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’s more or less impossible to describe the new true crime podcast “Hemingway’s Picasso” in a few lines, but here it goes: there was a man named Steve Kough who probably played in the NFL, but that’s beside the point, or it’s the essence of the point, one or the other, and later on when he was no longer probably playing in the NFL he started smuggling drugs across the Caribbean, mostly from Jamaica into the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, but also to and from Cuba, and one time when he was in Cuba he got his hands on an artifact—a ceramic, possibly collateral on a drug deal—that may or may not have come from Hemingway’s house and may or may not have been created by Pablo Pic…
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So here we are – The Detective Up Late, the seventh book in the Sean Duffy series… and so some evil rumourmongers say, the last. But it’s the 2020s – everyone has a comeback tour now, so no reason to think Duffy’ll be any different I reckon. For Duffy it’s 1990 – a new decade, the same old grinding “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. ‘The grim, greasy, seedy seventies had bled into the violent, neon, awful 80s…’ – a decade that saw 1,200 Troubles-related murders. Nobody in Carrickfergus Police Station is overly hopeful about the new decade, least of all our man, Detective Inspector Duffy. He’s still that rarest of things – a serving Catholic officer in the Royal Ulster Con…
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“The city is strong in the memory, no matter how much it decays and gives way to the sea.” –Elaine Perry, 1990 Since I’ve started writing about out-of-print and “lost” Black authors, I occasionally get suggestions from writer-friends who turn me on to their favorite neglected authors. When I was writing The Blacklist column for Catapult, journalist Ericka Blount Danois schooled me on the Harlem/Brooklyn teen novels of Rosa Guy while respected Miles Davis biographer Quincy Troupe taught me much about the literary life and brutal death of surreal fictionist Henry Dumas. Most recently I received a note from respected memoirist Bridgett M. Davis (The World According to Fan…
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“Wherever there is human nature, there is drama.” –Hercule Poirot in “The King of Clubs,” by Agatha Christie I often think of murder mysteries and magic tricks as complementary art forms. Both feature a “performer” attempting to bamboozle an audience via elaborate methods of good-natured deception. That has been my underlying principle when writing my first two books, Death and the Conjuror and The Murder Wheel. In fact, The Murder Wheel is mainly set backstage in a fictional London theatre – the Pomegranate. I love the theatre in all its myriad forms, from the classical to the commercial to the experimental, so I suppose you could say it’s my second great passion (afte…
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The pandemic derailed pretty much every aspect of regular life – office jobs moved home, shutdowns and social distancing became standard, and a sense of chaos and insecurity permeated those early months. The comic book industry was no different, and acclaimed writer Ed Brubaker found himself turning to a certain kind of crime novel for comfort – which, in turn, provided him with a bit of inspiration. “When the pandemic and the lockdown hit, I found myself turning to old favorite pulp and detective books for comfort reading. Parker novels, Lew Archer, Travis McGee, and I had this realization that American comics and graphic novels never really had anything like that,” Bru…
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It’s possible, perhaps, to feel sympathy for Norman Bates. Mental illness and a manipulative mother drove him to murder and other horrifying hobbies even while, as a small business owner, he struggled to maintain a tiny roadside motel bypassed by progress. It’s less easy to feel sympathy for Leatherface, generally assumed to be mentally deficient and (also) easily manipulated by family members. But his history included not only gainful employment in a slaughterhouse but as an outsider artist, fashioning sculptures and mobiles from bones as well as sewing unique facial coverings. Described in such a way, the central characters of “Psycho” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” se…
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It is often our subconscious self that underlies the decisions we make, and so it must have been with my far-reaching decision at a relatively young age to travel. That decision—more instinctive than cohesive—moved me off a single career path toward wide vistas of varied occupations. Every conceivable means of transport has taken me from one point on the map to another. Over the course of an unconventional career I have been a book publisher, the founder of a magazine, a corporate officer of a large multi-media company, and the chief-of-staff of a think tank operating in several international timezones and with a remit of global security. These decidedly different roles s…
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If you’ve read any self-help before, then you know that most of it reads like a 90-percent redacted NSA document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request—all the most salient details blacked out, unavailable. Exactly how many nannies, for instance, did it take for Sheryl Sandberg to Lean In? If the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy is such a financial genius, how come he shills real-estate seminars? And if Rachel Hollis really knows how to have a successful, sexy marriage, why’d she get divorced? Their books promise answers to life’s biggest questions, only to leave us with bigger questions. Yet why we buy and read such books is no mystery. Shit’s hard. Life can be a r…
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“The trial of Polly Bodine will take place at Richmond, on Monday next, and will, no doubt, excite much interest,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe on June 18, 1844, for the Columbia Spy. Poe had recently moved to New York where, he declared, “I intend living for the future.” He got a temporary lift when he sold “The Balloon Hoax” story, a fictional account of the first transatlantic balloon crossing to Moses Yale Beach of the Sun. THE ATLANTIC OCEAN CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!! screamed the Sun in April 1844. James Gordon Bennett exposed Poe’s story as a hoax and Beach issued a retraction. Not even the Sun could hold its readers entirely on hoaxes. Soon, Poe was broke again. He foun…
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Edwin Torres turned 90 this year. The author of Carlito’s Way, Q&A, and After Hours, Torres is the Granddaddy—¡El Abuelo!—of Latinx crime fiction in the U.S. For a brief while in the 1970s, Torres picked up the mantle of Chester Himes and Miguel Piñero, keeping the door cracked open for crime fiction writers who happen to be ethnically diverse. Without Torres we might not have gotten Ernesto Quiñonez’ Bodega Dreams, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera’s Lupe Solano series, or even Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress. “His books are a brass knuckle to the groin,” said Richard Price, author of Clockers. “There isn’t a false note on any page.” Torres’ books spawned two viscer…
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Biology is creeeeepy. At least, that’s the lesson I’ve learned from early readers of my new thriller, Child Zero, which takes place in a post-antibiotic near future. As a former molecular biologist, I’d been laboring under the misapprehension that biology was neato. My bad, I suppose. Lee Child, of Jack Reacher fame, called Child Zero “really scary.” New York Times bestsellers Joseph Finder and Tess Gerritsen opted for “terrifying.” So did Edgar Award winner Lou Berney, who added that it gave him nightmares “in the best possible way.” (Sidebar: is that even a thing? God, I hope so—because otherwise, Lou secretly hated my book.) Acclaimed authors Matthew FitzSimmons and M…
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One of the knocks on science fiction is that it’s a literature focused on ideas rather than people. While it’s true that at the heart of every science fiction story there’s a key conceit, it’s not necessarily true that this has to be the focus of the action. In many cases, it’s more like an undercurrent adding flavor to a piece that could otherwise almost be contemporary fiction. My newest book, Mickey7, is much more the latter than the former. Sure, it’s set a thousand years in the future, but despite that it’s at least as much about character and plot as it is about the science. Still, though, Mickey7 is science fiction, and the idea is there. Specifically, this book’s…
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“Few suspected women of spying, and certainly no one expected a middle-aged knitter to be surreptitiously gathering intelligence.” -Elizabeth Bentley, A Most Clever Girl While researching topics for my next novel, I stumbled across Elizabeth Bentley’s name and was gobsmacked that I’d never heard of this American spy who once ran the largest Soviet spy ring in America. Because Bentley was a female NKVD-spy-turned-FBI-informer—a combination America wasn’t quite sure what to do with—she was overshadowed both in life and after her death by Joseph McCarthy and Whittaker Chambers. In fact, Whittaker Chambers—whose story is very similar to Bentley’s—received a posthumous Pre…
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Minnesotans of a certain age remember when 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling went missing the night of October 22, 1989. Jacob, his brother, and a friend were riding their bikes near the Wetterling home in St. Joseph, Minnesota, when a man with a gun took Jacob. No one saw Jacob alive again. (His killer finally confessed in 2016.) Whenever my friends and I would play in the woods, we kept an eye out for Jacob. I remember scouring the trees, thinking maybe he’d gotten lost, and I could help find him. We didn’t understand that monsters walked among us. I wonder if Jacob’s abduction explains, at least in part, my lifelong fascination with true crime. I have this need to underst…
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While crime novels, especially those with courtroom scenes, are the most satisfying to read, they’re the most challenging to write. I say this not just as a long-time aficionado but as an author. After publishing four family dramas—lots of feelings, not much plot—I wanted to level up in my fifth. In When We Were Bright and Beautiful, a white, uber-wealthy Princeton athlete is accused of raping his former girlfriend. His sister Cassie narrates the story, and we follow the fallout on their family, from indictment through verdict. In my rendering, a series of twists culminates in a courtroom reveal that casts everything that came before in a different light. By the end, the …
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I am obsessed with Italy. I am obsessed with France. I am obsessed with anything Mediterranean. My screensavers are of Greek islands, Italian cypress trees, French vineyards. I gobble down books set in the area and visit as often as I can. As a young girl, I dreamed of a honeymoon on the isle of Crete—simply because I’d read a story set there as a child. And the Mediterranean is in my blood. My family is Italian and live in the Piedmont region, and I find any excuse to visit. So it’s not a surprise that my latest novel is set off the coast of Italy. It’s the story of a destination wedding gone badly awry, a tale of murder, and obsession, and twisted love, set on a fictio…
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Growing up in South Carolina, I’ve always felt that there’s just something about the South that lends itself well to a thriller. The humidity brings about a stifling sense of claustrophobia, like even your breath feels trapped. There’s life lurking around you everywhere, especially camouflaged in places where you can’t even see it, and the ever-present sounds of croaks and crickets somehow seem to amplify in the evenings, keeping you awake at night. These are just some of the reasons why I love writing about the South, and why I set my debut novel in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. A Flicker in the Dark tells the story of Chloe Davis, a psychologist who, at 12 years old, unco…
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Sometimes the crimes for which we’re most harshly judged and punished are the ones that break no laws. And for young women, pushing back against tradition, expected codes of behavior, and the social contract can provoke the severest of reactions. In my debut novel, The Nobodies, two girls discover they have the ability to swap bodies, a power they use to intervene in each other’s lives—sometimes to disastrous effect–over twenty years of friendship. As they literally step into each other’s worlds, Nina and Jess form judgments about what they find and act upon them, unearthing and divulging secrets, disrupting relationships, and making life-altering changes. Their power, t…
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I’ve been poisoned with arsenic trioxide. Well, technically, “treated” with arsenic would be a more accurate portrayal. In the summer of 2011, for nearly three months, five days a week, arsenic trioxide dripped from a bag hanging on a pole beside me into an IV tube that connected, through a butterfly needle, to one of my veins. Throughout those infusion visits as an acute promyelocytic leukemia patient at the age of 31, I often thought about Agatha Christie’s adoration of arsenic as a murder weapon. My uncle Bobby was equally intrigued by the “toxin” that would save my life. He bought me a copy of Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Me…
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To step into a campus novel, like stepping onto a college campus, is to enter a miniature world. It’s a place with a particular geography, made of dorm rooms and classrooms, student centers and dining halls. Time is both fixed and in motion: for students, it’s always moving toward an endpoint, while for professors, time passes, but their students remain young. As a setting for fiction, the campus offers a natural structure and urgency: the arc of the semester, seasons of the academic year. Its insularity can make things seem outsized, dramatic, whether the arcane traditions or the eccentricities of roommates or the absurd inner workings of academia itself. Lately, thoug…
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Ever since Miss Marple looked up from her knitting needles and solved her first murder, fiction has loved an unconventional amateur detective. From classic children’s adventures with sleuths like Nancy Drew or the Hardy boys, to Richard Osman’s crime solving seniors in The Thursday Murder Club, millions of readers are drawn to the ‘every person’ who finds themselves at the center of a crime. Part of the reason these books are so popular is that amateur detectives are often more relatable to the reader than a hardened cop with decades of experience. In the absence of any formal training, an accidental investigator is forced to rely on their curiosity, wit and ingenuity to…
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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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Eight thousand meters (over twenty six thousand feet) is the place known as the “Death Zone”. Every moment a person spends up there their body is dying, the lack of oxygen causing hallucinations, swelling of the brain and fluid leaking into the lungs. It is so dangerous that death is an accepted risk in the extreme high altitude peaks—even before you add in the risk of avalanches, serac falls and crevasses. In 2019, I became the youngest Canadian woman to summit one of these 8,000m peaks, Mt Manaslu, and I experienced life in this extreme place for myself. And as a writer, I couldn’t help but wonder— where better for a serial killer to hide, than a place already known as …
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A missing person is a story that doesn’t end. We grapple to make sense, to decipher, to make meaning out of something so unfathomable. Jon Billman refers to the ‘purgatorial underworld of the vanished,’ a description that makes infinite sense to me. The missing are perpetually caught in an in-between place, not here but not gone. Stories about missing persons respond to this cultural anxiety, their narratives plotting explanations or recovering and remembering the missing person, refusing their oblivion. In my novel Tell Me What I Am a woman goes missing leaving behind her four-year-old daughter and sister. They alternately narrate the story of what happened and, I like …
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When people ask me what books have influenced me as an author, I lose my voice. I would love to be able to rattle off a long list of the classics, the contemporary, experimental authors, literary giants, exciting debuts. Instead, I’m afraid I’m quite gauche. It’s not that I don’t read — I love books, I have always loved books. A beautiful scene, a snappy bit of dialogue, a plot that leaves you breathless or makes you question everything you thought you knew, chef’s kiss. But, if I’m honest, I spent much of my twenties working two, sometimes three jobs, most of which demanded a lot of my energy and when I got home and wanted to unwind, instead of reaching for a book (you t…
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