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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For four decades, nobody has worked the Los Angeles crime beat better than Michael Connelly. Connelly’s “watch” started in the 1980s as a crime reporter with the Los Angeles Times and continued, since 1991, with the publication of 36 crime novels set in the city. He has covered everything from the chaos that gripped the city after the 1992 acquittal of four LAPD Officers charged with the savage beating of African American motorist Rodney King to the imposition of a federal consent decree over the LAPD in 2001 after another scandal in the Rampart Division, and from the shuttering of the dilapidated Parker Center on Los Angeles Street to the opening of a gleaming new LAPD h…
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In this current phase of life, one I like to uniquely call, “The Era of Absolute True Crime Insanity!”, it seems we have delved into nearly every subject on every podcast, documentary and book. We’ve explored so many wronged victims, and even more wrongly accused. We’ve mourned the loss of Michelle MacNamara, we’ve wondered if Scott Peterson was innocent (This confuses me but I’m trying to remain level-headed!), and we claimed to have uncovered the Zodiac killer for the upteenth time! But in all of this, I find myself still angrily screaming into the void… What about Ann Rule? Have we forgotten the actual queen of True Crime? The woman who did it all, before you could do…
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When I incorporate folktales into my contemporary-set novels, it feels like I’m taking my place in an ancient tradition: re-telling old stories, updating them for a modern audience. While I’m not literally holding fort around the fireside, I like to think that creating and publishing a novel with roots in ancient folklore is the modern way of passing these tales on. Folklore itself exists everywhere, and there are many beautiful examples of novels that incorporate elements of these beguiling stories, bringing to life themes and characters that have captivated us for centuries. Selkies, which feature in my novel The Hidden, are shape-shifters: seals in the sea, human on la…
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The French Murder Case That Shocked a Francophile Family Into Writing A Detective Series
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It was the perfect venue for a summer vacation. A comfortable stone country house in the Dordogne—land of foie gras and deep green rolling hills—not far from Issigeac, one of the most idyllic of the “bastide” villages. The rambling old home was set high on a hill, with a spacious living room, and big French doors opening onto a terrace. In the fields out back, among the trees, sat a large pool for swimming every morning. Our family, all Francophiles, had come for a summer of sightseeing in the narrow winding streets of the medieval towns, and the bustling Sunday morning markets with the tomatoes glistening in the sun, and strings of sausages swaying in the breeze. All…
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An investigator, a judge and a reporter walk into a bar. They’re all promoting their latest true crime books. There’s a lot of truth to that variation on the old joke. For decades, many of the best-known books recounting real-life murders, kidnappings and “trials of the century” sprang from the minds of cops, prosecutors, judges and the reporters who covered the biggest and most shocking and sordid cases. Who are the writers of true crime and what draws them to write about some of life’s darkest moments? All of us are ultimately writers, of course, but increasingly the writers have a background that is very different from criminal justice or journalism. And the good new…
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Apart from love, one of the largest emotions in any of our lives is grief. In the natural course of events, we will grieve for our grandparents and our parents and perhaps for friends as well. It is something we have to learn how to do, learn how to live with. There is so much death in thrillers. To take the most flagrant examples, there are far more murders in Norwegian thrillers than there are actual murders in Norway. (In 2018 there were only twenty-five homicides.) But where is the grief? Obviously there is plenty of grieving in the margins of stories. We witness the distress of victims’ families. But what about the main characters? There is trauma, anger, bitternes…
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The CrimeReads editors pick the month’s best new books out in paperback. * S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland (Flatiron) “A roaring, full-throttle thriller, crackling with tension and charm.” –The New York Times Book Review Lisa Jewell, Before She Disappeared (Dutton) “A masterpiece of post-modern noir….A riveting stunner of a tale where the rare appearance of the sun shines down on what is certain to be one of the best thrillers of 2021.”—Providence Journal Shari Lapena, The End of Her (Penguin Books) “Shari Lapena’s latest thriller The End of Her will keep you guessing right up to the end . . . And so begins a nonstop page-turning that has become a hallma…
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“Life doesn’t have a narrator – it’s full of lies and half-truths – so we never know anything for sure, not really. I like that.” “So fiction really is fiction,” Brunetti asked. Paola looked across at him open-mouthed in surprise. Then she put her head back and laughed until the tears came. –The Temptation of Forgiveness (2018) \Guido and Paola Brunetti know a great deal about lies and half-truths, and all the other human failings, he as a commissario (detective superintendent) in the Venice police, she as a professor of English literature beset by lazy students and self-important colleagues – but still, after more than twenty years of marriage, they make each other l…
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“[Humans] cannot tolerate not knowing the cause of things that effect our lives.” —Lewis Wolpert, British developmental biologist. In November of 1970, a pair of young brothers discovered 18-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling’s body just beyond the mouth of a culvert adjacent the Cedar River in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It’s been more than 50 years, and her homicide has never been solved. The first time I read through Paula’s investigation file, I—balanced on a too-small chair in a subterranean Brooklyn coffee shop—unintentionally engaged in a sort of biased digestion of the material. Specifically, I was doing all I could to force each clue I encountered into supporting my o…
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It’s been years since our protagonist gave up his life of crime. He’s gone straight now. He just wants to be left alone to live the quiet life. He’s served his time, paid his debt to society and is ready to reconcile with his estranged daughter. Then, with a knock on the door, the past walks in. It’s Old Partner and Old Partner is in way too deep with some bad people. He needs Protagonist to help him. He needs to steal the thing in a heist no one thinks is possible. Also, if Protagonist ever wants to see his estranged daughter again, he’s only got 72 hours to pull it off. It’s time for one last job… There is something inherently lovable about the heist story. They have b…
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I’m not sure we’ll ever get a consensus on what it means to be a New Yorker—ten years in a rent-controlled apartment? birth? a certain swagger down the shady side of Broadway?—but there’s something undeniable about a great New York novel, a novel that balances the vastness of its ambition with the particularity of its moments, a story that takes place on street corners and stoops and peers through the occasional open window while admitting to the eternal appeal and hopelessness of the city’s voyeurism, how other people are around us all the time, on display and unknowable. The new novel, The Great Mistake, by Jonathan Lee, takes as its subject one of those lives, an extr…
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Yes, that’s right! James Ellroy, famed telegrammatic prose stylist and the author of classic noirs L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, and White Jazz (among many others), will be releasing a true crime podcast series. And as you all hoped after reading the headline, yes, he WILL be narrating it. The podcast is entitled James Ellroy’s Hollywood Death Trip. Evidently, it will dig into several of the most indelible and gory murders mid-century Los Angeles ever witnessed. The five-part series, produced by the group Audio Up, will be released in August, 2021. Audio Up said that listeners will be invited to “explore some of the darkest crimes in Los Angeles h…
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As a child growing up in the middle of the Daniel Boone National Forest I spent an inordinate amount of time alone. Most of those hours I wandered the woods. Half of what I know, I learned there alone. Most of the rest I learned from reading. A bookmobile trundled up the dirt road of my home hill once a week. On those slanted shelves I discovered my love of crime fiction by falling in love with Nancy Drew. Next I read the Hardy Boys, the Dana Girls, and the Three Investigators. The nearest town established a public library where I made the big jump to Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe. There was a four-book limit per person. I circumvented that—an act of minor crime—b…
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In the time I spent writing A Past that Breathes, I went from the frustrations of the private criminal law practice that inspired the novel to a public service desk job with the State of California. I had begun to question whether certain passages in the book were unduly harsh, insensitive, and unnecessary. But watching Derek Chauvin kneel on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, as an African who came to America at seventeen, I reflected on how it could have easily been me Officer Chauvin was kneeling on. A passage in my novel describes a visit to the Los Angeles County Central jail house by the defense counsel, Kenneth Brown, an African America…
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“There are no positive gay characters in this work.” – a reader on Bath Haus From 1998 to 2006, NBC flooded households with accessible, fictional gays every Thursday night. Edgy queer jokes pushed boundaries. Outlandish characters led impossibly glamorous lives. Shenanigans packed with sharp observations scored huge ratings. For fans, Will & Grace pointedly clarified the world like only comedy can. For this closeted kid in small town South Carolina—where coming out can be both hard and dangerous—Will kissing men on primetime did something else: it sussed out safety and identified potential allies. A straight, high school buddy erupting in laughter at a zinger from Ja…
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On a cold day after Christmas 1944, Joe Teiji Koide stepped forward and placed his hand over the Bible as others looked on. He pledged his solemn oath of office, as had so many others as part of their induction into the United States’ first centralized intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). His words echoed through the room in more ways than one: “I do further solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose …
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As soon as I started writing The Body Double, I seemed to discover doubles everywhere—in literature, movies, and even the tangled world of internet conspiracies, where they believe your favorite celebrities might not be who they seem to be. The appeal of the double self as a narrative force is clear—a second self to whom we can pin the worst of our behavior, or who, conversely, might be living our dream lives. Here are some of my favorite doubles in the twisted world of mystery fiction and (slightly) beyond! The Double, by Fyodor Dostoyevski Dostoyevski’s classic tale of a man pursued by his own likeness was one of the first books I remember encountering with a double…
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Historical settings can give mystery and crime novels added depth and texture. In this list, set everywhere from a post-WWI Welsch village to the freezing Arctic, our protagonists have to navigate the threats of clever murderers. But they do so on frozen tundra or in an early Plymouth colony already on life support from disease and scarcity of food, and it raises the stakes in such a dramatic way. I’ve always been drawn historical fiction with a mystery or suspense undertow, ever since my gateway book back in 2001, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks. Set in 17th century England in a village that quarantines itself to stop the spread of the disease…
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This month’s best international releases for crime readers aren’t all strictly crime novels, but they all capture that peculiar blend of misery and beauty that drives the best works of noir fiction. This month’s selections include: a doomed romance in a refugee camp in Turkey, a Maltese Falcon-esque search for a statue in Cuba, a bizarre novel of behind-the-scenes manipulation and comical doubling out of Japan, and a bleak novel of intrigue and desperation set in Mexico City. As we all head out to finally travel, these novels serve as both guides and warnings, reminding us that there is much below the glossy surface wherever we may be. Dolores Redondo, The North Face o…
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During long stretches of the war against Hitler, German bombs were a part of day-to-day life in British cities. The Führer’s first air campaign against British civilians, known to Britons as the Blitz, lasted from September 1940 to May 1941 and led to the dropping of tens of thousands of tons of explosives across the country. London alone was hit by seventy-one major Luftwaffe raids. The bombers were back over Britain in February through May 1944 with Operation Steinbock, the so-called Baby Blitz. The following month brought the V-1s—winged drone aircraft, of which the Germans launched more than ten thousand across the English Channel. The deep growl of a V-1’s engine in …
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It’s been a little more than a year since George Floyd Jr. was killed by police in Minneapolis. His death—at the time the latest in a string of high-profile deaths of men and women at the hands of police—galvanized a nation and a movement and caused many people to reconsider how they feel about policing and some police officers. It’s also been a little more than a year since “Bosch,” an outstanding police series streaming on Amazon Prime Video, aired its most recent episode, the sixth season finale. When the seventh and final season of “Bosch”—based on the popular and long-running series of crime novels by Michael Connelly—debuts on June 25, will the series reflect the …
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Linwood Barclay is the author of eighteen novels, and two thrillers for children. A New York Times bestselling author, his books have been translated into more than two dozen languages. His latest novel, Find You First, about the mysterious deaths of a tech millionaire’s would-be heirs, is now available. ___________________________________ Otto Penzler This is your twentieth adult novel. (With a pair of Young Adult ones to your credit, as well.) However, your first fiction—the four books featuring amateur sleuth Zack Walker, starting in 2004—were quickly overshadowed in 2007 by the immense success of the thriller No Time for Goodbye. It seems you haven’t looked back …
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The first time Stephen Mack Jones and I corresponded, it was because of the Newport and Gwent Literary Club, which describes itself as “probably the oldest literary club in Wales.” I’d seen Steve post something on Twitter about the N&GLC and reached out to him. True to form, Steve responded almost immediately, recalling how these “baronesses and knighted U.K. military” had welcomed him into their club soon after his debut novel was released. Looking back on that exchange, I guess I thought it was strange that this sexagenarian crime novelist from Detroit was somehow involved with a literary club across the pond. Now that I’ve had the chance to get to know Steve a li…
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I’m standing on a concrete slab in the middle of a deserted park. This is no ordinary slab, though. It’s about fifty feet long, twenty feet wide, and twenty feet high. It’s also covered in moss. Fifty years ago, dirt was piled around the whole thing to try and make it look like a hill, yet even now this mound sports only a few leafless trees despite the lush forest all around. There is a lone wooden picnic table in the exact center, black with mold. If I allow history—and a little imagination—to paint the rest of the picture, then it’s safe to assume that directly below my feet there used to be live missiles aimed at Russia. That’s right. A missile base once occupied t…
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Mongolia—six times the landmass of the UK, but with just over three million people. Sparsely populated and often with an unforgiving climate—blazing hot summers and severe winters, known as Zuds, that commonly kill livestock and ruin herder families. The country’s capital Ulan Baatar (UB) is home to 1.3 million Mongolians, almost half the entire national population. It’s a city that seen big changes since the country crash-dived into capitalism and democracy following the collapse of its sponsor state, the USSR. Now Mongolia, large in land but small in population, lies ‘between the bear and the dragon with the eagle overhead’—sandwiched between the competing attentions of…
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