone for a book, they would inevitably relax and tell their life sto…
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CrimeReads asked me to write a post, and as soon as I read the suggested title, I went to the corner drugstore and bought two nine-ounce packages of Coffee Nut M&Ms. I needed inspiration. There are such a lot of ways to eat chocolate. I should know. I was born loving chocolate. And, like every author, I was a reader before I was a writer, and I loved stories before I could read them. My mother used to tell the following one. “When she was around three, JoAnna’s special treat was chocolate milk, which she called ‘choc.’ One afternoon, I was reading, and she came to me and asked for ‘choc.’ And I answered, ‘As soon as I finish my chapter.’ “And she said, ‘When I ask…
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