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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Emotions ran high in the university town of Missoula, Montana, on April 12, 2010. Police termed it “a night of chaos,” with rowdy demonstrators and counter-protesters clogging the streets around City Hall. Within, a tense debate ran well past midnight over what would become Montana’s first nondiscrimination ordinance against LGBTQ+ people. The surrounding hubbub might explain why it took far too long for the man slumped in a nearby alley to rate a second glance. The alley was within sight of both City Hall and the Oxford Saloon, a hangout for the Missoula’s transients. A passed-out drunk near the Ox was par for the course. By the time Johnny Joe Belmarez rated that sec…
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In recent years, our culture has started to speak more openly about our mistreatment of famous women. We’ve looked back at the early aughts with chagrin, lamenting how, for years, female celebrities were mocked and belittled by the tabloids for anything from the shape of their bodies, to how they mothered their children. I was a preteen during this time. I distinctly remember when paparazzi took photos of Nicole Ritchie running on the beach; gossip rags claimed that she was suffering from a life-threatening eating disorder, with no sympathy for how this diagnosis, if it were true, would impact this young woman’s day-to-day life in the spotlight. In a similar, and more hi…
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2022 was a fantastic year for television, so making this list was harder than usual. Picking 15 to rave about on this website was nearly impossible. You do not know what I have been through, making this thing. So I picked 20. TV of other genres was excellent as well, and if you’re looking for recommendations in that department, try Season 1 of Pachinko, Season 4 of Stranger Things, Season 2 of Abbott Elementary, Season 4 of What We Do in the Shadows, Season 3 of Derry Girls, Season 1 of The Bear, Season 4 of Atlanta, Season 1 of Fleishman is in Trouble, and Season 3 of The Boys. But if you want crime TV, keep reading! This was a great year for “the miniseries,” a great…
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We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it. Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction; Nonfiction; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; and Literature in Translation. Today’s installment: Mystery and Crime. * 1. Paradais by Fernanda Melchor, trans. by Sophie Hughes (New Directio…
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Noir stories deal with doom. In such stories, as the great Cornell Woolrich succinctly put it, “first you dream, then you die.” So, if that is the case, how does It’s a Wonderful Life, the tear-jerking family friendly Christmas classic have anything to do with noir? It is because It’s a Wonderful Life is a reverse noir. Or to put it another way it is a kind of film blanc. As Aristotle pointed out, all dramatic stories have to do with two things: fear and pity. Fear is the motivational power behind most human action. Why do we want more money? Because we fear not having shelter or food i.e. dying. Why do we want fancy cars and jobs and more status? So that we …
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I know, we’ve run a lot of lists this December. But when there are so many great subgenres, why not highlight them all? Onwards to one of my favorite kinds of mystery and thriller: the speculative kind. Noir and science fiction have long gone hand in hand, and recently alternative histories have made their own particular mark in the crime world. Below, you’ll find some of the best crossovers to come out in 2022. S.A. Barnes, Dead Silence (Tor Nightfire) S. A. Barnes has crafted a masterful horror thriller in space with Dead Silence. A small communications team at the edge of colonized space following a distress signal stumbles upon the wreck of the most luxurious spa…
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Maybe we shouldn’t put so much stock in first impressions. The storied costume designer Edith Head initially met Alfred Hitchcock during preproduction of his film Notorious (1946). She had been loaned out by her home studio, Paramount Pictures, at the request of star Ingrid Bergman, with whom Edith had developed a rapport. (Forgive the familiarity. I call her Edith because she’s one-half of the detective duo in the Golden Age Hollywood mysteries that I write with my wife Rosemarie under the pen name Renee Patrick.) Edith certainly understood the assignment; a daring midriff-baring, zebra-striped top immediately establishes Bergman’s Alicia Huberman as a self-destructive p…
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When I was in the first stages of writing my new novel American Afterlife, I didn’t know how to write a great thriller. In fact, I didn’t even know how to write an average thriller. I wasn’t sure how to structure a thriller or which elements would make it fit into the genre. I was completely ignorant when it came to arcs, themes, and motifs. I didn’t know what made a narrator a great thriller narrator, and I also didn’t know how to captivate an audience while scaring them a little bit. I’d written and published novels with Random House, Simon & Schuster, etc., but my novels were literary or young adult, eco, or—in once case—a gothic, crime mystery. Critics always use…
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Writing a novel with dual timelines presents opportunities—and challenges. Plotting takes precision. Put simply, a dual timeline novel tells one cohesive story through several time periods and perspectives—typically a character who is living through the events and another character in a different time who is somehow connected to those events. Done well, books of this type can offer depth and insights that their more linear counterparts may not. Regardless of genre, readers are often treated to multiple mysteries as the connection between the characters and events in each era unfolds. Techniques vary, of course. Structurally, an author may employ alternating chapters, mu…
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Do you follow every rabbit hole in true crime podcasts or watch serial killer documentaries religiously? Does the Forensics Files or Cold Case Files theme songs ever get stuck in your head? Do you pour over each detail in Only Murders in the Building looking for clues so you can figure out the killer before our heroes Mabel, Charles, and Oliver do? Then you, my friend, are an armchair sleuth! You’re by no means alone. Up to 50% of podcasts right now are based on true crime. Murder mysteries—real and fictional—are topping the charts of Netflix and Hulu. We can’t get enough of it, which is a good thing because I’m an avid reader (and writer!) of cozy mysteries. If you’re b…
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The new renaissance of horror fiction came to my attention just last year, when the number of books hit such a critical mass I couldn’t help but notice, but the return of the spookiest genre to the highest levels of acclaim has been building for some time. Right now, if you speak with anyone in America, they’ll probably say that horror cinema is where the most relevant stories are being told today, and I’d argue the same for horror fiction, where our wildest fears meet our darkest realities, and every moment holds potential for either shocking violence or even more shocking kindness. Without further ado, here are the 12 best horror novels of 2022, followed by a list of no…
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The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. Katie Gutierrez, More Than You’ll Ever Know (William Morrow) This book is full of so much love. Lore Rivera has everything a woman is told to want: a husband who loves her, two children who work hard to succeed, and a career that values her. When her husband’s business falls prey to a recession, she finds herself suppressing her own success to make her husband feel better. Meanwhile, she meets another man in Mexico City who finds her success a turn-on. Soon enough, she’s got two husbands; soon after that, one husband finds out and kills the other. Forty ye…
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Over a decade ago, I read a book about the Women’s Suffrage movement, and I was surprised by how little of the real story I knew. I had no idea women who demonstrated for this right were jailed and beaten or that they had endured hunger strikes and forced feedings while imprisoned—all to convince the men in charge that they deserved the right to vote. I decided someone should tell this story, and then I realized the someone was me. But how do you tell a story about women working to get the vote without sounding like a textbook? I decided to add a little spice by having my heroine be a con artist who accidentally gets locked up with a group of suffragists and becomes a co…
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2022 was an incredible year for crime films, I’ll just say that up front. We had at least three big-screen whodunnits, several neo-noirs, reboots of beloved detective franchises, two cannibalism stories, several meditations on victimhood, some good superhero movies, some bad superhero movies, and Bullet Train. Here are the rules for our selection. As usual, all films considered had to be full-length feature films, released (in theaters or on streaming services) in the United States during the 2021 calendar year. One of the most annoying things is that several of the year’s best crime films—Australia’s Nitram and France’s Happening (not to mention the best overall, non-cr…
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When I first moved to LA, I felt like I was in another country – and sometimes another planet. There were red-tiled Spanish mansions, giant Seussian cactuses, and scores of gorgeous, gazelle-like young people. But there was also a dark side. Tent cities just blocks from city hall, downtown streets littered with needles, broken glass, discarded underwear, and ambiguous biological stains. Then there were the surprises. Chic speakeasies inside subterranean sandwich joints, soulless-seeming strip malls containing the most delicious hole-in-the-walls, tiny 20-seat theaters staffed by brilliant actors with big dreams. LA is a hard place to put your finger on. It’s a city…
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It used to feel like YA was all about werewolves, vampires, and post-apocalyptic wastelands, but over the past few years, there’s been a turn towards the mysteries, thrillers, horror, and suspense in the genre. Some new classics of the genre include Karen M. McManus’ One of Us is Lying, Tiffany Jackson’s Grown and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give; in short, the teen fiction mystery pantheon is no longer just The Westing Game, although I could read The Westing Game all year long. I only started paying proper attention to the new wave of YA suspense last year, and what I found thrilled me, so this year I’ve been covering young adult crime fiction in the hopes of getting every…
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Okay team! It’s time for us to round up crime movies which also happen to be set during the Christmas season but are not really, technically “Christmas movies.” As I explain EVERY year, when I make another one of these lists, these aren’t movies like Die Hard or Bad Santa or Lethal Weapon or the new Violent Night: famously crimey and obviously seasonal for having a “Christmasy” backdrop. NOPE! These are the movies you don’t always remember are even set at Christmas. In December 2018, our editor Dwyer Murphy assembled ten thrillers that might surprise you with their holiday settings, and in December of 2019, I added ten more. And then in December of 2020, I added another t…
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I’ve never been one for “year-end” lists. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because I’ve always been too busy rushing forward to look back. All that rushing and hustling has gotten me here, though, to the year I’ve been chasing since I first started writing. My debut novel came out last March. I marked so many items off my author bucket list in 2022. I also got to meet nearly all of my literary heroes, thanks to this column. I started “Shop Talk” because this was the content I looked for in author interviews. I wanted to know how authors put the black on the white. How they structured their lives to do this thing we do. Thanks to CrimeReads, I was able to interview my…
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It’s rare enough for stories to go from ideas to published works, let alone garner enough attention to get translated, but these books have all made that long journey to be with English-speaking readers today, which is why we try to draw special attention to crime fiction in translation here on the site. Each of these works offers insight into other cultures. These are not niche reads, however, consumed for tourism rather than literary merit—these are proper opuses, likely to stand the test of time and (hopefully) multiple adaptations. 2022 was a particularly excellent year for works translated from Spanish (Mexico and Argentina) and Japanese, with books from South Korea …
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Writing a series is like spending a weekend with old friends, taking long walks to catch up and to ponder the future. Eating familiar food, laughing at old jokes, and going home refreshed, grounded by sharing part of your life with people you know inside out. Writing a standalone is like going to a gala hosted by a woman in your yoga class who insists you’ll meet the most interesting people and hear the most fascinating stories. So you get fancy and go, the evening so perfect that though she swears she’ll never throw another party, you say yes to the next surprise that beckons, eager to find out what happens. Some writers gravitate naturally to series, while others mak…
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If you asked a group of people to name a profession that requires the following experience, talent, and skills, most would agree that “detective” fits the bill: Logical thought processes and excellent deductive skills. The ability to research information using a variety of methods, including online. Experience and success interviewing people to obtain information. The ability to “read” people and understand their needs and motivations. Talent for taking random facts and assembling them to arrive at a solution to a mystery. Natural curiosity, dogged determination, and a dedication to uncovering the truth. But there is another career that also perfectly matches this des…
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As the nights draw in and the weather gets cold and you might find yourself heading to bed early, pulling the covers over your head, and searching for some new podcasts. But then, of course, this is the international edition of the podcasts review on Crimereads, so we’re aware that you might be enjoying a cold beer in a Singapore hawker court, grabbing lunch in a Malaysian kopitam, or hitting the beach in Australia, but perhaps still in need of a good listen. And so our semi-annual round up of the best international (non-USA) true crime podcasts in English… ___________________________________ England ___________________________________ Bad Women: Blackout Ripper (Pu…
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The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the year’s best true crime books. (For more nonfiction, check out our list of the year’s best in criticism/biography.) Rachel Rear, Catch the Sparrow (Bloomsbury) Rachel Rear grew up often thinking about her stepsister Stephanie Kupchynsky. How could she not? Rear’s mother got together with Kupchynsky’s father after Stephanie’s disappearance from her home Rochester in an age of serial killers. Stephanie had moved from Martha’s Vineyard to leave an abusive partner, but fell victim to a mysterious assailant while on the cusp of a new life. Rachel Rear’s beautiful, heartbreaking memoir is also a fierce interrogation of …
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We’ve had real trouble this year narrowing down our lists, as is evidenced by yet another grouping of 15 instead of a top 10, but hey, it was a great year for subgenres, okay? 2022 was, in particular, an excellent year for new works set during three time periods: the 1920s, the early 1960s, and the long 19th century. Each has its own relevance for today—the 1920s, and for that matter the first half of the 19th century, both share uneasy parallels with today’s increase in activism and (in the case of the 1840s) barn-burning millenarianism. The 19th century has been called the era of the con artist, in which successive economic panics and booming fraud made swindlers into p…
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I moved to New Orleans twenty-six years ago because it was the first place where I felt like I belonged. I came here to visit for my thirty-third birthday and the city opened its arms to welcome me home. I fell in love with this strange, magical city nestled in the curves of the lower Mississippi River that weekend. Something—I’ve always believed it to be the heart of the city– kept whispering in my head, move here and all your dreams will come true. I used to say jokingly that New Orleans felt like home because “no one thinks I’m eccentric here.” I said it as a joke, but it was also true. New Orleans not only embraced its eccentrics but encouraged them. Where else bu…
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