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 2008 documentary Have You Seen Andy? is, sadly, not a unique true crime story. An unsolved mystery, a missing child, a devastating family tragedy… it fits neatly into the seemingly endless list of heartbreaking disappearances that leave families lost and broken. What snagged the fabric of my attention in this tale was the narrator: the filmmaker, Melanie Perkins, had been Andy’s childhood friend when he disappeared at age 10. His disappearance was written into her being, and she couldn’t leave Andy behind. She was a nine-year-old girl when her best friend went missing, and I’m sure her part of the story was remembered by her parents, and perhaps Andy’s mother thought …
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The old lady sits in her favourite rocker. To her listener it seems unyieldingly hard, softened for her fragile frame only by the thinnest of cushions at her back. Her hair, silver grey, has lost neither its lustre nor its abundance, but is pulled back into the severest of buns. The smooth, shiny-thin skin of her face is flushed from the heat of the fire, embers glowing in the blackened hearth of this vast cheminée that so dominates the end wall of the salon. Her voice, like her frame, is slight, and he finds himself realising that at seventy-five she is really only ten years older than he. Will the next ten years reduce him as it has her? But still, there is a clarity …
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Reading has always been a great escape in my life. Books gave me joy, taught me much, but mostly, they were entertainment. I had a good upbringing, raised by my mom and grandma. We weren’t rich or poor, I had what I needed. Books, however, were a luxury, an “extra” given to me as gifts or on special occasions because they weren’t in the budget. So I spent many hundreds of hours at the library. Free books! Thousands to choose from. Tastes change, and different people like different genres, but from the beginning, I gravitated toward mysteries and thrillers. My childhood favorites are similar to many writers in my genre: Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew; Agatha Christie and L…
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What is it that draws suspense authors to Texas settings? In a word: variety. From the sunbaked desert to the shadowy piney woods, from the rugged Chisos Mountains out west, to the sugary sand beaches down south, authors of Texas-based stories have a wide variety of dramatic settings to choose from. As America’s second-largest state, Texas encompassing nearly 270,000 square miles, offering storytellers an array of interesting places to set their adventures. And the people are just as varied as the topography. Across the sprawling Lone Star State, many different people and worlds collide, creating conflict and tension—two key ingredients in suspense fiction. The list of…
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“Well, that was fun, but it wasn’t at all realistic!” is an often shared opinion by readers after snapping closed an engrossing though twisty thriller. I always find those kind of assessments amusing because: Don’t we read fiction to escape reality? No matter how far-fetched the plot, I bet I could find a real-life example that is even more outlandish because “Truth is stranger than fiction,” as Mark Twain once said. When I decided to begin researching for my book The Three Mrs. Greys—a novel about Cyrus Grey, a conman who marries three different women and lies unconscious in the hospital room while his wives are left to unravel his secrets and solve his attempted murd…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Caroline Kepnes, You Love Me (Random House) Kepnes keeps turning up the intensity with each new installment of the Joe Goldberg series, this time sending her protagonist-villain to an island in the Pacific Northwest, where he finds work, naturally enough for Joe, at a local library, and of course trains his attention (and delusions) on one of the librarians. In the past, Joe has been very much a creature and observer of cities, first New York and then Los Angeles. The move to a small-town adds a special, terrible intimacy to his crimes, not to men…
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“Be gay, do crime.” These four short words have become the new rallying cry at Pride demonstrations, but a glance at the canon of queer film suggests you might not hear this sentiment at the cinema. Classic films like The Children’s Hour and Suddenly, Last Summer often take up Gothic elements to convey the paranoia and sense of entrapment felt by queer characters, but their plots are focused on individual psychology rather than the detection of a crime, as are more overt crime films, such Harold Prince’s gay murder mystery Something for Everyone from 1970. This disconnect between queer cinema and crime film might be surprising, given that, until fifty years ago, to be g…
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New York Times bestselling author Michael Koryta got the call from the records office at Indiana University shortly before he was scheduled to graduate. Looking back, it’s easy to understand why he overlooked a single core prerequisite. Koryta was busy writing part-time for the Bloomington Herald-Times, he worked occasionally for a private detective and in what spare time he had left, he was writing novels. He did all of this while studying for a degree in criminal justice because he never lost sight of his goal to become a crime fiction writer. Koryta was a college sophomore when he sold his first novel. While shopping his manuscript, the 19-year-old didn’t tell anyone…
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Monday, June 29, 1992 A girl with dark brown hair jumped off the train at the same time as the four young men from the San Viator cuadrilla. The five teenagers spread out across the bare station at Cabezón de la Sal, a town in Cantabria famous for its salt flats. Their backpacks were full of supplies, and their hearts were full of expectations for the summer. Waiting for them was the project director, Saúl Tovar, a young professor dressed informally in a checkered shirt. He welcomed them and introduced several student assistants who had already attended summer camp there. There weren’t many: a few second- and third-year girls studying history who swarmed around Saúl, …
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When I was a newspaper reporter, one of my colleagues on the advertising side of the operation was as much a fan of the TV series “Justified” as I was. My family hails from Tennessee, so I was attuned to the southern sensibilities of “Justified,” which was about flawed law enforcement agents and flawed criminals in modern-day Kentucky. My family knew many of the cities and wild places and types of people in the series. We recognized the truth and smiled at the exaggerations and appreciated how Kentucky tourism officials would feel when their state, on a weekly basis, was depicted as a place full of trashy rednecks and meth heads. My coworker, on the other hand, was an …
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“From the purely tactical point of view, women were able to move about without exciting so much suspicion as men and were therefore exceedingly useful to us…” —Maurice Buckmaster, They Fought Alone: The Story of British Agents in France While researching my latest novel, The Invisible Woman, about Allied spy Virginia Hall, I made a surprising discovery. Nazis largely didn’t think women were as brave, intelligent, and even devious and vengeful as men. Because of this, women were often overlooked in the hunt for resistors and spies. German propaganda at the time depicted a feminine ideal of woman as mother, preferably of four or more children, tending home quietly and …
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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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You don’t need a long weekend in April to enjoy a good international thriller binge, but it helps. In some corners of the world, there’s an Easter break right about now, which if memory serves was the traditional weekend to watch Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, not an activity people indulge in too often these day, though that’s not going to stop me from doing my Yul Brynner imitation all weekend. The point is, some of us are already programmed for a good long binge this weekend, preferably one that spans continents and involves some interesting clothes, so let’s dive in and see what the new offerings are for all your international thriller needs. If you watched…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Michael Connelly, The Dark Hours (Little, Brown) “A masterpiece… Meticulous about actual police procedure, Connelly makes the fundamentals of detective work engrossing while providing plenty of suspense and action.” Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Rex Pickett, The Archivist (Blackstone) ”Take a deep dive in the dark archives with intrepid, independent, indefatigable project archivist Emily Snow as she excavates deadly secrets in Pickett’s exhilarating debut literary thriller. With deftly woven narrative threads and intrigue worthy of Hitchcock, The Archivist is immersive and r…
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tl;dr: Research is hard, rabbit holes are interesting and twisty, and electric cars were invented a long time ago. Also, crooked cops are bad, whatever the era. Spoiler alert: Wow, electric cars sure were invented a long time ago! And some serious points are made. I spent this last week down a rabbit hole. We’ve all been there. My last big dive before this was when I was looking up DNA for my upcoming mystery novel, He Wasn’t There Again Today, which will be the third in the Epitome Apartments novels, following last year’s The Adventures of Isabel and this year’s What’s the Matter with Mary Jane? (I’m tempted to post the results, but this travelogue is already pretty l…
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Faith Jones has had a challenging life. She was born into the Children of God cult, left in her late teens, and later, reconnected with her family after they, too, left the cult. Her new memoir, Sex Cult Nun, is clear-sighted and inspiring; she doesn’t need to forget the past to move beyond it, and that’s an amazing lesson for our amnesia-challenged society. I asked Faith a few questions over email to go along with the publication of her new book. Molly Odintz: The story of a cult seems to be, in some ways, the story of domestic violence writ large—do you find the same parallels? Faith Jones: Yes. Domestic violence involves stripping away boundaries and using manipulat…
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New York writers are used to toiling in the shadows of the greats who came before us. But when I began writing The Bouncer and its sequels, creating a crime series set in the city, I found myself both inspired and intimidated by how many authors had plumbed those depths before me. Since the days of Whitman and Melville, the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, New York City has always inspired excellence in both writing and crime. And at least since Poe, one has fed the other, giving Gotham’s underworld a rich and varied literature all its own. Here, in vaguely historical order, is a list of some my favorite books about outlaw New York. Low Life, by Luc Sante For anyone…
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In Underexposed!: The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made (Abrams) Joshua Hull and Posterspy chart the history of films that were almost, but not quite made. Here, they looks at David Fincher’s planned follow-up to Zodiac. ___________________________________ FADE IN A torso is discovered during an innocent game of tag, setting in motion a cat-and-mouse game between Eliot Ness and the Torso Killer in 1930s Cleveland. This is the plot of Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko’s six-issue comic book series, Torso, which was originally published by Image Comics in 1998. In 2006, while busy working on the thriller Zodiac, David Fincher signed on to direct an adaptation of Torso…
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This month’s international crime fiction roundup brings you plenty of corruption, coverups, and conspiracies. Sleuths in Iceland, Quebec, and Taiwan go all the way to the top for answers, a housebreaker in Egypt leverages state secrets to make his way to the center of society, a Parisian illusionist finds himself the target of his rich clients, and an unhappy bride is stalked by an admirer who knows far too much about her life in China. Perhaps you’ll even be able to take these books on a long-delayed vacation! Sergio Schmucler, The Guardian of Amsterdam Street Translated by Jessica Mendez Sayer (House of Anansi Press) In Mexico City, Galo has confined himself to Am…
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This piece was supposed to be about fiction. Given that my own novel, Impostor Syndrome, is about a Russian spy working as an executive at one of the world’s largest technology companies, it made sense to gather some of my favorite works of fiction on crime in Silicon Valley. I soon realized however, that most of my selections were actually non-fiction. Unlike say, investment banking (The Bonfire of the Vanities) or academia (On Beauty, Lucky Jim, and many more), it seems tech is one of the lesser examined areas in fiction. Maybe it’s because the personalities, and crimes, are often already outsized; the truth in many cases is already plenty outrageous. Some of my favor…
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Philip Agee remains unique in the annals of US intelligence in that he went from being the consummate intelligence insider—nobody is more entrenched than a Central Intelligence Agency case officer in the field—to being a thoroughgoing outsider, and did so by choice. Agee has continued to be, with the exception of Aldrich Ames, the United States’ most hated erstwhile spy. Within the CIA, his “was taken as one of the most harmful, worst betrayals that we [have] suffered, and the hostility to him was greater than it was towards almost anybody else,” notes Glenn Carle, himself a CIA whistleblower with respect to “enhanced interrogation.” While Agee did assert the natural righ…
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It all came to a head in the most surprising way. One morning, Miguel heard the key in the lock and assumed that Natalia had forgotten something, since she’d only said goodbye five minutes earlier. But his daughter was not who appeared in the door with a triumphant smile. Miguel’s stomach turned on seeing Gustavo, his ex-son-in-law. “What are you doing here?” he asked, not even attempting to hide his hostility. He hated Gustavo as intensely as he’d once loved him, years ago. Gustavo smiled in phony cordiality. “A hug would be nice, Miguel. It’s been a long time.” Miguel had trouble finding his words, had to chew them up and let them out like mush. “You are no longer…
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Before Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck became an essential part of the Western literary canon, he was an unpublished writer with three rejected novels to his name. (Relatable!) Apparently, one of these novels was a mystery called Murder at Full Moon, which featured (get ready for it) werewolves. Twenty-something Steinbeck wrote the novel under the pseudonym Peter Pym. The 233-page manuscript—currently stored in the Harry Ransom Center archives, where it has languished since it was rejected by publishers in 1930—centers on a small California coastal town whose residents are trying to make sense of a recent wave of grisly murders that happened during the full moon. Officials…
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“fools gamble With things they don’t own, even though the first thing they’ll lose is their life.”—Abbas Mahalawi The gardener had left the gate ajar as planned. We entered one after the other like house cats familiar with their home. Then we sped through the garden like ghosts. Ernesti pulled some large socks out of his bag and signaled for us to slip them over our shoes to silence our footsteps. Eduardo, the Italian butler, assured us that he had drugged the large guard dogs, as well as Cicurel and his wife. He had slipped a barbiturate into the dinner he had served them and had seen them eat it. They’d be sleeping like the dead now and wouldn’t awake before noon, he s…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Kathy Wang, Impostor Syndrome (Custom House) “Like John le Carré filtered through Tom Wolfe, Impostor Syndrome encapsulates our Facebook anxieties perfectly.” The Millions David Gordon, Against the Law (Mysterious Press) “This one has everything, from a car chase that makes what Steve McQueen does with that Mustang in Bullitt seem like a Sunday drive, to a showdown in a Russian bathhouse that is part Marx Brothers and part Kill Bill. For anyone with a taste for blood-spattered comic capers featuring characters who vault off the page, Against the Law is an exquisite fever dream in…
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