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 riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife. And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain.” Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground I was reminded of Sean Duffy’s poetic take on the beauty of a Belfast riot recently while the rubble of the previous night’s endeavors smoldered on the stree…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Russ Thomas, Nighthawking (Putnam) “Outstanding. . . Thomas adeptly develops his diverse cast, but the novel’s real power lies in its intricate structure—the mystery surrounding the body is impressively deep, the various levels of tension are relentless, and every chapter ends with a narrative punch to the face. This police procedural is virtually unputdownable.” –Publishers Weekly Steve Berry, The Kaiser’s Web (Minotaur) “Berry keeps finding enticing alternate-history mysteries for Malone to solve . . . Keep ‘em coming.” –Booklist Joe Ide, Smoke (Little Brown) “Ide has dis…
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I’ve always been impressed with the level to which authors, readers, and editors support each other in the crime fiction community, but the folks at #pitchwars go above and beyond. I interviewed some of the wonderful mentors and mentees of Pitch Wars to find out how their community works to help new authors break into the industry. We talked about gatekeeping, getting started, and how to gracefully take an edit, among other things. Thanks to Kellye Garrett (Hollywood Ending), Layne Fargo (They Never Learn), Mia P. Manansala (Arsenic and Adobo), Mary Keliikoa (Denied), and Dianne Freeman (A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Murder) for answering all my questions about this fant…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Abigail Dean, Girl A (Viking) I know it’s only February, but Girl A already looks to be one of biggest books of the year. In this powerful story of trauma, abuse, and long-delayed reckonings, the survivors of horrific family abuse must reconnect after the death of their mother. The siblings are still fractured by the alliances and betrayals of their childhood, and each is damaged—and attempting to heal—in their own way. A bleak and powerful tour-de-force that raises complex questions of responsibility and truth, Girl A is not to be missed. –…
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I escaped Romania in the middle of the night, by bike, on February 2, 1965. It was the moment when the country was locked in a communist prison. I was seventeen years old then. Now, twenty- four years later, in the diplomatic and political frost of 1989, with the beginning of freedom, I’m returning. As I walk through customs at Bucharest’s Otopeni airport with my American pass‐ port held tightly in my hand, I feel a strange sensation: memory is pulling me back to a lost time. I see my seventeen-year-old self in front of me, leading me into the labyrinth of youth. She takes my hand and warns me of pitfalls while I enter a world I may have forgotten. She’s cute, smiling, s…
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I started working at my local library two years ago. After a decade spent in the city, I knew I wasn’t happy and so left the world of finance behind in order to concentrate on writing. It wasn’t planned. I was called into my boss’s office and offered a promotion, and right there and then decided to quit. I’d recently read a book by the author John Hart, and subsequently an interview in which he talked about turning his back on a successful law career in order to spend more time writing. It was hugely inspiring. My wife was a student at the time, and pregnant, and had no idea I wanted to write a book. She was very supportive (and is slowly learning to love me again). I…
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There’s nothing more delicious than a good scandal, and the best scandals are practically a cottage industry, spawning books, movies, even the odd opera or two. Here are six of my favorite scandals and the novels that bring them to life. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes Oh, how they must have gossiped when the original Real Housewife of Sparta ran off with a younger man! I’m talking, of course, about one of the most legendary scandals in history—Helen and Paris. It’s often referred to as an abduction, but most versions show Helen an active participant, throwing off her arranged marriage for an elopement with a sexy Trojan prince. We don’t know if it was historical o…
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My brother, an avid backpacker, carries a satellite phone with him in the backcountry. I suppose it is meant for emergencies, although I’m not sure he’s ever used it for that purpose. The most recent message our siblings text thread received from that phone was a joke about how long he would wait in line for an In-N-Out double-double. I thought about this as I read Zoje Stage’s essay “How Do You Write an Isolation Thriller When Everybody Is Connected All The Time?” It is a very good question, one I have been turning over in my head since I read that piece a few weeks ago. My first, and most flippant, reaction was to think, “You set it in space”—which is admittedly a rath…
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The rule of thumb in book publishing is simple: Unless your name is Harper Lee, your first novel will not be your best and most likely won’t be a bestseller either. All other mere mortals in the world must rely on a well-measured publishing axiom known as the learning curve. Tom Straw is no exception to the rule for first-time authors, but the rest of his publishing career broke every rule in the book. The first rule he broke was his identity. It was a closely held secret for seven years. This seven-time New York Times bestselling author (yes, he hit number one), was only outed in recent years and has earned the moniker as the best unknown author on the New York Times li…
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Two officers landed on my twin brother, cuffed him, and strong-armed him down the hallway during a Christmas visit at our mother’s condominium in Willmar, Minnesota. It took six attendants in the emergency room to wrestle him onto a gurney. It’s still hard for me to believe we hadn’t acknowledged the signs before—his frantic juggling of a dozen plastic bags, stuffed with his clothing, while home on a military leave; his incoherent tirade at a friend who greeted him as they departed from a service in our church. But it was only then, in 1986, the year Marvin and I turned forty-five, that he was diagnosed as having severe bipolar disorder. While Marvin’s manic rage landed …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Christine Mangan, Palace of the Drowned (Ecco) “Voluptuously atmospheric and surefooted at every turn, Palace of the Drowned more than delivers on the promise of Mangan’s debut, and firmly establishes her as a writer of consequence.” – Paula McLain Dolores Hitchens, The Cat Saw Murder (American Mystery Classics) “Hitchens’s use of foreshadowing elevates this above similar whodunits. That the observant Rachel is an appealing Jessica Fletcher antecedent makes the prospect of her further exploits in the American Mystery Classics series welcome.” Publishers Weekly Sujata Ma…
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The scene had the air of a ritual murder. Her body was dressed in its best clothes, and paraded around for spectators to mock. He declared himself finished with her. He beheaded her in the garden, while the party watched. He broke a bottle of red wine, splashed it across her face. Then he stumbled, drunken, away, declaring later that he had no regrets. He had been “cured completely” of his “passion.” He spoke of his her as scornfully as he had once described her with tenderness and interest. That “she” was a life-size doll, and “he” a living man, and a well-known Expressionist artist, is only part of the strangeness of this Pygmalion story. * Alma Mahler in 1910. …
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An isolated chateau, a remote health spa, an off-grid hunting lodge or private island. In a destination thriller, no-one can hear you scream—except, of course, the others who happen to be trapped there too. It’s a classic crime format reworked for the age of air miles: the current vogue in fiction for far-flung “luxe-spense” turns the trip of a lifetime into a gilded locked room. Part-Christie, part Conde Nast Traveller and a firm favorite among readers even before the pandemic put a stop to our wanderlust, destination thrillers have offered plenty of much-needed escapism over the past year too. The best ones are perfectly pitched at the point where aspiration and Schad…
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Throughout most of our evolution, from when life began, death and the possibility of an afterlife weren’t conceptions on the table for contemplation. We simply didn’t have the capacity. Death was simply the end of one’s existence. Anthropological evidence indicates that humans began to have religious beliefs and to conceive of life and death relatively recently—between forty-five thousand and two hundred thousand years ago. These conceptualizations were essential to major shifts occurring in cognition and behavior that marked an era in human development known as the “great leap forward.” These shifts, rooted in the capability for complex, abstract thought and language, ha…
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“You’re crushing my balls!” Jared whispered hoarsely into my ear as he clung to my back, my right arm between his legs, my left hand gripping his right arm, his torso draped across my neck in the classic fireman’s carry. I sensed he was gritting his teeth while trying not to let anyone else overhear. Jared was a 200-pound Navy SEAL not wanting to advertise his discomfort at having his gonads flattened against the shoulder of a female, fifty pounds lighter, who was struggling to hang onto him. “Shut the fuck up! What do you think you’re doing to me?” I spat. I was hot, I was sweaty, and I wanted to get him off my back. But I was determined to make it down the field towa…
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What’s it like to see your debut novel, Suburban Dicks, come out the same year you turn sixty? Pretty cool. What’s it like to wonder why you waited thirty-five years to write it? Pretty vexing, I’ll admit. But the source of that vexation is complicated. I am a comic book writer. I have written lots of other things, but I am best-known (where I am known at all) and have had my greatest success on that platform. I made my bones in the late `80s through the mid-90s, during a time of tremendous quantitative success and questionable qualitative output. I was party to quite a bit of both of those categories. I came of age in an industry that had just begun to fight back again…
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In my last two posts in this series, I have joked that living in New York City during the summer makes me want to go somewhere else (take a road trip or go to the beach). But actually, no, living in New York City during the summer also just makes me want to stay here, because I love summer in New York City. I do. What’s not to love? I love almost getting hit by a barreling ice cream truck every time I cross the street. I love that I can’t take a stroll down to the river in the evenings without six old Italian men blowing cigar smoke in my face. I love wondering “leaf or cockroach?” every time I step on something crackly in the dark. You would love it all, too, if you, lik…
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“You mean you, the translator, don’t read the novel all the way to the end before you start translating?” My new friend, who’s a Swedish novelist, couldn’t hide his surprise as we sat chatting during our first encounter in Oslo, Norway. I’d just told him that I’d been astounded and thrilled by the plot turn as I put the last pages and paragraphs of his novel into English. You see, the excitement of an investigation, a chase, an unexpected development, or a revelation is even more intense when you’re embracing the foreign-language text line by line and seeking to render it precisely and vividly into your own native language. I’ve been a mystery and puzzle addict since m…
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Though the idea for my second novel came to me while I was earning my MFA in creative writing, it didn’t start in a writing workshop. At Washington University in St. Louis, we filled our schedules with the mandatory workshops, but had two other courses that were entirely our own. Some of my peers chose independent study or specialized workshops to incubate their baby novels; at the time, I had no novel, couldn’t imagine stringing together more than fifteen pages. An English major, I retreated into the familiarity of humanities courses with provocative names and required readings so dense that they brought me to weekend panic attacks. In my second year, a seminar called H…
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No one who goes on a wellness retreat thinks they are joining a cult, but they often share very similar traits. There can be a set routine involving early rising, meditation, exercise and enforced silence. The leader is often charismatic, passionate, opinionated and persuasive whilst the followers are fervent, desperate and vulnerable. They’re lured in with the promise of enlightenment, peace and healing; they buy into the jargon, the promises and the exoteric practices. There are many differences of course, including the fact that no one expects to die on a wellness retreat. But it has happened and, in a largely unregulated industry, it could well happen again. My backg…
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Today the Mystery Writers of America announced the nominations for the 2021 Edgar Awards, one of the mystery world’s premier honors. The winners will be announced on April 29, 2021. This year marks the 75th annual presentation of the awards. For more on the nominees and special award winners, check in with the Mystery Writers of America throughout the season. ___________________________________ BEST NOVEL ___________________________________ Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (Penguin Random House – Random House) Before She Was Helen by Caroline B. Cooney (Poisoned Pen Press) Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Penguin Random House – Pamela Dorman Bo…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Benjamin Wood, A Station on the Path to Something Better (Europa) Benjamin Wood’s emotional noir about a young boy taken on a desperate road trip by his estranged father is as beautifully written as its title is long. The father promises to take his son to the set of a popular TV series he claims to work on, but the journey turns into anything but, as the father’s untruths catch up with him and he resorts to violence to salvage his self-worth. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor Melissa Ginsburg, The House Uptown (Flatiron) In The Hous…
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Seasons greetings! It’s November, so we’re officially in the (new, extended) Holiday season that apparently begins right after Halloween (as opposed to after Thanksgiving). But that’s okay with me. The days are getting shorter, so perhaps some gift-giving-related-cheer will help light up the next few weeks until Official Holiday Time begins. I’ve been tasked with putting together this year’s CrimeReads Holiday Gift Guide, and I could not be more excited to do so. This gift guide is intended for literary and/or cinephilic persons (particularly, mystery and crime fans) and—here’s the big red bow on top—does not include books. Mostly. This list is for book-adjacent stuff (mo…
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This draft of “The Bloomingdale Story” was written by Patricia Highsmith in 1948. It would later be expanded and significantly reworked before being published as the novel The Price of Salt, later titled Carol. The draft is included in the newly released book, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941 – 1995, published by Liveright Publishing, which has made it available here. Notes presented in the right margin were made by Highsmith upon revisiting her notebooks at a later date, accompanied by explanatory notes from her longtime editor, Anna von Planta. ___________________________________ 12/9/48 I see her the same instant she sees me, and instantly, I lo…
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Dostoevsky was fascinated by the ways people found freedom in Siberia. He took a special interest in Grandpa, the old Raskolnik in his barracks, and listened. “At the end of the world the river of fire shall flow, to the doom of sinners, to the cleansing of saints. All cliffs and mountains shall become flat. For mountains are made by the demons.” Dostoevsky thought of Raskolniks as dogmatic, but he admired Grandpa’s honesty and fervor. Suffering is what kindled it, Dostoevsky realized. Suffering was a strength-giving virtue. A hard-labor prison was a blessing. Most prisoners pursued another kind of liberation. “Money is minted freedom,” Dostoevsky said of life in a Siber…
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