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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April 28, 2012 The neighbor’s iron gate stood ajar, something Isabel Nuñez failed to notice when she woke to her Saturday morning routine, during her household chores, or when she left at about 1 p.m. to go shopping. It was on her way home when Yolanda Balderas stopped Isabel to ask her about the gate. Yolanda was a street vendor selling yogurt, as she always did on Saturdays, and stopped by the neighbor’s house. Not only was the gate ajar, Yolanda said, but across the cleanly swept concrete patio with the giant palm, the front door was open as well. The neighbor was never that careless. “I knocked on the gate,” Yolanda told Isabel, “and I yelled her name, but there…
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The first time I heard the gorgeous swoon that is the song “Sea of Love” was in 1984 when former Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant formed the throwback band The Honeydrippers (a one-off group that included guitarist/co-producer Nile Rogers, keyboardist Paul Shaffer, bassist Wayne Pedzwater and drummer Dave Weckl) and released their remake as a first single. Sung in a sorrowful, soulful style, “Sea of Love” was sweet and spooky in the way that only a ballad penned and recorded in the doo-wop 1950s could sound. The original version was written and performed by Louisiana native Phil Phillips, a hotel bellhop who composed the track for sweetheart crush Verdie Mae Thomas. “…
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If I had a map, I would have known we were in a southern region of the Appalachian Mountains. But all I had to orient myself was an endless stretch of identical dirt and trees, dappled in the afternoon light. Miles went by without any sign of human habitation before we finally reached a double-wide trailer plopped down right in the middle of nowhere. My captors led me straight inside, where a middle-aged woman had clearly been waiting for my arrival. A plaque on a small desk spelled out an unremarkable name, Jill or Ann or Jan. She ran her icy eyes up and down before landing on my face. “Elizabeth, I assume?” “Don’t bother,” the male escort said. “She doesn’t talk.” …
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Whether authors will admit it or not, some of us use personal experiences as inspiration for our writing. In the case of my latest psychological thriller The Alone Time, I drew inspiration from a plane crash that I survived when I was a child. The influence of my experience can be identified in the first few chapters of the book, while the rest of the story and its characters are all highly fictionalized. Yet, writing this book while drawing on my real-life memories led me to wonder just how many other authors do the same thing. Was I overstepping in mining this moment for creative purposes? Has anyone else also felt the pressure to leave reality as subject matter alone…
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When I wrote The Crossing Places in 2009, I didn’t think that it would be the start of a long-running series. I was only grateful that it was published at all. My first four books, written under my real name of Domenica de Rosa, were romances and my publisher didn’t want a crime novel. Luckily, my agent suggested a name change and a new publisher. Jane Wood at Quercus took a chance on the unknown Elly Griffiths and I will be forever grateful. The Crossing Places tells the story of forensic archaeologist Dr Ruth Galloway who is consulted by the police when a child’s bones are found on the Norfolk mashes. The bones turn out to be over two thousand years old, but Ruth is dr…
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The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 is thought to have killed over 50 million people worldwide. Yet, while the First World War provides the background for countless novels, the pandemic features in very few contemporary fictional accounts. Even modern writers tend to skate over this devastating episode. In Downton Abbey, Spanish Flu seems to last the length of a dinner party, although someone does die (after having been pronounced perfectly healthy by Dr Clarkson, the world’s worst doctor). I thought about this when planning my fourteenth Ruth Galloway novel. The previous book, The Night Hawks, ended in December 2019 so I knew that in the next instalment I had to face the p…
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I’m never really sure whether I believe in ghosts. Despite growing up in some seriously spooky and remote old houses, I’ve never actually seen anything: no figures in white sheets, no women in suspiciously generic period costume. However, particularly when alone, I’ve felt—well, something. The sense of a presence. The idea that you’re not actually alone; that something unseen is with you. Other people, of course, might experience this as the presence of the divine. But for me, it was always something supernatural. My debut novel, All The White Spaces, deals with a fictional expedition to Antarctica in the years immediately after the First World War. I chose to write abou…
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In the theatre, plays used to be divided into comedy and tragedy. Historically, however, comedies weren’t necessarily funny—instead, to quote Oscar Wilde, ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means’. This definition of comedy has faded into the past, but it’s useful to return to when unpicking why comic fiction has come to be contrasted not with tragedy or drama, but with ‘serious’ works. This would be fine if by ‘serious’ we meant sincere, solemn or earnest. But all too often ‘serious’ is understood to denote fiction that is substantial, thoughtful, demanding and meriting deep consideration – with the implication that, by contrast, comic …
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The Lakes, the northwestern English county of Cumbria and close to a thousand square miles of pristine countryside. A popular holiday destination, perfect for a late summer getaway, a chance for Crime and the City to recharge away from the mean streets. When you think of the English Lake District and literature you probably recall the Lakes poets—William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey. Romantics, often joined by their friends and lovers Dorothy Wordsworth, siblings Charles and Mary Lamb, Thomas De Quincey. And somewhat later Beatrix Potter and her cast of cuddly characters. Peace and quiet, the rolling hills, mountains, and the beautiful lakes t…
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Netflix’s sequel to Enola Holmes, cleverly titled Enola Holmes 2, is a very elaborate presentation, with a great number of side elements and subplots attached to an excellent historical mystery, one that involves real-life characters and situations. I expect some will say that the romance, action, and comedy distract from the main story, while others will see those embellishments as helping to sell a whodunit based on a factual injustice. At a couple of places, I found myself wondering if the love story, the dance hall number, the rooftop chase scene, the ballroom gala, the prison break, the sword fight, and the many asides spoken directly to the audience were all necessa…
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Eric LaRocca burst onto the scene with last year’s intense and playful novella, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, and this year he’s back with a new full-length title, Everything the Darkness Eats, to be published in June of this year. Eric LaRocca was kind enough to choose CrimeReads for a cover reveal of his new book, and to answer a few questions about his approach towards horror writing. – It seems like there’s not only a horror renaissance, but a queer horror renaissance – would you agree? I wholeheartedly agree. It’s so gratifying to see openly queer authors operating in the horror sphere with such fearlessness and conviction. Not only is it rewarding …
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Lilith was an incredibly difficult novel to write. I lived with it in my head, and worked on it on and off, for nearly a decade. September 2, 2015, the first morning I dropped my daughter off at pre-K, was one of joy and pride, until I saw the sign by the entrance that read, if blue or red lights are flashing do not enter— and when I tried to open the door, I found it was locked and the kids and parents had to be buzzed in. We live in a small Vermont town. We all know each other. Why did we need to be buzzed in as if entering the Pentagon? Why was there this menacing sign? The joy quickly turned to fear and anxiety, and anger as I realized what that sign and those loc…
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In Chicago, on May 21st, 1924 Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb murdered 11 year-old Bobby Franks, in what was termed at the time a thrill-killing. Leopold and Loeb were both academic geniuses, sons of millionaires, and lovers. Renowned attorney and foe of capitol punishment, Clarence Darrow was able to get them “life plus 99 years” instead of the death penalty. Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936 and Leopold took charge of his own publicity and was released from prison in 1958. He lived out his years quietly in Puerto Rico until his death in 1971. Little has been written about his post-prison life. Erik Rebain , an archivist who works for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Hi…
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I’ll never forget the scream coming from the basement the day my mother learned her mother had been murdered by her own husband—or had committed suicide. I often wonder if this was the origin point for my lifelong obsession with horror. My grandmother, Margarite Temple, came from a long line of urban Indians (of Apache, Chickasaw, and Cherokee descent) and suffered much. Without the finances to realize her dream of becoming a blues singer in New York, Annie James, the Chickasaw whorehouse owner grandmother who raised her, arranged a marriage with a much older man. Margarite was 14. He beat her, gave her syphilis, walked up the steps of their house drunk, and kicked her …
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Ah, summer. There’s just something about these months of sun-soaked, sun-dappled, sunscreened sunniness that makes me long for the dark and drizzly days of autumn. I live for the rare thunderstorms, rejoice in the occasional foggy morning, and generally spend my afternoons pretending I’m curled under a quilt and not hugging the nearest AC vent like a well-placed comma. It’s little surprise that I save my darkest, eeriest reads for this season of heat and humidity, escaping into the tall grasses of ill-maintained estates, wandering through long corridors of questionably sentient shadows, and basking in the perilous angst of another gaslit heroine. I was around ten years …
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If a thrilling movie filmed in a foreign locale helps you escape for an hour or two from limitations on travel imposed by the pandemic, imagine what watching 25 episodes of an international thriller series might do to uplift your psyche and energize your creativity! I thought I’d test that theory, and over the last month have streamed 27 international thriller TV series in a variety of subgenres—espionage, political, romantic, and more—from continents across the globe. I do feel considerably less home-bound, and have drawn from what I learned about the wider world as I write my next book. Based on that experience, I’m delighted to share with you my Top 10 Streaming Inter…
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During this last period of lockdown and isolation, we’ve all searched for ways of escape. I found mine by rereading two of my favorite authors, PG Wodehouse and Jerome K Jerome. I first discovered Wodehouse and Jerome one Saturday afternoon when I was twelve or thirteen, an impressionable age, browsing through the stacks of my local library. To say the experience was an epiphany would be an understatement. No one I knew talked like that. I never knew such a world existed. (It doesn’t, but more about that later.) I’d never read anything so funny in my life. I still haven’t. So what makes British humor so funny? Is it different than American humor? British humor has a…
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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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