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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What better foundation for a suspense novel (or any novel, for that matter) than a woman with secrets? I love secrets in novels—the more the better—and I find, both as a reader and a writer, that secrets raise the stakes in wonderfully compelling ways. Secrets are at the forefront of my novel Floreana, which features two women, a century apart, who are keeping secrets from themselves as much from as their loved ones. In my fictional narrative of Dore Strauch, inspired by real and sinister events that took place in the 1930s, Dore writes about her time on Floreana Island, part of the Galápagos Islands, where she fled with her lover in 1929 to live in paradise. The problem…
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As the nights grow longer, the holidays grow nearer, and the seasonal depression takes ahold, why not while away the hours with an international mystery (or two, or five)? Post-election, we all need a break from the US, and this column, featuring novels in translation from all over the world, are a more necessary escape than ever before. Below, you’ll find an action-packed Japanese thriller, a Chilean domestic thriller, a bleak French noir, a historical Mexican epic, and a dystopian political thriller set in Iran. Alia Trabucco Zerán, Clean translated by Sophie Hughes (Riverhead) A housemaid in prison narrates her tale of woe as a confession in this visceral explora…
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In the new installment of Alan Bradley’s beloved mystery series, 12-year-old amateur sleuth Flavia de Luce investigates the murder of a former public hangman to prove her beloved housekeeper innocent of murder. Taking her odious younger cousin along for the ride, she uncovers a secret that brings the greatest shock of her life. Our editor Olivia Rutigliano spoke to Bradley to talk about writing habits, Louise Penny, adoring one’s characters, Sherlock Holmes, and turning a novel into a series. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity. OR: The Flavia de Luce series is my favorite detective series of all time. It had seemed to me like The Golden Tresses of…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jeneva Rose, The Perfect Marriage (Blackstone) “Everything I want in a thriller. Sexy, shocking, and tense with an ending I never saw coming. Jeneva Rose is the queen of twists.” –Colleen Hoover Mike Lupica, Robert B. Parker’s Hot Property (GP Putnam’s Sons) “Boston’s gift to the private-eye pantheon is thrust into a case that’s far too personal for his liking.” –Kirkus Reviews Antti Tuomainen, The Beaver Theory (Orenda) (tr. David Hackston) “A joyous, triumphant conclusion to Tuomainen’s trilogy … the comic thriller of the year.” –Sunday Time (UK) Terri Parlato, What…
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When publishers feel the urge to put out a retrospective of an author’s short stories, they often cherry-pick a handful of representative works—the literary world’s equivalent of a greatest-hits album. Then you have Soho Crime, which decided the lauded crime writer James Sallis deserved as maximalist a collection as possible: Bright Segments features 154 stories from across his entire career, packed into 800 pages. If you’ve ever heard someone refer to a book as a ‘doorstop,’ this is exactly what they mean. It’s a tome weighty enough to crush a post-apocalyptic cockroach, and yet many of those stories are very short—no more than a page, in some cases. You can breeze thro…
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The moody world of Sherlock Holmes tends to exist in our minds a certain way; wrapped in a perpetual fog and gaslight of Victorian London. And yet, the most famous Sherlock Holmes book, The Hound of the Baskervilles hardly takes place in London at all, and Holmes himself is absent for much of the action. Like our memory of fog and gaslight pervading all the stories — even when that’s not the case — the shadow of Baskervilles is long, and in its influence, it can eclipse some even more chilling Sherlock Holmes stories from the classic canon. To put it another way, The Hound of the Baskervilles does represent a classic, horror-tinged Sherlock Holmes story in one specific w…
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Sometimes, the criminal makes the book. The books that follow are personal favorites of mine, and some of them have classic criminals as villains, but many more of them have us rooting for the criminals, despite, or sometimes even because of, their crimes. Vin Venture, from The Final Empire (Mistborn series) by Brandon Sanderson Vin is an abandoned street urchin, using her powers of consuming metal unknowingly to help her survive. She gets scooped up by Kelsior and his crew to join them in the ultimate heist: steal the empire’s treasury. Vin is jaded and wary from life on the streets, but also eager to learn, and she blossoms as she gains control of her newfound powe…
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The short answer is… very. Although literary scholars have long been aware of the existence of Victorian lady detective stories—at least since the 1970s, when Michelle Slung collected fifteen extant narratives published from the 1860s to the 1940s for the anthology Crime on Her Mind—major revisits to and reappraisals of this canon did not commence until after the millennium. Before then, the lady detective was read (both intra- and extra-textually) as a woman uniquely subjugated and overshadowed by her male counterparts. To critics like Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan, writing in 1981, the lady detective was a figure who merely confirmed Victorian attitudes about female…
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A sunken ship. A mysterious lighthouse. A hunt for treasure. A missing father. Teenagers with their own secret hideouts living in a world of haves and have nots. A lot of books and TV series have influenced “Outer Banks,” from the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew to the 1960s Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators juvenile mysteries to recent teen mystery TV like “Veronica Mars.” The Netflix series even has more than a little “Dawson’s Creek” DNA in the mix. “Outer Banks,” with four seasons on Netflix and another, final, season promised, has some clunky moments of earnestness and flippancy and its cast of teenagers looks a little too old for the parts, as with most juven…
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I write cozy mysteries, and I’m proud of it. Cozies are all about the characters and their community. The protagonist and the close circle of friends, colleagues, and family who surround her are the main reason readers come back book after book. Where the community is set is almost as important. When I start a new series, I spend a good chunk of time imagining a place that’s distinctive and unique. I want to create a village my characters love living in. Some writers talk about their setting being a character. While that might be stretching the definition of “character,” I think it could be said of my settings. So far, I’ve set contemporary cozy series in semi-rural nor…
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For many readers part of the joy of a historical mystery is to be transported to another time and place-to approach an imposing country estate, to smell the salty air of the nearby sea, to feel the jostle of a carriage ride as the horses whinny when their hooves meet the gravel drive, to find an elegantly dressed body crumpled at the foot of the stairs. For a writer to accomplish this, while maintaining the integrity of the plot, the details must be right. And an integral part of researching any historical mystery is the site visit. The setting of a historical mystery has the power to go beyond creating a backdrop for the murder, to dictate the mood, the characters, the …
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I spend an inordinate amount of time sitting around trying to think of ways to kill people. Yes, it is for my books. Still, I sometimes worry about myself. Or maybe I’ve just been watching too much Criminal Minds, and I worry about being a psychopath. It’s a worry I share with many of my fellow mystery writers. In my books, I’ve used everything from kitchen utensils to a North Pole sign to commit one of the most heinous of crimes––murder. I’m always looking up exactly how these methods might work. And then do extensive medical research to find out exactly what would happen. So far, the FBI hasn’t shown up at my house to find out what I’ve been doing. I feel like I prob…
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From the time I began this column, nearly two years ago, I’ve been looking forward to interviewing Megan Abbott. I first became aware of her work in 2016, when I read The Fever over the course of a few days while holding my baby daughter, in the midst of a bleak election cycle which, as we now know, presaged many more bleak election cycles to come. I remember looking down at my daughter’s face and thinking, Oh no, is this really what it’s like to be a girl? It’s a question that I should have already known the answer to, but there’s something about Abbott’s writing that makes women’s experience seem unnervingly foreign, even to women readers. Her ability to simultaneously…
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We live in a world where the Supreme Court has already declared that a corporation is actually a person. Can the same or even more sweeping declarations be far off for our friends the computers? Like it or not, artificial intelligence is all around us. We play with it on our computers and phones. We use it to create memes and write emails. We ask it to find the best restaurants near us – as if AI has ever tasted a bacon cheeseburger or perfectly prepared sushi. And all the while AI seems positively harmless. But what if – as detailed in the dreams of sci-fi authors – one of the many AI programs out there decided it was tired of being our monkey butler? Perhaps this …
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I have always heard Tough Guys Don’t Dance (both the 1984 novel by Norman Mailer and the 1987 film adaptation of the same name, screenwritten and directed by Mailer) described as a “noir,” which leads me to call into question NOT the designation of either of those works as noir, but what it means for something to be a “noir” in the first place. Of all the genre designations that exist, “noir,” might be the one that feels the least definite or circumscribed in terms of content; existing instead as a cohesive aesthetic, or really a as collection of vibes. The great film historian James Narremore suggested that the definition of noir lies at the nexus of two theorizations: …
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When I arrived in the city of Perm in the Ural region in 1994, I went to live in a students’ hostel. It was certainly not for the first time in my life. I had lived in undergraduate rooms at the University of Bologna, where the main activities were staying up all night, smoking and organizing the next meeting of the student collective, and in Oxbridge colleges, where political discussions took place in colleges across high table seats reserved for graduate students. In the dormitory in Perm, no one talked about politics and no one seemed to spend any time sweating over books. It was a typical Soviet-style building, not far from the station: a flat-fronted white block with…
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When I tell folks I have two degrees in sport management and an adult thriller coming out soon, I know the question I’m going to get before it’s even posed: How do those go together? During the summer of 2021, my two lifelong loves met up in Casper, Wyoming. I was 21 and had never lived anywhere outside of Washington (the state, not DC). I set off in my Honda Fit and drove 1,100 miles east to the heart of Big Sky Country, all in pursuit of (what I thought) was my dream job: a baseball play-by-play broadcaster. Why Wyoming? Well, it was the only place that offered me a job. One of the teams I interviewed with said they liked my demo tape, but I was too much of a risk to…
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Unlike English native-speakers, I didn’t really encounter gothic novels in the first twenty-or-so years of my life. I grew up in the French-speaking part Switzerland, and my modern and medieval literature studies focused on French authors and their preoccupations. Therefore hearing the concept of ‘gothic’ as a formative genre for the English psyche didn’t really mean much to me… or so I thought. I moved to the UK in 2008 and started voraciously absorbing books and TV programmes and visiting stately homes during weekends, until I realised I had somehow internalised gothic tropes; dark castles, ominous clouds, supernatural and madness seemed suddenly part of my artistic sub…
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I was 15 in 1975 when the man then only known as the Yorkshire Ripper committed his first murder, and 21 when he was caught – in Sheffield, about a mile from where I was living – by a probationer PC checking a fake car number plate. I remember the fear taking a while to build, but the year I left university the Ripper killed his thirteenth female victim, Jacqueline Hill, a 20-year-old student. By then every Yorkshirewoman I knew thought twice before leaving home after dark. I was a feminist, I wasn’t going to let someone I’d never met put me under curfew, so I carried on walking home alone late at night, hypervigilant, suspicious of every man I passed. Police were prosecu…
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My partner told me that she’d never seen the film Gaslight. I told her that she definitely had. –Zoe Coombs Marr Eighty years ago, George Cukor’s Gaslight was released. A noir masterpiece, it swept the Oscars and coined a term that’s used far and wide today. You need only check in with the armchair psychologists on TikTok to see the rampant use of the word to describe any kind of dysfunctional relationship, whether husband-wife, parent-child, doctor-patient, candidate-voter. The relationship at the center of Cukor’s Gaslight is between Paula and Gregory, played by Ingrid Berman and Charles Boyer. Paula is a vulnerable young woman who was traumatized as a child by her au…
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Spy thrillers don’t get closer to real-world spycraft than the 1968 Soviet film Dead Season. Written under nearly literal dictation from the KGB, it’s based on true exploits — or at least the Lubyanka-approved version — of an intelligence officer named Konon Molody, who had spent years in the West posing as a Canadian businessman. Rather startlingly, the actual Rudolf Abel (the man Mark Rylance would later play to Oscar-winning perfection in Bridge of Spies) shows up before the titles roll, in his first public appearance ever, to vouch for the accuracy of what we’re about to see. Imagine Zero Dark Thirty opening with a sonorous testimonial from Leon Panetta. The Soviets w…
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In our novel The Starlets, we drew upon our love of the movies by placing two feuding movie stars in the crosshairs of international criminals, sending them careening together through the Riviera of the late 1950s, desperate to get to Interpol before the baddies catch them. It’s a tried and tested formula—a relatable hero becomes embroiled in intrigue, finds themselves in way over their head, then needs to hit the road to stay one step ahead of trouble, with plenty of twists and turns along the way. Whether the catalyst is a case of mistaken identity, a treasure hunt, or actual criminal activity, these stories require their protagonists to rely upon their decidedly un-su…
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Everything you’ve heard about Miami is true and it is also a lie. Miami is duplicitous. It is beauty and cruelty. How could it not be with gorgeous beaches and yachts on one side of the 1,950 square mile county and a swamp of deadly reptiles on the other? Soon after its incorporation in 1896, Miami was dubbed The Magic City as part of the marketing to sell pre-construction property in Henry Flagler’s blueprint of a city. The moniker is bitingly appropriate. We specialize in illusions, swindles, cons, and party tricks. Scams are born here. Luxury can be rented. (Seriously, you can rent a Lamborghini and a diamond-encrusted Cuban Link necklace for the day.) Visitors fall …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Michael Idov, The Collaborators (Scribner) “A cutthroat international financial scheme with grave political implications . . . Unlike most spy fiction, it’s driven in the liveliest sense by young characters who reflect their generation. Falk, a millennial who wears Weezer tees, and Maya, who was up for a part in a Peacock vampire series, are an irresistible pairing. . . . Sharp, freshly conceived, thoroughly entertaining spy fiction.” –Kirkus Reviews DM Rowell, Silent are the Dead (Crooked Lane) “[Rowell] elegantly threads tangible details about tribal life into the action, which…
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Ah, the winter holiday season. The most wonderful time of the year—or is it? Most merry readers are familiar with ye olde traditions of telling ghost stories at Christmastime. While many believe this to be a primarily English holiday pastime—with Victorian-era celebrants gathered around the hearth to while away winter nights in the company of ghost stories and séances—this isn’t completely true. In fact, though the Puritanical culture of early America was, shall we say, less than hospitable to such things as spirits and hauntings, there is a distinctly American flavor to the heart-warming tradition of horrifying your friends and family with tales of monsters, malice, and…
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Where it All Began
