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 a crowd at the bar when I get inside, but I hang back, alone, and watch. There’s a bucket swinging in my hand, rusted tin, filled with pinkish water, and my hands are dyed red. They match the walls of The Ruby, though it’s so packed tonight, you can barely see the diamond wallpaper through the crowd. A constant hum of people talking over each other fills the room, pierced by a loud laugh here and there, like the church organ shrieking over the choir. A few people stare at me – I don’t know if it’s the bucket or just knowing who I am, but they don’t say anything. They look away, quick, back at a friend, or the stage, where the band plays It’s No Sin, the female im…
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This year brings far too many good horror novels to list them all by name, but here are a few that I’m looking forward to, and that capture a wide variety of takes on the genre at a time when horror fiction is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance. Strongly represented in the following offerings are haunted buildings of various kinds, from houses to hotels to luxury apartment buildings, along with plenty of authors blending historical and horror. Other than that, it’s hard to spot trends, other than compelling narratives and innovative use of genre conventions. Enjoy! Juan Martinez, Extended Stay (University of Arizona Press, January 17) El Norte meets Barton Fink in …
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new releases in nonfiction crime. * Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham, The Riders Come Out At Night (Atria) In this searing history of police violence and civil rights activism in Oakland, two longtime investigative journalists unpack the circumstances that led to Oakland’s massive amount of police shootings and other officer misconduct over the past half century. The book also goes into the many half-hearted attempts to hold officers accountable and curb their violent behaviors. Monumental and not to be missed! –MO Jeff Guinn, Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage (Simon & Schuster) As…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards (Knopf) A genuine literary event … Others before Ellis have attempted to retool the serial narrative for the internet age. Nothing has felt quite as thrilling as Ellis’s year-long, hour-by-hour performance of The Shards … Any lingering uncertainty that its brilliance lay more in the recitation than the writing can be dispensed with. The Shards isn’t just Ellis’s strongest novel since the 90s, it’s a full-spectrum triumph, incorporating and subverting everything he’s done before and giving us, if we follow the book’s ingenious, gleefully self-aware conceit, not…
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Last year’s historical fiction was all about the 60s, baby, while this year’s features more from the 1950s, the long 19th century, and the 1970s. I have bad news for Gen-Xers and Xennials: the 1990s are now historical fiction, and there’s plenty coming out about the tail end of the 20th century and the havoc wrought there-in. As continues to be predictable during the pandemic, books set in the post-WWI era are proliferating. And historical fiction continues to meld the history of forgotten voices with highly entertaining storytelling to do the important work of educating us about the past without feeling like a textbook (I assume most of the following titles will not be w…
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Hello there. Perhaps you clicked on this link because you have heard people cite Shakespeare on the necessity of killing all the lawyers and wonder if it’s a myth. Or maybe you suspect it’s one of those misquoted aphorisms, the kind that gets written on a stand-up chalkboard outside a beer hall, like the oft-attributed-to-Ben-Franklin maxim, “beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Or maybe you’re here because you know a lawyer. Well, first of all, the quote is real! It goes, “The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It’s said by a character called Dick the Butcher in Act IV, Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, which was …
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I’ve gotten a spark for story ideas a lot of ways. When I was writing short stories for my MFA workshops, I used to get inspiration from song lyrics—so many songs are three-minute novellas of sorts, and I tried to take my own spin on what they could mean. (I remember I transformed Nada Surf’s Blizzard of 77 into a story about someone who’d lost a love one during the 9/11 attacks and was planning to run the Greenland marathon, which I’m almost positive wasn’t what the band was going for.) For Pretty Little Liars, I took inspiration from some of my favorite books—The Secret History, I Know What You Did Last Summer—as well as the show Twin Peaks and old Hitchcock movies. For…
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I steal. My fingers sticky, my pockets large, my wit quick, I take what I do not own. If it’s not locked up, bolted down, hidden, it’s mine. But at least I have some standards: as any professional thief will boast, only the best will do, thank you very much. Of course I speak not of stuff, of loot, of swag. That would be vulgar. Plus it would require boldness, which I lack. I steal words, conceits, images, metaphors, structures, milieus, even whole plots. A perfect example. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley returns to 9 Bywater and discovers by virtue of a chip he’d lodged atop his front door—elementary tradecraft, it now lies on the floor—signaling that someone h…
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When teen queen Alice Ogilvie, one of the main characters of The Agathas, is dumped by her basketball star boyfriend, she does what any Agatha Christie superfan would do: disappears for five days. “The thing you can do to take the knife deeper to the person who betrayed you is to make them see how much everybody else wants you. Everyone was looking for her. What teenage girl or adult person would not hear that story and think, ‘you go girl,’” Kathleen Glasgow, co-author of The Agathas, a 2021 YA mystery, with Liz Lawson, told me. As an adult reader of the book, who shares Alice’s obsession with Christie’s 1926 disappearance (Arthur Conan Doyle consulted a psychic to tr…
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When I taught courses in philosophy and literature, I included both stories written by formal philosophers (that is, those who had earned relevant degrees and whose theoretical works were also taught in the discipline) and novelists whose plots and characters are so suggestive of familiar philosophical issues that one could easily tease the theory out of them. There are more of the latter than the former, but there are two advantages to considering the philosopher-novelist. When a story contains ambiguities and permits alternate interpretations, you might consult the straightforward philosophical writings to decide which understanding of the story is well-founded. Secondl…
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“These days I look like what I am. A graying, aging jock with bum knees and a busted nose that never properly healed. Flaming migraines that singe my skull and a heart that hippity-hops out of tune. And yet, here I am, along with the wondrous Melissa, bit players in the great cosmic mystery of love.” – Jake Lassiter in Early Grave No one is immune to the ravages of time…except for protagonists in crime fiction, and even then, with a few keystrokes, the writer can age, retire, or even kill your long-time favorite character. Writers have several choices. Keep the hero the same age, no matter how long the duration of the series. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stayed 56 years old –…
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In my latest novel The Twyford Code, a former prisoner navigates life on the outside while revisiting a traumatic childhood event. Motivated by the need to understand what happened when his teacher disappeared on a school trip, Steve’s quest is complicated because he has only just learned to read and still can’t write. All we have to go on are transcriptions of the voice-recordings he has to make on an old iPhone to keep track of his investigation. Despite its unusual narrative format, The Twyford Code is not unusual in taking the experience of a prisoner or former prisoner as its narrative drive. In fact, while prison may be the end of the road for a murderer in the tra…
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After combing through advanced reading copies, publisher catalogues, lists upon lists, and publicity emails galore, I can confidently say that 2023 is going to be a great year for YA. So good, that you may curse us for adding so many damn books to your TBR list. There’s quite the variety in the list below, including hard-hitting social thrillers, high-concept heists, intriguing use of multiple narration à la Rashoman, queer apocalypse thrillers/romances, and some highly symbolic haunted houses. There are also two different thrillers featuring sea-mesters at sea (get it?). This is not an error. There really are two books out this year featuring murder during study-at-sea p…
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Secrets long buried, old flames rekindled, grudges resurfacing—there’s endless dramatic potential in a homecoming. Especially when murder is involved. There’s something elemental in the way that place and memory become intertwined. Anyone who has returned to their family home and discovered themselves reverting to old habits and falling into old arguments can attest to the power our physical context has to shape our behavior. Returning to the coffee shop around the corner of your old apartment brings back the memory of old friendships, break-ups, the ache in your feet of a long shift at a terrible job. The ghosts of sensation and emotion stir—there’s a reason we call our…
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In a sense, every detective novel is about the inside of someone’s head. What immediately captures the reader at the beginning of a Sherlock Holmes story is the tick-tock of Holmes mind: what brilliance will he conjure next, what detail will he pull out of an ordinary scene, who is this guy? But we’ll come back to Holmes later, because the character of Tom Mondrian in Watch Me Disappear began to take shape alongside a more modern hero. I discovered one of my favourite series characters in a Majorcan villa when I picked a book off the shelf, curious to know why it was so dog-eared. What was it about this novel that meant it had been read so many times that many of its pag…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Janice Hallett, The Twyford Code (Atria) “[I]ngenious… Filled with numerous clues, acrostics, and red herrings, this thrilling scavenger hunt for the truth is delightfully deceptive and thoroughly immersive.” –Publishers Weekly Sterling Watson, Night Letter (Akashic) “Amid the classic noir elements, author Sterling Watson slow-rolls a moving reflection on the costs to the human heart of vast social and economic change.” –New York Magazine E. V. Adamson, Murder Grove (Scarlet) A claustrophobic, breathlessly effective tale that seems to pave the way for a choose-your-own…
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“The Passenger,” Cormac McCarthy’s first novel in 16 years, begins with a scene familiar to anyone who regularly reads thrillers. A small passenger plane has crashed in the Gulf of Mexico; Bobby Western, a racecar driver turned salvage diver, is tasked with examining the wreck. But when he dives, he finds an odd scene: the plane is miraculously intact. One of the dead passengers is missing, along with the pilot’s flight-bag and an instrument panel from the cockpit. Once Bobby returns to shore, the mystery only deepens—and so does the threat. Government men lurk around his New Orleans apartment, asking scary questions about the wreck. He explores the coastline near the di…
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“We are the adequate, forgettable Occasionally regrettable Caretaker presidents of the USA.” -The Simpsons, “I Love Lisa” The dawn of the 1920s looks surprisingly familiar a century hence: America contemplated the path forward from a devastating pandemic, revolutionary forces clashed in the streets with counterrevolutionaries both representing the state and sanctioned by it, and demagogues sought to blame immigrants and anarchists for it all. The man elected president on a promise of ending all this, however, is largely a footnote in history. This is unusual; a president elected on a platform of turning back an era’s anxieties typically comes to be identified with t…
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Bleak, bone-chilling settings. Dark days and darker nights. A cheerless snow globe filled with tormented characters doomed to collide. Where brutality rings as true for the elements as it does the violence these characters do unto one another. These are the components of Nordic Noir, a subset of crime fiction that often takes place in Scandinavian countries such as Norway, Denmark, and Sweden—to name a few. But what about the Midwest? Come along with me, and we’ll explore my world of Black Harbor, writing as a social experiment, and the Midwest’s endless potential as a setting for crime fiction. Midwestern Noir: It’s a thing Quite simply, Midwestern Noir is what hap…
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Deciding that you want to rob a bank is the easy part. We’ve all thought about it—how wonderful it would feel, shouting those first, forceful words, “this is a stick-up”—but an idle reverie amounts to very little, and pretty soon we all bump up against the inevitable: this isn’t something one person can do alone. No, you’re going to need a team of operators filling discrete and sometimes ridiculously convoluted roles, and even then, without the proper leadership and a shared vision, you still might not pull this thing off, or if you do, you might not make a proper getaway or get the right kind of identity-altering plastic surgery later. Choosing the right team—one that …
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new international crime fiction. * Michael Bennett, Better the Blood (Atlantic Monthly Press) Michael Bennett is a much-lauded Maori screenwriter and director, and this, his debut, brings his skills of storytelling to a new medium and introduces a compelling new heroine. Hana Westerman is a Maori CID detective with a rebellious teenage daughter, uncooperative colleagues, and now a truly puzzling case—someone’s been killing the descendants of a group of men responsible for an early 19th-century lynching, and it’s up to Hana to track them down while proving herself once again to her department. –MO Christoffer Carlsson…
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Literature is so full of evil dolls and puppets that it’s probably best to assume that any doll or puppet you encounter in a book is up to no good. Maybe they’re having sex with your girlfriend, maybe they’re trying to drive you insane, whatever their method, remember that we are not the same species and your first response should always be to throw it in the fire. Read these books at your own peril (not recommended) but if you want to avoid the trauma, I’ve done you the favor of reading them myself and compiling a list of the dolls and puppets you should go out of your way to avoid. Fats (Magic, William Goldman) Every time a killer puppet listicle pops up, William Go…
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The Mystery Writers of America has announced the nominees for the 2023 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2022. The 77th Annual Edgar® Awards, which also celebrates the 214th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, will be celebrated on April 27, 2023. ___________________________________ BEST NOVEL ___________________________________ Devil House by John Darnielle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux – MCD) Like a Sister by Kellye Garrett (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown & Co./Mulholland Books) Gangland by Chuck Hogan (Hachette Book Group – Grand Central Publishing) The Devil Takes Y…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Michael Bennett, Better the Blood (Atlantic Monthly Press) Michael Bennett is a much-lauded Maori screenwriter and director, and this, his debut, brings his skills of storytelling to a new medium and introduces a compelling new heroine. Hana Westerman is a Maori CID detective with a rebellious teenage daughter, uncooperative colleagues, and now a truly puzzling case—someone’s been killing the descendants of a group of men responsible for an early 19th-century lynching, and it’s up to Hana to track them down while proving herself once again to her department. –Moll…
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The most important thing about the mystery at the heart of (what is hopefully just) the first season of BritBox’s Karen Pirie—the midnight stabbing of twentysomething barmaid Rosie Duff in the middle of the St. Andrews Cathedral graveyard—is that it hinges on the yawning 25-year gap between the night the original murder takes place and the cold case investigation that will ultimately put Rosie’s ghost to rest. In the 2003 Val McDermid novel the BritBox series draws its inspiration from, The Distant Echo, this means Rosie’s life and tragic death is fixed firmly in 1978. In the 2021-set streaming adaptation, though, the unrelenting force of math moves Rosie’s half of the t…
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