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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After I left university, I cashed in on my extended time as a student (four years as an undergrad, and three years to obtain a doctorate in theoretical physics) by joining an investment bank, where I worked for almost a decade. In the early years, toiling away as a lowly associate, I found the job involved exactly what you might imagine: high pressure and incredibly long hours in a male-dominated workplace with condescending bosses and viciously competitive peers, in return for a hefty salary and the promise of further riches if one could only stay the course and at least pretend to drink the Kool-Aid. (In the interest of a balanced account, I will say that my bosses beca…
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My heart fills with a sinking feeling, a weight I can’t shake. That’s the only way I can describe it to my husband, Ted. He’s driving and I’m trying to be calm. It’s not working. “I suppose that’s apropos of something, sweetie, given we’ll be boating this weekend.” Ted grins. In front of us, the light changes. He pounds the steering wheel in frustration. “Seriously? Another red light? We’re going to be late now, for sure.” Most of the reason for our tardiness lies with me. I hate leaving the kids. Even now. They’re teenage twins, just graduated high school, and they’re fine without me for one night, I know. It’s an irrational, deep-seated-control thing called motherhood…
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The great artist Charles Addams, whose masterful cartoons and illustrations bedeviled the pages of The New Yorker from 1932 to 1988, drew two movie title sequences in his lifetime. He, the creator of the characters known as “the Addams Family” and a known master of the lighthearted-macabre, was tapped to provide illustrations for the opening to the 1963 horror-comedy The Old Dark House (which was a remake of the 1932 James Whale film The Old Dark House). More than a decade later, in 1976, he was recruited to illustrate a title sequence for the film Murder by Death. This sequence was being designed by Wayne Fitzgerald, one of the twentieth-century’s greatest and most prol…
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Steven Powell’s just released book Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy is an ambitious biography of one of American crime fiction’s most influential and controversial figures. Powell, an Honorary Fellow in the English Department at the University of Liverpool, UK, wrote the book with Ellroy’s cooperation. It is a sustained piece of literary scholarship that combines an in-depth analysis of the author’s multifaceted career with deep insights into his personal history and life. AN: This is your fourth book on the writer James Ellroy. What is it about him as an author and literary figure that you find so interesting and worthy of a fully-fledged literary bio…
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Ah, February, when the Hallmark stores, train station florists, mass produced chocolate makers, and jewelers everywhere rake it in. But what about the books? They have V-Day well covered too. From mothers to daughters and sisters to disloyal friends and lousy house guests, there is a book here for you this month. Sophie Ward, The Schoolhouse (Vintage) The Schoolhouse was an experimental school in the 1970s. The children were given room to roam and indulge the worst of childhood’s impulses, especially as they turn on each other. Now a librarian with an austere and quiet life, Isobel is still in the grips of what happened in the Schoolhouse. When her childhood nightma…
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I didn’t know I was a mystery writer until my editor informed me. Finding out started me thinking about the nature of mystery generally and the mystery story in particular. In time I decided I was more interested in Mystery than in mystery and that the distinction is significant both for writers and for readers. Mystery is one of the largest categories of human experience. It is so because the human brain is so-constructed as to be obsessed with the not-yet-known. The brain always seeks to know “what comes next and what does it mean?” Meaning, in this sense, ranges from “Is there danger in that unexpected sound?” to “Is there something more to reality than what the sense…
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From MISTER MAMMOTH by Matt Kindt and Jean-Denis Pendanx, forthcoming in April. Copyright ©2023 by Matt Kindt and Jean-Denis Pendanx. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Dark Horse Books. All rights reserved. View the full article
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Tis the season… for winter movies! What is a winter movie? Well, first it must be said that a winter movie is not a Christmas movie. You might be familiar with our coverage, during the holiday season, of crime movies that surprisingly take place at Christmas, but this list is not like that. This list is about movies that take place in the winter, in the freezing cold, in the snowy wilderness or the icy ocean. There is no cheer, there isn’t really much hope. These movies should be watched in January/February/March, when the world is cold and bleak and the freezing wind pierces your skin like needles, slices through your whole body like blades. In “the Boxer,” Paul Simon s…
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“The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains…none were free.” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol Supernatural fiction and ghostlore isn’t exactly short on miserable and pitiable spirits. A few of the more famous examples include, La Llorona, the infanticidal “weeping woman” of Latin American legend, Jacob Marley, the sorrowful, chain-bound harbinger of A Christmas Carol, and the unfortunate, murdered mother-son tandem Kayako and Toshio from Ju-On: The Grudge. These and more are trapped in a hellish afterlife that is presumably endless. For Marley and La Llorona—in the traditi…
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The late 1980’s TV series, Moonlighting, starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis has become notorious for more than its detective duo’s crime solving. Viewers loved the witty banter and the romantic tension between former model Maddie Hayes and private detective David Addison, but once the couple finally consummated their relationship, they—and the series—lost their spark. Romance novels usually end with “happily ever after,” too. It’s assumed that readers only care about the courtship, and not about the challenges faced by a couple navigating commitment and/or marriage. But are crime novels subject to the same rules? Series novels give authors the perfect opportunity …
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Even as an “out” bisexual (truth: I had been once, but I wasn’t any longer), when I came up with the idea to write a novel about a bi, genderfluid bookbinder, I believed queer themes were off limits to me. I’d been married to a cisgender, heterosexual man for over a decade and had been presenting—to both the world and myself—as unmistakably female. I figured no one but a few good friends would even care to know my private feelings about who I was. But through writing my forthcoming debut novel, Endpapers, I came to understand that I wasn’t being private; I was ignoring a part of myself that couldn’t be turned off simply because I wished it could. And surprisingly, it als…
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There’s something about food and cozy mysteries that make them go together like apple pie and ice cream. Maybe it’s because cozy mysteries are like comfort food for the mind. They provide a safe escape from the stresses and tribulations of everyday life and allow readers to sink into a fictional world where the bad guys always get caught, the setting feels like home, and the regular characters are like old friends. Delicious food can soothe your soul after a long and difficult day, and cozy mysteries can do the same. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why culinary cozies seem to be such a hit with readers. Among all of the available culinary cozy mysteries, there are many…
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Prologue: Behind the Scarlet Door Johnny was twenty-two years old and only wanted to have sex. Other things, too, he was sure of that, but they receded so far into the background haze of his conscious state that they generally went unregistered. That’s what had driven him, post–high school, from Massachusetts to Manhattan, where he was ostensibly a stagehand but really just a dude hanging around the theater scene to meet beautiful, smart, talented women drawn to the promise of the Big Apple. He’d lucked into a square jaw, a decent fastball that gave him athlete cred, an ounce of acting ability from his mom, and if he worked out twenty minutes a day, he could keep a six-…
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Tim Reed sits in the driver’s seat of his ancient and rust-punched Datsun hatchback, balancing a screwdriver on the tip of his finger. Hutch and Tim are killing time, waiting for some poor guy to come home so they can terrify him and, if necessary, perform grievous harm to the fragile architecture of the man’s body. It’s the usual deal: reluctance to pay a debt owed. When this happens, when their boss encounters someone offering resistance, there are phone calls. Verbal requests. Polite reminders. A process old as time. And finally, after all that, Tim and Hutch come by. It’s just work. The screwdriver handle, pitted red plastic, wavers only slightly as they sit in the gl…
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After five years of procrastination, Ian Fleming sat down at the typewriter. He began to write not for the joy of creating, but as a way to avoid reality. He was forty-three years old and troubled by thoughts of the future. At the typewriter, he could escape reality and dream about the person he would rather be. On the surface, Fleming’s life looked idyllic. It was 1952, and he was wintering in Goldeneye, a simple one-storey house near Oracabessa on the north shore of Jamaica. He had had this house built after the end of the Second World War, with the intention of using it as a winter writing retreat. It was quite an ugly, sparse building, to the eyes of those used to…
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As the paperback editions of LIKE A SISTER and SECRET IDENTITY hit shelves, award-winning authors Kellye Garrett and Alex Segura take time to process the year that was – and look ahead to what’s in store for them and the industry at large. ALEX SEGURA: Hi Kellye! I’m so happy you agreed to do this. It felt too perfect to pass up, you know? Anyway, let’s cut to the chase – I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it’s been an amazing year for you and LIKE A SISTER. Award nominations (an Edgar and a Lefty…so far!), great reviews, Book of the Month, and lots of reader praise and attention. I have to ask – how did it all measure up to what you expected? Or hoped for? KELLY…
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I first arrived in the United States on February 7, 2001, exactly twenty-two years before the publication date of my immigration thriller Extreme Vetting. From my limited experience living in Romania when its borders were closed, and then when traveling abroad was too expensive, I imagined the Seattle metropolitan area as a different kind of Bucharest. A place where I could fit in. I’d make new friends and devote myself to my software development job, but now with the freedom to shape my own life. More than two decades later, I know how unrealistic that expectation was. Fitting in was never in the books for me, no matter how much I learned about my adoptive country and h…
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The culinary cozy genre is populated by wonderful authors who are inspired by a true love of cooking. Some of them focus on recipes that reflect their own dietary concerns. Libby Klein struggles with Hashimoto’s and celiac disease, so her Poppy McAllister Mysteries feature gluten-free recipes. Daryl Wood Gerber’s series, which include the Fairy Garden Mysteries, also feature gluten-free recipes because she’s a “true blue celiac.” Other culinary cozy authors like Mia Manansala (Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mysteries), Raquel V. Reyes (Caribbean Kitchen Mysteries), and Jennifer J. Chow (Night Market Mysteries) include recipes that are a tribute to the cultures their books celebrat…
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It may not be possible to definitively pinpoint when horror movies turned into racial minefields, but there’s little doubt that 1968 was a watershed year. That’s when two films that would help shape the genre through the turn of the century splayed high-profile Black deaths across the screen, ingraining these images on the minds of future generations of filmmakers and moviegoers. Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told and Night of the Living Dead were grimy little black-and-white indies whose provocative content—and eventual success—reflected the anti-establishment shift of the decade. It was an era of social and political upheaval that forced the nation to confront…
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Highway 75 cuts across southern Florida, through the Everglades, going from the beaches of Fort Lauderdale to the beaches of Naples. Highway 75 has another name. It’s called “Alligator Alley” for the obvious reason that the knobby-headed reptiles thrive in the swamp on both sides of the eighty-mile roadway. And traveling down this highway, as I have done, it’s not hard to imagine two killers on a dark night dragging a body into the swamp knowing the gators will dispose of the corpse—which is pretty much how my new Joe DeMarco thriller, Alligator Alley, begins. I set other parts of Alligator Alley in Key West and Naples and Miami, places we passed through as my wife and…
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John Humphrey Noyes, in his youth, was so painfully shy that he could barely endure the company of women. “I could face a battery of cannon with less trepidation,” he wrote in his diary, than “a room full of ladies with whom I was unacquainted.” Born in 1811 on the Vermont frontier, he was the fourth of nine children of John Noyes Sr., a former congressman, and flame-haired Polly Hayes, whose nephew—the feeble, emaciated Rutherford B. Hayes—would grow up to become the nation’s nineteenth president. John Humphrey was a precocious student, and he enrolled in Dartmouth College at fifteen. He went on to study law, but his shyness was so paralyzing that he stammered and stu…
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My husband and I fell in love with Kauai when we went there for our honeymoon. We’ve been back many times since, and during the pandemic, we decided to live there so I could research the book I was working on. It was supposed to be an upmarket novel like my first two books, but pandemic homeschooling coupled with the state of our world put me in a dark place. My solution: I started killing people in the book. There was an accidental death or two, an intentional murder, stalking, and a drowning. All of which I wrote while sipping Mai Tais at the beach under the sunny sky, sand between my toes. I didn’t know I’d accidentally written a thriller until I showed it to some wri…
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It was close to midnight in Manhattan and they were still waiting in the van. Ford, short and wiry, was behind the wheel, while Neuland—bulkier and a foot taller—slouched in his seat trying to keep his head from hitting the ceiling of the van. They were dressed all in black and had black balaclavas on their faces so that the only things visible were their eyes—and someone would have to look carefully to see them. They’d been parked at the edge of the alley since twilight and both men had long since grown bored. Still they waited, their rifles propped against their legs. Their employer—Mr. Garrick—hadn’t given them a description of their target, just the bare outline of w…
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In his introduction to the Black Lizard edition of Charles Willeford’s Miami Blues, Elmore Leonard writes that neither he or Willeford wanted to be stuck with the good guy’s point of view. “We both saw Harry Dean Stanton as our hero,” he said. When I lived in Los Angeles, I haunted the bar at Dan Tana’s because I heard Harry Dean Stanton haunted the bar at Dan Tana’s. I spent a couple foggy closing times in his company, drinking tequila, smoking American Spirits, and singing Irish songs. Later, when I started writing about the burned-out Van Nuys bail bondsman who became the hero of my first novel Zig Zag, I always pictured Harry Dean. Across a hundred or so movies, Har…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jonathan Kellerman, Unnatural History (Ballantine) “This is Kellerman at his very best. Just the dialogue between Sturgis and Delaware is worth it. But also, the depiction of Los Angeles is always the star.” –Mystery & Suspense magazine Kwei Quartey, Last Seen in Lapaz (Soho) “Quartey once again finds piercing social pain beneath what looks like a routine case.” –Kirkus Reviews Deborah Crombie, A Killing of Innocents (William Morrow) “Crombie is as skilled as Louise Penny or J.D. Robb in developing characters while entwining personal lives with riveting police investig…
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