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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Humans have been using dogs for hunting, protection, and herding for at least 14,000 years. Dogs were domesticated in China by 12,000 BCE for hunting, companionship, and occasionally as a food source. Analysis of canine DNA suggests that humans began domesticating dogs nearly 20,000 years ago. Earlier still, dogs may have begun domesticating themselves by scavenging garbage and alerting humans to potential intruders. Currently, canine service dogs are widely used by national, state, and local governments for community policing, guarding infrastructure (ex. airports, prisons and jails, power plants and nuclear facilities), and providing security at public venues like scho…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Hannah Morrissey, Hello, Transcriber (Minotaur) “Former police transcriber Morrissey brings her expertise to this suspenseful debut. The story of an introverted, troubled woman, isolated in a bleak small town, will appeal to fans of Jess Lourey’s atmospheric books.” Library Journal, starred review Flora Collins, Nanny Dearest (MIRA) “Nanny Dearest is not just an entertaining suspense novel but a therapeutic one for any adult who has faced disturbing holes in the family tree. Unsettling, compelling, elegantly paced—Flora Collins’ debut is a slick, contemporary novel that explores …
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Tasmania – 150 miles off the southern coast of Australia, directly across the Tasman Sea from Melbourne. It’s the country’s least populated state with approximately half a million people. But it does have a bit of a reputation – the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, mass slaughter of the island’s Aboriginal peoples by colonialists and, of course, the legendary Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) marsupial. And some great writing too… I’m going to start with a personal favourite, The Potato Factory (1995) by Bryce Courtney. It’s a big novel that starts in the slums of East London in the nineteenth century and follows the criminal career of Ikey Solomon, the so-called …
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Alison Gaylin, The Collective (William Morrow) “Gaylin’s prose, so achingly pure yet electric in its gathering rage, pulls readers so far into the abyss in which these women live that it feels entirely plausible … readers may be prompted to ask: Are evil acts always reflective of evil hearts, their perpetrators forever beyond redemption? Is there any way to atone for one’s mistakes, no matter how grave? Full of twists, The Collective also raises fascinating questions about the echo chamber of social media and the righteousness of rage—maternal or otherwise. Even after reading its shatterin…
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In the summer of 2015 a rough beast slouched out of the shadows and into the waking nightmares of an unsuspecting world. His name was Dark Mill South, but that wasn’t the only name he went by. Cowpoking through Wyoming, working the feedline, as they used to call it, he’d been the Eastfork Strangler. Not because he ever hung his hat in the Eastfork bunkhouse or rode their fences, but because he’d somehow come into possession of one of their 246 branding irons, and had taken the time with each victim to get that brand glowing red, to leave his mark. For that season he’d been propping his dead up behind snow fences, always facing north. It wasn’t a Native American thing—Da…
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When I couldn’t see my youngest for two years because we were in a global pandemic and she lived on the other side of the world, I had to find a way to endure it. What other choice did I have? My partner Karyn and I live in Santa Cruz, California. Our daughter, Eliza, lover of languages and travel, resides in Amman, Jordan, 7500 miles away. When your child lives ten time zones away, you get a crash course in separation. I learned to shelter my emotions and look on the bright side: our daughter was living her dream. She was 24 years old. Independent. Doing what she loved: living in another country, speaking fluent Arabic, working with refugees. She’d met a Jordanian man …
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Many who read this will have read Nightmare Alley. But it is to be hoped that others will be drawn to read this singular work for the first time. I envy the latter, and I don’t want to interfere with the experience that awaits them by delving into matters that would reveal its plot, which grows increasingly more powerful and bizarre from beginning to end. But, to paraphrase Ezra Pound, a little knowledge can do us no harm. This book, first published in 1946, was born in the winter of late 1938 and early 1939, in a village near Valencia, where William Lindsay Gresham, one of the international volunteers who had come to defend the Republic in the lost cause of the Spanis…
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Cozy mysteries often feature small towns because they’re, well, so cozy. An intimate setting offers something comforting with its predetermined town layout and its recurring cast of characters. It’s like visiting a safe, known community every time you flip through the pages of a cozy mystery. Even in a series like my own Sassy Cat Mysteries, which is set in urban Los Angeles, there is a sense of community. I achieve this in my books by highlighting fun neighborhood enclaves and featuring quirky but loveable side characters. Also, I try to keep the suspects list narrow, so that the mystery can be feasibly solved by the star sleuth. With a small cozy setting in a mystery,…
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I love a good psychological thriller. Something engaging to play on my psyche and keep me on the edge of my seat. Throw in a little sex and you’ve got a recipe for one salacious read! Being able to balance equal parts thrill and romance is a fine line. The genre is fairly niche, and authors have to perfect that delicacy of equal parts thrill and equal parts romance. But it’s these types of books that, I feel, make for a more immersive narrative because the story is able to play on a wide range of emotions. One minute, I’m haunted by the mind games of a psychopath. The next minute, I’m soothed by the intimacy with his first kiss. The best of both worlds. If you’re in the m…
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The FBI, as America’s top law-enforcement agency, has always depended heavily on informants to bring to justice all manner of criminal organizations—be they the Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia, or an international drug cartel. But along the way the efforts had sometimes gone appallingly awry, with agents undertaking illegal bugging operations or committing rampant civil rights violations—Martin Luther King Jr. had been one well-known target of gross FBI malpractice during the civil rights era. In another, the worst known informant scandal in FBI history, the legendary Boston crime boss James J. “Whitey” Bulger was protected by a band of corrupt agents in the FBI’s Organized Crime…
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Last year, I watched Die Hard for the first time. I hadn’t resisted until then, I just never got around to it. I had never been enticed by the ubiquitous “is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” debate (which, btw, Bruce Willis says it’s not), but I wasn’t put off by it, either. I had encountered its many endorsements and tributes—from the constant allusions to it in the show Brooklyn 99 I watched as an adult or the Princess Diaries books I read as a preteen. It seemed like a fine movie. It wasn’t personal. Just as John McClane had never happened to visit the city of Los Angeles until Christmas Eve, 1988, I never happened to put it on until December 4th, 2020. So it goes. But I t…
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One day in the summer of my sixteenth year I was riding around my hometown in my best friend’s car. It was a jet-black sports car with flashy rims and a spoiler wide enough to be an airplane wing. We were listening to music, talking about the girls we liked and the dreams we had as young black boys who were trying to learn the ways of men. I was the one who first noticed the blue lights. My friend didn’t panic. We both knew he wasn’t speeding. We weren’t drinking and neither one of us smoked weed. He pulled over and lowered the window then put both his hands on the steering wheel. I put both of mine on the dashboard. This was the way our parents had told both of us t…
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By day, Alex Segura is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Oni Press, with previous stints at Archie Comics and DC Comics. By night, he’s the acclaimed author of award-winning novels, comic books, short stories, and podcasts. Somewhere in the midst of such a heavy workload, Alex is also a husband and a father. If that sounds like a lot, then you don’t know Alex Segura. You don’t know his secret… Alex Segura is a superhero! Shhh. Don’t tell anybody, but I’m serious. This guy is magic, especially when it comes to other authors and their work. It’s fitting, then, that Alex’s next book, Secret Identity (Flatiron Books, March 2022), features “The Lethal Lynx…
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I’ve always loved superficial fear, the tickle of anticipation or drop of my stomach before a book’s plot twist, a jump scare in a slasher movie. I was watching Stephen King adaptations at age nine, inhaling R.L. Stine before I finished second grade. Maybe it’s schadenfreude for those poor characters who are on the verge of decapitation or about to receive a letter blackmailing them into doing unspeakable deeds. Perhaps it’s a way for me to convert my generalized anxiety into something ephemeral that I know will dissipate when I close a book or watch the credits roll. But pathologizing aside, I have always loved edge-of-your-seat suspense, immersing myself in the unknown …
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If setting is a character, there is none more mysterious—and duplicitous—than an ocean beach, especially at night. The fearsome roaring of the waves, the pounding crash of breakers and the dreadful sucking sound of the undertow provide haunting backdrops to sinister intents. They remind the reader that much like those we love and assume love us in return, the ocean is never to be trusted. It can be serene one moment and violent the next. In so many excellent novels of suspense, the ocean is a cold killer that lures its victims to murky depths, disposing of their remains quickly and permanently. It randomly crashes boats against cliffs, pulverizing passengers on a whim. I…
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When he tracked her down in the winter of 1931, the trappings of her once-vast wealth—seaside villas, jewels, a fleet of fast cars—were gone. Roger Normand, billed as “an eminent French authority on law and finance,” found Marthe Hanau in a spartan apartment on the fifth floor of a run-down building in Montmartre that, he was dismayed to discover, had no elevator. The interview was conducted in a room that served as her office, furnished only with a writing desk, typewriter, and a leather chair that, like its owner, had seen better days. Her defiance and sangfroid—the traits that catapulted her into the financial stratosphere before reality and allegations of orchestrati…
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Just before the first lockdown, I went to see a performance of Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House in London. I was halfway through writing Watch Her Fall, a thriller about two rival ballerinas and settled into the red velvet chairs under crystal chandeliers, grateful that I got to call this ‘work’. For the most part, I had the same response to the Swan Lake as the rest of the audience: awe at the dancers’ beauty and gravity-defying leaps; immersion in the dark fairy tale and the twisted love story; and of course, Tchaikovsky’s score tugged my tears from their hiding places. But I’m willing to bet my next book deal that I was the only one thinking about the logistics of c…
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Is spooky season over already? No sooner had I un-donned my Elizabeth-Holmes-at-Burning-Man costume than it was time to crank up those holiday tunes, cue up the Hallmark holiday movies (30 all-new flicks to check off your list this year!), and trade in my PSL for a peppermint mocha. (Just kidding: I’m an iced-coffee-all-year-round kind of gal.) No matter the season, I’m always down for a bursting cornucopia of brand-spanking-new (and returning) pods. Get ready to drown out “Jingle Bells” and “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (sorry, Mariah) with these eight spine-chilling shows. An Absurd Result (Mopac Audio) – Premiered October 27 I will listen to (read: devour) ab…
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There’s nothing quite like a murder mystery. Learning all the juicy secrets behind the suspects, flipping the page and revealing a plot twist, coming up with theories as you read, staying up way too late to find out if you’re right…I love it all. When I set out to write Killer Content—my third novel but my first murder mystery or thriller—one of my main goals was to create this sort of experience for my future readers. Killer Content is a murder mystery set in a house of famous teenage TikTokers. The six members of the house seem to have it all—millions of followers, lucrative content deals, striking good looks. But behind their perfected social media image, there are hi…
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My first thought was, well dang! That’s a HUGE compliment. My second, well dang. What a lot to live up to. Because if I think about my character Nena Knight. I don’t know if she’s better than Bond or any other guys in the club. What I know is she’s a woman. And she’s Black. And she’s an immigrant from a country no one would ever consider in a Bond-esque role. And yeah, that’s really badass. Isn’t it? But why is that badass? Is Nena Knight different than every action hero of spy, espionage, and action you see and read? She’s not different than them. She’s their every match…and then some. Nena Knight is an “and then some.” Hopefully, that makes sense. I have always been a…
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‘There’s no market for it over here,’ said my New York agent. ‘I thought you were delivering a thriller but what I got was a very English black comedy.’ He was turning down ‘Hot Water’, my latest crime novel. My agent is a piece of work; ruthlessly honest, charismatic and usually right. ‘I got halfway through and stopped reading.’ This time he was talking about ‘The Foot on the Crown’, the epic that has taken me ten years to write. ‘It’s too earthy, too eeeuw for delicate US editors.’ ‘Things must be pretty bad when your own agent fires you,’ my friend Deborah said. ‘Why don’t you write to their market?’ I considered the idea. ‘I’m not sure I know what their market is…
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Joanne Hichens: Welcome to the 2021 CrimeReads African Crime Fiction Round Table! We have a wonderful selection of African crime writers who’ll be chatting about their books, what it means to be an ‘African’ crime writer, and indeed whether such a thing should bear a label. We’ll talk of cultural influences and who we write for and finally offer some reading recommendations. First of all, please start off by talking briefly about yourself and your writing. Basically, who are you? Michael Stanley: We’re a writing duo—Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. Friends for many years, our love of Botswana and our experiences in the African bush motivated us to write a detective …
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True Crime is a genre that has priors—a rap sheet a mile long—and dark secrets dating all the way bac to its very first hit, Truman Capote’s seminal 1966 smash, In Cold Blood. A master stylist’s attempt to write the world’s first non-fiction novel, it’s a heart-stirring read, telling the tragic story of a family slaying in small town Kansas. Indeed, the story is so assured and deeply-felt that at times it seems almost too perfect, too good to be true, and many of those interviewed by Capote as part of the project later questioned the veracity of his narrative, claiming that he had misquoted some, misrepresented others, and in several cases, conjured whole scenes out of t…
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I had just wrapped up my first Harith Athreya mystery (A Will to Kill) and despatched the manuscript, when I set off for the Bundelkhand hinterland in Central India. My nephew was getting married at a charming resort there, tucked away on a riverbank near the erstwhile kingdom of Orchha. November was the perfect time for visiting – the heat of summer was behind us, and the bite of winter hadn’t yet arrived. Off we went, my wife and I, on a much-anticipated jaunt, kicking it off with a 24-hour train ride from Chennai to Jhansi. That was a mini-event in itself for it had been many years since we had taken a long train journey. After a leisurely day and a comfortable night,…
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For me, every good book begins with its characters. Even with crime fiction, where a gripping and twist-filled plot is essential. And even with Cozy Crime, where the bucolic settings and rootedness in place add so much to the genre. When I reflect on the books I have loved or that have changed me as a writer, years after I read them, it’s always the characters I remember most vividly. It’s the characters who drew me in to those thrilling plots, and intricately conceived worlds, and made me care about them. My own new cozy crime book, Murder at the Castle, is the second in my series of Iris Grey mysteries. And although Scotland (and Italy) both play a significant part in …
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