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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There’s someone in the house. I know it as soon as I’m inside, though I couldn’t say how. Some indescribable change in the air, perhaps, or a sound I hadn’t consciously registered. A wave of adrenaline sweeps over my skin, prickling all hair follicles on end. I stand frozen, just inside the still- open front door, a layer of warm air and sunshine pressing at my back and the shadowy cool of the terraced house silently waiting for me. But it’s the wrong type of silence. I stand motionless, staring, my ears straining to catch any sound above my own racing heartbeat, which is thumping in my ears, thumping in my throat; waiting for a moving shadow or the thud of a footfall or…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace (Gillian Flynn Books) “Sister Holiday, the protagonist of Margot Douaihy’s showstopper of a series debut Scorched Grace isn’t what you’d imagine a nun to be like, even in laissez-faire New Orleans . . . I cannot wait to read the sister’s next investigation, of mysteries and of her own self.” –Sarah Weinman, New York Times Rupert Holmes, Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide (Avid Reader Press) “Holmes is a gifted wordsmith whose latest is a top-notch read that both entertains and amuses. . . . Delightfully wicked . . . An amusing and…
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“Which is exactly why we have to keep startling the reader in a desperate attempt to keep one step ahead: The hero did it. The victim did it. Watson, did it, Holmes did it, it’s the butler, it’s all of them, it’s none of them—” –from Accomplice by Rupert Holmes Hey, let’s twist again! (Like we did last summer, remember?) I pick up every puzzler hoping to be both astounded and humbled by some stunning revelation lurking within. The classic mystery novel is the magic show of literature, and the illusionist’s audience can be divided into two camps: those who hope to guess the trick in advance (often incorrectly) and those of us who eagerly hope to be fooled, misdirected,…
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I love research. I hate writing, so “research” is the best excuse to avoid writing while still telling yourself “Hey, I’m working on the book!” And it has the extra benefit of being absolutely a true and necessary part of the process – especially when writing about a time and place you’ve never lived, if you want to get it right. My stepmother was a hidden child in WWII Hungary, a 5-y-o little Jewish girl sent to live on a farm with a Catholic family, in the guise of an orphaned niece; she was fortunate to survive the war, and eventually emigrated to the US. After my first novel, A Child out of Alcatraz, was published 25 years ago, I was casting about for my next project…
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Description is critical in good, immersive fiction. It first and foremost enables the reader to richly imagine the world that a writer has created. But good description does more than provide the sensory and physical details crucial in setting, characterization, action, and world building. The ways in which characters see and describe their worlds deepen personality, establish point of view, convey motivation, ratchet up tension, and move the plot along. Ultimately, the description is the thread that connects the who, what, when, where, and why in any narrative. Creating mood and atmosphere centers on the manner in which something is described. The sound of words matter…
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It started out as more than just a ride. In the early 1990s, Disneyland Paris (then called “Euro Disney”) had planned a whole Jules Verne area, “Discoveryland,” to be one of the main features of the new amusement park. According to researcher and documentarian Kevin Perjurer, the area’s centerpiece was going to be a giant copper and steel pavilion, and inside it would be a replica of The Mysterious Island, the home port of Captain Nemo from Verne’s 1872 novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Docked in a giant pool would be Nemo’s golden submarine, the Nautilus, which was to be its own walk-through attraction and feature an underwater restaurant. There was going to…
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Reality often plays a role in fiction. There are contemporary “ripped from the headlines” stories—these days often with a podcaster as the protagonist— lining the shelves are novels inspired by murders, kidnappings, bank robberies and airplane hijackings among many other bad acts. And then there are historical mysteries peopled by bold faced names of the time. (Teddy Roosevelt makes an appearance in Mariah Fredericks’ Jane Prescott series; Princess Elizabeth collaborates with Maggie Hope in an early installment of Susan Elia MacNeal’s series of World War II mysteries; famous figures from Dwight D. Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy appear in James R. Benn’s Billy Boyle mystery…
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The human urge to uncover hidden things is behind the enduring appetite for crime fiction, where we turn the pages to search for the truth. The impulse to solve clues and find buried treasure explains the success of everything from The Da Vinci Code to The Goonies, and hatched a sub-genre that sparks the kind of obsession you’d find in the pages of a psychological thriller. Literary treasure hunts, word-and-picture books containing clues to buried treasure, literal or figurative, inspired my latest suspense novel, THE SKELETON KEY. In my fictional treasure hunt, a golden skeleton is scattered across England, the clues hidden in a storybook called The Golden Bones. What s…
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Ever since Aesop wrote his fable about the city mouse and country mouse in the 6th century B.C., there has been an urge to divide the world into two kinds of people – those who prefer the country where it’s safe and comfortable, and those who long for the city, where there is more variety but also the perception of greater danger. In the world of mysteries, you can see a similar sort of dividing line. Cozy mysteries are typically set in a small town or country village, where the murders are less gruesome and a true villain should be easy to spot in a tight-knit community where no one can stay a stranger for long. Thrillers, noirs and more hard-edged mysteries are more o…
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When I was a kid in the early 1970s, my late father was a hippie turned political idealist working, quite effectively for several years, to change the system from within. As you might imagine from that thumbnail biography, pop was also a pot smoker. Being exposed to rolling papers and bongs from my earliest days, marijuana held no allure or mystique for me. I took a toke or two with friends in high school and college, once earning a quarter’s worth of ribbing for the epic coughing fit triggered by a single dorm-room inhalation, and that was the end of that. My mood-altering substance of choice is bourbon, and I still fondly recall giving my dad a requested taste of Pap…
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Is it possible? That the saga of Elizabeth Holmes, as long and drawn out as it was, has finally reached its conclusion? Since we last spoke, Holmes’s co-conspirator (and erstwhile May-December lover) Sunny Balwani has been sentenced to about 13 years in the federal slammer. We also learned that the ever-enceinte Holmes is likely to spend her decade-and-change sentence at FCP Bryan, a minimum-security facility just 90 minutes from where she grew up. (Also that Holmes booked a one-way ticket to Mexico back in January 2022, shortly after her conviction. Speaking of flight risks, might I recommend indie rock duo Tommy Lefroy’s song of the same name? It’s 59 seconds of ethe…
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New Jersey has my heart, even if I don’t live there anymore. You can blame the exorbitant property taxes for that. Like most Jewish kids from my town, I was born in New York City, but raised in its shadow. I grew up in a sprawling suburb of massive subdivisions and mini-malls; of traffic along the Route 9 corridor; and of new synagogues and old churches. My high school had two thousand students in it and was within walking distance to Old Tennent Cemetery where descendants of witch-hunter Cotton Mather are entombed. The mall is still only a five-minute drive from there. On the way to Nordstroms, you’ll pass Monmouth Battlefield where Molly Pitcher supposedly took her husb…
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In a small attic bedroom in Cleveland, in the Jewish neighborhood of Glenville, Jerry Siegel tried to sleep. It wasn’t the summer heat that was keeping him awake nor his snoring older brother Leo snoozing noisily beside him. Twisting and turning, Jerry had a new idea for a story in his head. It involved a character like Samson, Hercules, and Moses all rolled into one—a new character that was an amalgamation of everything he had ever written or read. And he had read a lot. Jerry, a nerd with glasses, had had few friends at Glenville High—ignored not just by the girls but the boys, too. He had been bullied for years, kids taunting him with rhymes like “Siegel, Seagull, b…
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I can’t say exactly why everyone seems to be captivated by an antihero story, but I can say why I am: antiheroes make shit happen. They’re active and ambitious characters, taking big swings, relentless towards their pursuit of greatness, whatever that means to them, and they’ll stop at nothing to get what they want, nefarious deeds included. That alone always has the makings of great entertainment and I am here for it. I love thrillers, always have, but I personally craved a story with a wild woman front and center, one who some might say is a villain, where others might say she’s a hero (ahem), but no matter what side of the argument a person falls on, they want to hang…
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I’m not going to say, “winter is coming,” one, because by the time this goes to print, the first season of House of the Dragon will have wrapped up, like, two months ago (aka two decades in GoT years). Totally unscientific fan theory that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately (maybe I should write an article for The Cut about it?): Dramione shippers like me grew up to be Daemon fangirls. Two, would I ever be so trite as to co-opt that most memorable of Starkisms? Copywriters of the world, please stop using the first family of Winterfell’s motto to sell your coats/sweaters/scarves/etc. In my case, winter isn’t coming. I’m headed home to Florida for the holidays, aka the …
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“I’d always been a sucker for a creepy old house, with or without a creepy old housekeeper.” ~Greer Hogan, Three Can Keep a Secret It began with Scooby Doo. Show me a decrepit old mansion with a wailing ghost that sends Shaggy and Scooby running in terror, and I was glued to the screen. By the time I was ready for chapter books, I was constantly on the hunt for any story featuring an eerie house harboring dark secrets and strange residents—living or dead. Dog-eared hand-me-down copies or crisp new pages, it didn’t matter. I was happy to unearth The Secret of Terror Castle along with The Three Investigators, or winkle out The Secret of the Mansion with Trixie Belden. If …
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On February 24th, 2022—a week after I’d submitted the first draft of my Soviet spy thriller, Black Wolf, to my publisher—the world watched in dismay as Russian troops occupied the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine. While the alarming specter of a wider nuclear attack loomed, raised once again by our old Cold War enemy, Russia, I also wondered how many of the thousand Russian soldiers I was seeing retreat through the Exclusion Zone would eventually die, slowly and painfully, because of their exposure to the radioactive soil. In some ways, the fact that I’ve managed to become an author at all is surprising. Despite being born in the early 1950’s, I’d stubbornly, and stead…
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At first the bodies sank to the seabed. Then, after only a few days of submersion, once the internal organs had begun to putrefy and the flesh had swelled with noxious gases, they rose again to the surface like inflated balloons. Later that same week they came ashore one by one and at different locations, as if in death they disdained each other’s company. They fetched up all along the bleak and empty coastline that stretches from Yarmouth to Caister, Winterton and Happisburgh. There were even some that drifted as far north as Foulness and the estuary of the Humber. They were deposited on the sands as the tide ebbed. In some, the softer parts, the cheeks and the lips, …
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Then—in my childhood—in the dawn Of a most stormy life—was drawn From ev’ry depth of good and ill The mystery that binds me still— —from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Alone” Having completed just forty years of what was without question a most stormy life, Edgar Allan Poe took leave of this realm early Sunday morning, October 7, 1849. Nobody knows precisely why. Indeed, like so many aspects of his life, his death has been the topic of endless debate, conjecture, speculation, guessing, and second-guessing. Nobody can tell you with anything resembling certainty why, while traveling from Richmond to New York, he ended up in Baltimore. Nobody can tell you what happened to him durin…
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Why do so many journalists turn to writing fiction? The list is legion. Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, Bram Stoker, H.G Wells, Joan Didion, George Orwell, Geraldine Brooks, Margaret Mitchell, Susan Sontag, and countless others. Perhaps I should narrow down the question. Why do many journalists embark on a life of crime? I speak from experience. I began my writing career at the age of seventeen, as a cadet reporter on an afternoon newspaper in Sydney, Australia. It was a typical tabloid ‘red top’ with bold and breathless headlines, full of clickbait stories before ‘clickbait’ was even a word. The Sun was sold at newsstands and on street corners…
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You don’t know this person, so don’t even try to figure this out, because you won’t be able to. (Seriously. And she is not part of the book world community). I’m telling you this because it’s a cautionary tale, and one that’s more reassuring to believe isn’t true. But it’s true. It’s also the genesis of THE HOUSE GUEST, and more on that in a minute. There’s a woman I once knew who was happily married. She’d go to work every day and send her husband off to do whatever he did; accounting, or insurance, or something financial. And to hear him tell it, the next big sale or the next big deal was always around the corner, and she was incredibly supportive. Then one day the po…
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Monasteries are easier to get away from than to get into. As a young man I tried to get into one but the vocation master, well-trained in such matters, knew as soon as I opened my mouth that I was for this world, not his. He sent me on my way, but I never lost the desire to experience his world of ritual chant followed by hours of profound silence. Since writing is a profession of profound silence requiring intense ritual, I’ve found my own form of monastic life, and my latest hero is a monk. So I’ve got it all, and I’m grateful to that vocation master of long ago who steered me toward the only monastery in which I could be comfortable, the one in my own mind. Each time …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Gregg Hurwitz, The Last Orphan (Minotaur) “Hurwitz takes the series to an even higher level. Pulse-pounding, heart-stopping, and thought-provoking. I loved it.” –Meg Gardiner Kathleen Kent, Black Wolf (Mulholland) “An intelligent, propulsive spy thriller . . . Kent draws on her own experience working for the U.S. Department of Defense to create an utterly convincing espionage novel full of tradecraft. Readers will eagerly await Mel’s further adventures.” –Publishers Weekly Lexie Elliott, Bright and Deadly Things (Berkley) “Chalet-based thrillers combine the luxury of a get…
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George Stebbins was tearing down a stone wall in the cellar of his home in Northfield, Massachusetts when he uncovered the bones. A skull emerged first, then the spine and the bones of the arms and legs. The remains were packed together in a space measuring less than three feet, suggesting the body had been dismembered or had decayed to a skeleton before being interred. Had Stebbins, who operated a ferry on the Connecticut River just inside the state’s border with New Hampshire and Vermont, disturbed a forgotten grave? Or was there a more sinister explanation for the discovery? “The condition of the wall appeared as if part of the wall had been removed,” he informed the …
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There’s something about a poisoning plot that gets me every time. Over the years, my husband and I have become avid watchers of Dateline. Sometimes it can be overwhelming scrolling through all the available episodes and choosing one to watch. Personally, I’m always intrigued by murders involving poison. The covert nature of the act is chilling—not at all in-your-face like a murder with a gun or knife. It may also be that poison is so often the weapon of choice for women in caretaking roles. We’ve all heard the tales of women who slipped poison in their husbands’ food or drink, which turns the stereotype of the gentle, loving homemaker on its head. In seventeenth century…
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