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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Over the weekend, during a virtual celebration of “Bouchercon,” the world mystery convention, the winners of the Anthony Awards were announced. The “Anthonys” honor the year’s best achievements in mystery and crime fiction. This is the thirty-sixth year the awards have been handed out. Keep scrolling below for a list of the year’s Anthony winners and nominees. Congratulations to all the authors. ___________________________________ BEST HARDCOVER NOVEL ___________________________________ Winner: Blacktop Wasteland, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron Books) Nominees: What You Don’t See, by Tracy Clark (Kensington) Little Secrets, by Jennifer Hillier (Minotaur Books) And Now …
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‘The Way of the Gun’ Was a Nihilistic Rebuke To Everything Cool in Nineties Crime Cinema
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Crime fiction (and crime film) has always had an uneasy relationship with the violence it portrays. Every creator knows that a large portion of their audience slaps money down for a full helping of murder and mayhem—and yet, so many go out of their way to insert a bit of moral finger-wagging into the narrative. Sometimes this appeal to morality is overt, as in the original “Scarface” (1932), when director Howard Hawks was forced to add scenes in which characters condemned the gangster lifestyle; in others, it’s slightly more subtle, as in the innumerable mysteries in which a detective ruminates on the evils that humans do—after a couple hundred pages of describing those…
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David Rizzio Plays Tennis with His Assassins Late Saturday afternoon · 9th March, 1566 Indoor tennis court · Palace of Holyrood · Edinburgh Lord Ruthven wanted him killed during this tennis match but Darnley said no. Lord Darnley wants it done tonight. He wants his wife to witness the murder because David Rizzio is her closest friend, her personal secretary, and she’s very pregnant and Darnley hopes that if she sees him being horribly brutalised she might miscarry and die in the process. She’s the Queen; they’ve been battling over Darnley’s demand for equal status since their wedding night and if she dies and the baby dies then Darnley’s own claim to the throne would be…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Ian McIlvanney, The Dark Remains: A Laidlaw Investigation (Europa / World Noir) “Laidlaw… surprises the reader at every turn, showing himself to be literate, intelligent, and thoughtful. McIlvanney’s fans will relish this gritty early perspective on Laidlaw.” Publishers Weekly Vera Kurian, Never Saw Me Coming (Park Row) “Stick a bunch of devious psychopaths together and what could possibly go wrong? Find out in Never Saw Me Coming, a completely original, clever whodunit from a talented new arrival to the world of psychological suspense. Vera Kurian is one to watch!” Mary Kubica …
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I didn’t know “Dark Academia” was a Thing until my younger, much cooler friend showed me some Instagram accounts. “It’s an aesthetic,” she said, recommending that I buy some female Sherlock Holmes / librarian attire. But it’s so much more than an aesthetic. To me it’s a mood, a strangely welcome feeling of claustrophobia, of being trapped in a single location, but a cozy location with dark nooks to explore. When I started writing what would become my debut novel, Never Saw Me Coming, I started with the basic premise that it would be about a program for diagnosed psychopaths hosted at a psychology department at a university. I love college novels, and hadn’t seen many my…
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Her hand emerges from beneath the covers to caress her granddaughter’s dark hair, but Eugénie is no longer looking at her: her attention is focused elsewhere. She is staring at a corner of the room. It is not the first time that the girl has frozen, gazing at some point in the idle distance. Such episodes do not last long enough to be truly worrying; is it some idea, some memory flashing into her mind, that seems to trouble her so deeply? Or is it like that time when Eugénie was twelve and swore that she had seen something? The old woman turns to follow her granddaughter’s gaze: in the corner of the room there is a dresser, a vase of flowers and a few books. ‘What is it,…
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We all have a picture in our mind of the archetypal detective of American fiction. The hardboiled, wisecracking private eye, walking a city’s mean streets. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or one of the hundreds, probably thousands, of other gumshoes who have trodden in their footsteps. But that style of detective only came into being in the late 1920s and early 1930s, most influentially in Hammett’s novels and in the pages of the legendary magazine Black Mask. American crime fiction has a much longer history. It begins, of course, with Edgar Allan Poe. (The history of most genre fiction in the USA begins with Edgar Allan Poe.) His chara…
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My novel Ice Angel is set in the Canadian Arctic diamond field, an area where I spent many happy days as a reporter covering the great discovery and diamond rush of the 1990s. In fiction, you create your characters, but a reporter takes them as they are. Luckily, when it comes to diamond exploration, that’s good enough. This is a story about one of them. His adventure says a lot about the mistrust, the competitive obsessions, and the plain craziness of a mineral rush. I never got to interview this particular character, because I lacked the necessary skill: proficiency in husky. In the Spring of 1992, the winter staking rush was over in the Barrens. The Arctic summer was …
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There is grim satisfaction in realizing, while sitting safely at your desk in rural Connecticut, that you know more than the Soviet secret police about an event recorded in their own archives. The satisfaction is all the greater when the documents in question concern the identity of a man who planned to strike a powerful blow against the Soviet regime, a man whom the GPU (an earlier avatar of the KGB) saw as one of its most dangerous enemies. In today’s world, punishing a national regime takes a bigger and stronger country, or even an entire alliance, as with the sanctions that the United States and NATO have been imposing on Russia. But there was a time when one determin…
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“Are you trying to bust my balls?” The speaker is Inspector Salvo Montalbano, head of the fictional municipality of Vigata, Sicily’s, police department, and in the 28 novels and two short story collections written by Andrea Camilleri and published in Italian and English…someone always is. The criminals, from petty to monstrous, who occupy his frustrating days (and sometimes alarming nightmares); the Mafia thugs who spread their tentacles into every Sicilian institution; the corrupt politicians who march hand in hand with them; the witless press that blindly supports whatever government is in charge at the moment; the colleagues who, for all their police skills, can’t h…
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Science fiction readers recognize the old distinction between stories that are rigorous about scientific plausibility (“hard” SF) and stories that are more fantastical or philosophical (“soft” SF). And writers know wherever there’s a binary, there’s artistic opportunity in breaking it. I appreciate stories that scramble the mechanical and the mystical. By treating fantastical machines, algorithms, and social processes with what feels like hard-SF rigor, we can approach ideas in a fresh way. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, “psychohistorians” use mathematics to predict the futures of entire societies (a riff, perhaps, on Marxist dialectical materialism). In Cixin Li…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jonathan Kellerman, Jesse Kellerman, The Burning (Ballantine) “Edison is an interesting protagonist, a good man for whom finding the truth is more important than anything else, including his own safety. He’s gentle and strong, compassionate and ruthless, methodical and impulsive.” Booklist Andrea Camilleri, Riccardino (trans. from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli)(Penguin) “Incisive wit colors this insightful and intriguing farewell. The sad, poetic ending is perfect.” Publishers Weekly Lincoln Michel, The Body Scout (Orbit) “Completely weird and still completely real. Deli…
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Terry Tice liked killing people. It was as simple as that. Maybe “liked” wasn’t the right word. Nowadays he was paid to do it, and well paid. But money was never the motive, not really. Then what was? He had given a lot of thought to this question, on and off, over the years. He wasn’t a looney, and it wasn’t a sex thing, or anything sick like that—he was no psycho. The best answer he could come up with was that it was a matter of making things tidy, of putting things in their right place. The people he was hired to kill had got in the way of something, some project or other, and had to be removed in order for business to proceed smoothly. Either that, or they were super…
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In the newest novel in Craig Johnson’s Longmire series, Sheriff Walt Longmire is called out to assist Tribal Police in an investigation. A local basketball phenom, Jaya One Moon Long, is receiving death threats. Her sister was one of the many Native women to go missing without a trace, and the fear is she will be the next. Daughter of the Morning Star is one of the most unsettling and deeply moving installments in the long-running series. In the lead-up to the novel’s release, Johnson answered a few questions about the people and events that inspired this story. What inspired you to write Daughter of the Morning Star? I was doing a library event up in Hardin on the Crow…
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It’s no secret that social media revolutionized the way we see and interact with the world. Literally—the entire world is now at everyone’s fingertips, one login away. For many, this has been a blessing, as they reached stardom with little more than mirror selfies and tweeted shower thoughts. But for others, the ubiquity and addictive nature of social media has unintended consequences. I’ve always been interested in the many ways social media can go wrong, sometimes with deadly results. In my book THE LAST BEAUTIFUL GIRL, the protagonist rises to Internet fame by recreating the glory days of a socialite from a hundred years ago, but danger is lurking in the corners of her…
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I am an epic fantasy writer by trade, but I cut my teeth on mysteries. My reading teeth that is. When I was 7, I was gifted a complete set of The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner right before summer vacation. The first evening of vacation I decided to open the eponymous novel and found myself sucked into this series of children who solve mysteries. It was the first (of many) series that I binge read—waiting for my Mom to tuck me in and then hiding under the covers with a flashlight, reading long into the night until finally I couldn’t keep my eyes open. (Reader take warning, the next school year a teacher told us an apocryphal story of Kipling reading by candl…
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By dint of yelling and cursing and blasting his horn until his ears rang, he managed to carve a path through a crowd of fifty or so people who’d come running to the scene like flies to shit and were now blocking the entrance to Via Rosolino Pilo to anyone, like him, coming from Via Nino Bixio. The root cause of the blockage was a police car parked across the width of the entrance to the street, with beat cops Inzolia and Verdicchio—known on the force as “the table wines”— presiding over the scene. At the far end of the street, which gave onto Via Tukory, the “wild beasts”—that is, beat cops Lupo and Leone—were also standing guard. The police force’s “chicken coop,” on the…
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It’s officially fall in the northern hemisphere and you might well be thinking this is a good weekend to stay indoors with a bottle of something earthy and the bounty that is the contemporary international streaming scene. For me, late September is a time for things that are unusual, inventive, and in that vein I’m personally going to be watching Reservation Dogs this weekend. It’s not exactly an international thriller, or else it would be the answer to the headline above, but by all means you, too, should feel free to enjoy Reservation Dogs, now streaming on FX on Hulu, since it is sort of a crime show, after all, filmed on location in northern Oklahoma and following the…
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Thomas Byrnes was still in his Sunday best on the morning of October 27, 1878, when he heard that the Manhattan Savings Institution had been robbed. It was unimaginable that this venerable bank, located at the corner of Bleecker Street and Broadway, within Byrnes’s own Fifteenth Precinct, had been breached. Thought to be an impregnable fortress, it featured a maze of bolts, locks, and thick steel doors that opened to a steel vault with a separate safe within. In addition to holding millions in cash and securities, the bank was a repository for the money, jewelry, and other valuables of wealthy New Yorkers. Just as astonishing was the reported haul: nearly $3 million in s…
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Let’s face it, all readers have the same dream—to own a bookstore! Ah, the images it conjures. Spending our days with books, reveling in the aromas of paper and ink, tingling with anticipation when we think of the fictional worlds waiting for us inside the covers of books. It’s no surprise that books about books are so popular or that as both book lover and writer, I wanted to explore the possibilities of bookstore fiction. Since I like nothing better than a twisty-turny mystery, I began with that idea in mind. But my roots are in romance. In fact, I started my career writing historicals. That’s how Love Under the Covers was born, the romance bookshop in my Love Is Murd…
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Legendary New York City gangster Joey Gallo’s closest friends in the show biz world were actor Jerry Orbach and his wife Marta. They when they happened to be eating in the same restaurant (Queen on Court Street in Brooklyn). Jerry at that time was best known for playing gangsters in Broadway musicals—he’d played Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera and Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls—but would later be famous for playing Detective Lennie Briscoe on several Law & Order TV series, and as the voice of Lumiere, the candelabra in Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast. Jerry first sought out Joey because he was playing a part in a movie based on Joey, and considered J…
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One of the most common questions novelists are asked is, where do you get your ideas? For me, and for many writers of historical fiction, inspiration is all around us. It’s on the sidewalks we traverse, the streets we drive, anytime we look outside our windows. That house was built from a 1911 Sears Roebuck catalogue; that bodega used to be a mob hangout in the 1920s; these cobblestones were laid since the 1840s. One small nugget of knowledge about how things used to be can spark an idea, which grows into a story, which can be spun into a novel. Novelists mine all kinds of sources, and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that I began writing what turned into the Gilded G…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * John le Carre, Silverview (Viking) “First-rate prose and a fascinating plot distinguish the final novel from MWA Grand Master le Carré (1931–2020)…This is a fitting coda to a remarkable career.” Publishers Weekly Lori Rader-Day, Death at Greenway (William Morrow) “Irresistible… a Golden Age homage, an elegantly constructed mystery that on every page reinforces the message that everyone counts.” New York Times Book Review John Connolly, The Nameless Ones (Atria/Emily Bestler Books) “As always, the writing is exquisite: Connolly is a supremely talented storyteller, a genuine …
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Back in the early aughts, I worked, for a bit, at a national bookstore chain. I mostly slopped together drinks, steaming lattes and steeping teas in the cafe, but every once in a while, I helped out on the floor, stacking books on tables according to very specific corporately-determined layouts. I took a lot of breaks, though I’d always purport to be working—shelving and what not—and I’d spend most of my self-granted down time either in the “Horror” section or the “Fiction” section. The “Horror” shelves contained mostly thick, squat mass-markets with covers sporting silhouettes surrounded by overdrawn hellscapes, while the “Fiction” shelves held a wide assortment of cove…
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As often as James Bond engaged in casual sex, you know he’s got some offspring around the world. But we’re here today to talk about another kind of spawn of Bond: the movies, TV shows and comic books that hoped to cash in on the mania for the superspy. And while Bond imitators have popped up for sixty years—“No Time to Die,” the 25th in the official film series released today, will no doubt be felt in modern-day pop culture—we’re looking at the impact of Ian Fleming’s 007 in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time when you almost couldn’t dodge Bond-inspired movies, TV shows and comic books. You couldn’t turn around without stumbling over a suave agent with a license to kil…
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