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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Once I got over the excitement of being asked to write an essay for CrimeReads, I settled into several days of racking my brain over exactly what to write. Essays and articles, for me, are more difficult than writing a full novel. My 7th novel, and newest release, is called The Nightmare Man, a story where nightmares come to life, so I initially migrated toward writing something about dreams and nightmares and folklore and legends, which all cover many of the book’s main themes, but I kept coming back to this being my first horror/crime novel, the first under my pen name, and I got to thinking: I’ve had one interesting road getting to this point in my career, and I think …
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The humid air pulsed with music from a thousand open windows, the live bands in every bar fighting a sonic Ragnarök with the tunes blasting from the cars crawling the 18th Street drag, all of it smashing into a thunderhead of drums and bass you could hear from a half-mile away, beckoning the city’s drunks and partiers: head to Adams Morgan, where all your needs can be satisfied, and all your bad decisions will be washed away tomorrow morning along with the crushed beer cans and half-eaten jumbo slices. Adams Morgan, the loudest and drunkest neighborhood in Washington, D.C. A place you could still find a cheap drink and trouble. Inside the Brass Nut, one of the sketchiest…
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My introduction to the criminalization of fine art happened on a personal level. And by “criminal” I mean the use of fine art to commit tax evasion. Later, I would discover fine art could serve as an efficient vehicle for other crimes ranging from fraud and money laundering to theft. It was the eighties and I was an art critic for a national magazine and a major American newspaper. In my private life, I was also the member of a socially prominent museum support group thanks to my marriage, at the time, to a wealthy businessman. It was during my museum activities that I became aware of two people whom I knew socially who were donating paintings and drawings to the mus…
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I write a historical fiction series set in World War Two London. My protagonist is a Scotland Yard detective called Frank Merlin. I place great importance on being historically accurate in my books. I take the view that as I am attempting to transport my readers to a very different time and place, accuracy is a key element to doing that successfully. I am very aware that words like ‘atmospheric’ and ‘authentic’ are among the most commonly used in positive reviews of historical fiction. However, it cannot be denied that there are many books, films and plays that are historically inaccurate but still regarded as successful. Why? And does it really matter? In this internet …
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Seaside villages are beautiful, but they also hold secrets. Sometimes dark, nefarious ones. Like the fact that the picturesque French islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, south of Newfoundland, were in the 1930s a major offshore smuggling hub for American gangster Al Capone. Of course, you’ll find similarly outlandish stories on both sides of the North Atlantic. The UK series Broadchurch, for instance, shows us what the men of a quaint Dorset port town are capable of hiding. While on the other side of the water, the murderous black comedy Blow the Man Down tells of a fishing village in northern Maine where it is the women who keep the secrets. Both of these are dark, bl…
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I’ve never been much of a reader. As a published writer I suppose I should be embarrassed to confess such a thing. But it’s true. As a lad I was too impatient to nuzzle down with a good book. There were too many distractions; girls to chase, balls to kick, cigarettes to choke on. I relied on television and cinema to stoke my cultural development. Those were the days when the TV had to warm up before you got a picture. There were only two channels. For the modest cost of a television license, you could enjoy the dramatic marvels of the BBC and watch hours of sport. Then there were the affordable Saturday morning picture shows. I was a proud minor of the ABC cinema on Wimbl…
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Fiction is freedom in ink. There’s nothing as freeing as pulling up to a blank page, where the only limitation to worlds, plot and character is our imagination. A blank page is a lot of things – expectation, potential, fear – but it is never one thing: restrictive. So it’s not surprising that some authors aren’t a fan of rules, and view them as creativity-crushing restrictions that better belong guiding a group (a classroom, a football team) in an activity than on our pages. I used to think like that too. But here’s the thing: I write mystery novels. And writing mysteries is a team sport. I’m not talking Holmes and Watson buddying up. It’s much more important than that…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Kate Alice Marshall, What Lies in the Woods (Flatiron) “Marshall explores the complicated dynamics of childhood friendships and the powerful effect that memory has in shaping narratives…In a novel filled with emotional depth and convincing red herrings, Marshall delivers a propulsive mystery about trust, secrets, and friendships.” –Booklist Grady Hendrix, How to Sell a Haunted House (Berkley) “A delight…Hendrix, with relentless efficiency—and a bit of humor—forces us to confront our fears.” –The Washington Post Stephen Amidon, Locust Lane (Celadon) “Amidon’s compulsively r…
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I will read any book or poem, watch any movie or show, if within its story there is another story. Like most tastes, this one is hard to explain, but part of it is that the Russian nesting doll structure appeals to my sense of mystery. I read quite a few YA books incorporating this technique at a young age, so its rules feel familiar, and one is that, within a nested structure, the inner story holds a key (or keys) to the outer. Whether it be a clue, a metaphor highlighting theme or vital foreshadowing, the inner story becomes a text to scour for clues. It becomes a mystery box, and as a curious reader, I simply must know what’s inside. The reason I read so many embedde…
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The suburbs are safe. They’re clean and orderly and civil. At least, that’s what my parents used to tell me whenever I asked why we lived there, instead of somewhere exotic and exciting, like Greenwich Village or the Left Bank. Long maligned for their boredom, conformity, and status-consciousness, the subdivisions and planned communities that sprouted during the Baby Boom years continued to be a big draw for one main reason – their promise of providing a safe haven from the perilous cities they surround. It was better to endure the boredom of a pot-luck dinner party than suffer a mugging. Or so I was told. For me, the suburbs soon became something quite different than th…
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March 1976 Josephine Wright could have kissed the ground, she was so glad to arrive back at her house in West Mills, North Carolina. She looked at her watch. It was seven o’clock. She had been on the road from Harlem since eight o’clock that morning. Typically, the drive took only eight hours. And that allowed for congestion on the George Washington Bridge and the bumper-to-bumper traffic one could count on while passing through D.C. But today there had been a bad automobile accident as Jo entered Delaware. She had crept at a snail’s pace for nearly an hour. “Home at last,” Jo said, allowing herself to enjoy the stillness in her car. For a moment, she sat looking at the…
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If you’re a fan of crime fiction and you’re not reading books by writers of color, you’re missing out big time. Oh, the places you’ll go, as the good doctor predicted, if you gamely walk in another man’s shoes down urban alleyways, lonely rural roads or even a different country at a different time not your own. It’s about the crime, sure – the body, the knife, the gun, the poison, the rope – but it’s just as much about the journey, the steady hands on the tiller, and the rich tapestry woven from different voices from different rooms that elevate the artform and give it vibrancy and depth and a dose of real. Hidden gems are only hidden because no one goes looking for them…
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Welcome to 2023, thriller lovers! January is here and I have the problem I like: there are easily ten books that could have made this column. I will mention in passing the two books I am most impressed by, and I know I’m not alone: Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (Mariner) and Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows (Mulholland) are the kind of books that might stick with me until December and my 2023 list. I can also vouch for solid January books by writers you probably know by now: Jane Harper’s Exiles (Flatiron) and Mary Kubica’s Just the Nicest Couple (Park Row). So what’s left? Five books that have impressive premises, and/or exceptional writing…
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Two films that work as a double feature are John Cassavetes’ Gloria, from 1980, starring Gena Rowlands, and Erick Zonca’s 2008 film Julia, with Tilda Swinton. Gloria, it’s no secret, inspired Julia; both movies focus on a forty-some-odd woman, unattached in life, who through a violent chain of events comes to have a young child in her custody. Neither woman appears to have the slightest trace of what is called “maternal instinct”, and both Gloria and Julia wind up being on the run from forces, male-dominated, trying to harm them. And yet, in their overall approach and how they unfold, the two films are quite different. They function more as diametric compliments to ea…
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Today, we’re revealing the cover for Kelly J. Ford’s new novel, The Hunt (Thomas & Mercer), scheduled to be released on July 25, 2023. In anticipation of the release, Alex Segura sat down with Ford to discuss the inspiration for her new story. Alex Segura: Kelly, what can you tell us about THE HUNT? Kelly J. Ford: Everything I write seems to come from a nugget of my Arkansas upbringing that I can’t shake, whether it’s the chills I got listening to my dad and Uncle Larry’s ghost stories around a fire, the smells of the world once you leave the asphalt for dirt roads, or the sounds of my childhood favorite local radio DJ revealing the latest clue to the annual Hunt …
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Happy New Year, book lovers! For me, January 1st came and went like a flash, and my TBR pile hasn’t budged one iota since the start of 2022. Not ONE. SINGLE. MILLIMETER. In fact, it’s grown even taller. And the pileup on my e-reader? At this stage it’s reached monumental proportions—a traffic jam of delectable books just waiting to be unleashed. I should begin by confessing that I never make New Year’s resolutions. I only end up disappointed and mad at myself, and who needs more of that? Even where reading books is concerned, especially where reading books is concerned, I simply can’t commit to powering through all of them within a set time frame. My physical TBR pile i…
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Adam and I did all the usual touristy things while in Karachi: Mohatta Palace and French Beach, restaurants and cafés and dhabas. One day, we went to Zainab Market. Adam was mesmerized. In one shop, he picked up a beautiful antique copper paan daan. I explained to him what it was even though he was examining and handling it as if he were more familiar with it than I was. I turned to the shopkeeper to ask how much. The shopkeeper took one look at us and instantly quoted the foreigner rate. Adam replied to him, in Urdu, that he liked the paan daan very much and asked if he could have it for less. The shopkeeper looked at Adam quizzically. “Where is he from?” he asked me, a…
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You’ll notice something unusual in the titles below—while in previous years, we’ve dedicated much of our preview space to crossovers, especially in the realm of horror and science fiction, almost all of the picks for this year’s big most anticipated list are strictly crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Why? Because there are so many darn good ones out this year! There’s, like, a book from every big name in the genre coming out this year, plus a wonderful new crop of debut voices and plenty of up-and-coming writers with new releases. But never fear, we’ll still be running our spinoff previews for YA, horror, historical, and speculative, you just won’t see quite as much…
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Eric LaRocca burst onto the scene with last year’s intense and playful novella, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, and this year he’s back with a new full-length title, Everything the Darkness Eats, to be published in June of this year. Eric LaRocca was kind enough to choose CrimeReads for a cover reveal of his new book, and to answer a few questions about his approach towards horror writing. – It seems like there’s not only a horror renaissance, but a queer horror renaissance – would you agree? I wholeheartedly agree. It’s so gratifying to see openly queer authors operating in the horror sphere with such fearlessness and conviction. Not only is it rewarding …
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Much like her novels, Jane Harper is a force of nature. A former newspaper reporter, Harper’s big break came after winning a first-novel contest in 2015. Since then, there’s been no stopping her. Harper’s books have sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide. She’s won numerous awards, including the CWA Gold Dagger, the British Book Awards Crime and Thriller Book of the Year, the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year and the Australian Indie Awards Book of the Year. Needless to say, I was thrilled to talk shop with such a successful and distinguished crime writer. From Jane’s meticulous planning, to the unique restrictions she enforces on her work space,…
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A few days before Christmas, I drove 6 hours from Stockholm to Halland Province to see my family. About 1.5 hours south of Gothenburg and 1.5 hours north of Malmö, and a little in from the coast, there’s a small place called Marbäck. A hundred people live there, spread out over 27 hectares of land. Most are craftsmen, plumbers or carpenters, or old crop or dairy farmers. My father worked his whole life as a car mechanic. To this day, I love repair shops, car dealers, the smell of used tires and gasoline. My mother worked at the local police department, never as an officer but she did pretty much everything else: a 911 dispatcher, an IOA (internal officer assistant), a…
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The action in City Under One Roof, Iris Yamashita’s taut debut novel, plays out against a backdrop of natural splendor and eerie desolation. The fictional Point Mettier, Alaska, is popular with temperate-weather tourists looking for glaciers and mountains. But by the time winter arrives, the only ones left are the town’s 200 or so year-round residents—all of whom live in Davidson Condos, a gloomy apartment building that locals call Dave-Co. There’s just a single road out of town, and come January, snow and ice frequently render it unpassable. The remoteness complicates a criminal probe involving a detective who, at least initially, has more pressing tasks on her agenda. …
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It was a dreary day in October, and the baby that was supposed to have arrived was already late. Maybe that means nothing to you, but to me, it meant that my out-of-office had long ago gone up and instead of holding my new baby, I was Googling the rates of stillbirth for post-term infants and the mortality rate of the women who carried them. Like most people who are afraid of death (theirs and other people’s), I sought solace in crime fiction. There’s something tantalizing about unsolved murders and whodunnit puzzles that, when executed well, can draw even the most anxious among us away from our internal spiraling. As a lifelong reader of mysteries and thrillers, I was l…
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I find the campus to be a perfectly oppressive setting for a thriller. A campus thriller isn’t a traditional closed-room mystery, but it does share some tantalising similarities. No physical enclosure perhaps, but the bubble of the college seems to create a certain terrible claustrophobia, full of simmering discontent and narcissism – this leads to crimes that make for an addictive reading experience. Here are just some of the things I enjoy about campus thrillers, and the books that shine in the genre. The outside world invades… I have to begin with The Secret History. Donna Tartt’s debut novel remains wildly popular three decades after its original release. Reade…
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