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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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Ace Atkins, Don’t Let the Devil Ride (William Morrow) “Ace Atkins’s killing honesty sets a new standard for Southern crime fiction.” –New York Times Book Review Joseph Kanon, Shanghai (Scribner) “As in his spy novels, Kanon demonstrates a mastery of closed-in drama. Such is the jabbing understatement of the dialogue—what’s withheld matters more than what’s said—that it holds you in suspense as much as any action scene. The contrast between his impeccable control and the nightmarish chaos of this time and place gives things a powerful edge. Kanon goes to China with stirring results…
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To read a Peter Swanson book is to become immersed in a slightly askew world – people are still people, yes, but many of these individuals inhabit their own tangled realms, not the least of which is the scheming, cheating, lying one where said people frequently make bad decisions. But there’s more: killers. Always killers. They’re all here in Swanson’s delicious new novel, A Talent for Murder. Spoiler alert: this article contains what some might construe as a spoiler. After a prologue that ends in a sudden death, we meet Martha Ratliff, a spinsterish librarian who has married a man named Alan Peralta after a quick courtship. Alan is a traveling salesman who goes to edu…
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In our new mystery The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, the vastly wealthy aristocrat father of runaway heiress and artist Juliette is obsessed with all things Egyptian, and this obsession influences her own paintings. This is inspired by real events—the symbolism of Ancient Egypt fascinated the surrealist circle of the 1920s and 1930s (of which our fictional Juliette is part), appearing in the work of Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and Leonor Fini, among others. In fact, Fini’s work, Little Hermit Sphinx, in London’s Tate Modern, inspired the fictional painting in which Juliette inserts hidden references to her family’s terrible secrets. The symbols of Ancient Egypt also in…
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The first time I read American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, I abandoned it two-thirds finished. Listen, I was a freshman in college. Very fresh into college, actually—it was orientation week. With a few empty days of freedom before classes started, on my first week away from home, I decided to pick up a book about a finance bro turned remorseless murderer. Up until that point, I’d hardly been able to tolerate even fairly benign scary movies, but dark stories always fascinated me. This one was far more gruesome and horrifying than anything I’d read before—I ended up hiding the book in a drawer and sleeping on the floor of a dorm-mate I barely knew because my roommate was o…
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In our recent trilogy of quizzes on this site, this one going to be the most challenging. Ain’t it just like a dame. Like the quizes that came before it, this one is part quiz, part trivia. Under “questions” I have listed many descriptions of femme fatales from crime novels. And you have to guess which book each description comes from. Now, because this category might be incredibly hard otherwise, I really mean it when I say: these are classics. I’ve stuck to the most famous crime and mystery novels. You don’t have to rack your brains for femme fatale-types, like Circe or Salome or Lady Macbeth. I’ll also say that you should feel free to guess characters from the same …
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The 1970s was an odd decade for movies. Following the late 1960s counterculture movement and consciousness-raising that translated into films like 1969’s “Easy Rider,” the 1970s were a time of great artistic merit, as exemplified by the “Godfather” films, huge box-office blockbusters like “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” and a steady stream of drive-in fare best represented by horror films and so-called “blaxploitation” films. And then there were the Southern-fried, often-seedy but always entertaining crime films set in redneck towns surrounded by swamps and crossed only by lonely highways. These were the kind of movies you were lucky to find at a drive-in double feature with a R…
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The third book of my ‘Hooke & Hunt’ series, The Bedlam Cadaver, includes a building designed by Robert Hooke. And, indeed, includes the shortened version of its name in the title. The Priory of the New Order of our Lady of Bethlehem was founded in 1247, its main purpose to collect alms to support the Crusader Church. By the 17th century, it specialised in the treatment—and confinement—of the insane. By now better known as the Bethlehem Hospital, or Bethlem, or Bedlam, it escaped the 1666 Great Fire, but was ‘very olde, weake & ruinous and to small and streight for keepeing the greater numbr of lunaticks therein.’ Its governors decided a new building was required;…
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· They called me a femme fatale in the media, back when that Jesse Black fiasco went down. Most people have no idea what it really means. Most people think it means badass with tits, but that’s not it at all. A real femme fatale is a villain, and I always thought of myself as a hero. At least I tried to be. Turned out they were right. May, 2011. I found out I was pregnant on my way to kill Vukasin. I’d been stalking him, online and in real life. I followed him everywhere, obsessively studying his daily habits. Letting him think he was hunting me, when I was really hunting him. I started fucking his urologist about three weeks ago. Dr. Albert Balian was a sweet guy bu…
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We’re halfway through 2024, but in these books, we’re still in the (generally terrible) past! Its been, as usual, a great year for historical fiction, and I’ve assembled the best historical fiction of the year so far. The following books are as great as the history they depict is awful, and the beauty of their sentences can be matched only by the grotesqueries of their contents. For those of you who have noticed a certain 20th century sensibility in past incarnations may delight in the plethora of distinguished novels featuring 19th century settings that have been released this year. Clare Pollard, The Modern Fairies (Avid Reader Press) Setting: Paris, 17th Century …
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In Holy City, Henry Wise honors the Southern gothic tradition with a captivating and lyrical debut rooted in rural Virginia. At the heart of this gritty thriller, deputy sheriff Will Seems returns home after a decade in Richmond, Virginia, to restore his dilapidated family estate and face his grief and guilt over long-ago tragedies. After Will pulls the body of an old friend from a burning house, he finds himself at odds with the sheriff who has arrested an innocent man for the murder and seems pleased to move on. The town’s Black community hires a ruthless private detective from the city to help Will find the true killer, but their partnership proves fraught. Complicat…
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Rachel Howzell Hall had what can only be described as an annus horribilis while writing What Fire Brings, which was published on June 11, 2024. Her father, both her in-laws, and her dog all passed away during that year. But, like the protagonists who persevere in her novels, Rachel prevailed. That’s not to say there wasn’t a toll: for the first time ever, in a writing career on top of a full-time job during which she often wrote in the car before going into her office, a battle with breast cancer, and all the varied vicissitudes of life, Rachel couldn’t make the book’s deadline. Knowing Rachel, that’s not a big deal, it’s a huge deal. Rachel’s herculean challenges are m…
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The diamond world was stunned when De Beers, the storied diamond miner, announced this month it was ditching its lab-grown diamond business. De Beers had been selling lab-grown gems online through its Lightbox brand for six years, at prices its competitors found hard to beat. But the lab-grown diamond price was crashing, and De Beers will now focus its $94 million Oregon diamond factory away from gemstone production and onto something much more exciting: diamonds for targeted industrial uses. Among these new and often secret uses is the place of diamonds in the race to develop a quantum computer—the mind-boggling doomsday machine that China and the United States are d…
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Part One: The Passion of Aline and Henry— A True Tale of the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous between the Two World Wars The headline was horrific. “Wife, Beaten for 6 Years, Can’t Take It Anymore,” blared the title to the story about Aline (Stumer) von Rhau’s divorce suit against her husband, Henry von Rhau, in the New York Daily News on April 27, 1933. Before a Bridgeport, Connecticut courtroom packed with “society folk,” the Daily News reported, “the wealthy and socially prominent Aline Stumer von Rhau” testified before Superior Court judge Arthur F. Ells that the “six years of her married life were marked by one long series of beatings, featured by an occasion w…
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“Everything is true here, even if it’s not.” With over 17 million members, NoSleep is a subreddit dedicated to horror stories that may or may not be based in reality. I’ve been reading and writing NoSleep stories for over a decade, but it wasn’t until 2021 that my series ‘We Used to Live Here’ was optioned to become a major motion picture, and the basis for my debut novel. As a tribute to the community that launched my career, here are 10 of my favorite NoSleep stories, in no particular order. Mayhem Mountain by u/The_Dalek_Emperor (aka Rebecca Klingel) A group of lifelong friends revisit their favorite childhood amusement park, only to find things aren’t quite how th…
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The heat and haze of summer days holds the power to rekindle memories of sacred childhood rituals—beaches and bicycles, playdates and popsicles, sandcastles and swimming pools—with all the urgency and unpredictability of a weather front. Such remembrances are often amplified by strategically timed seasonal reads, from lighthearted romances to dark-minded mysteries, which occupy coveted space on bedside tables and lawn chairs, some warming hearts while others send chills up down spines. New York Times bestselling author Riley Sager—whose new novel, Middle of the Night (June 18, 2024; Dutton), is destined for vacation reading—has been the cause of sleepless nights for nea…
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When you don’t remember what you had for lunch two days ago, it’s easy to imagine that bringing back characters from a book written seven years ago would be a challenge. This might be true for authors who write solo, but for us as collaborators it’s a little different. When you write with a partner, you have someone who knows the story and the characters as intimately as you do, and that means that you also talk about these characters with each other. As real people. As in these are people we both know and discuss as if they exist. Even seven years on. But…the prospect of bringing them back to life on the page and creating a sequel to The Last Mrs. Parrish was a dauntin…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Ram Murali, Death in the Air (Harper) “An old-fashioned mystery in the model of Agatha Christie . . . . A frothy, fun, truly escapist read—offering perspective on a certain echelon that feels both hyperbolic and cuttingly real at the same time.” –Vogue Meg Gardiner, Shadowheart (Blackstone) “Meg Gardiner is the next suspense superstar.” –Stephen King Liv Constantine, The Next Mrs. Parrish (Bantam) “Constantine lays the glamour and nastiness on thick, resulting in an acidic thriller that delights with every twist of the knife. Fans of the first book will eat this up.” –Pub…
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I’m not sure when the folk horror (or folk horror “adjacent”!) element of my new thriller, The Midnight Feast first came to me. Perhaps it was researching the area in which the book is set, the West Country: think Stonehenge, Glastonbury, Arthurian legend and Thomas Hardy. This part of the UK is unbelievably rich in ancient history and folkloric legend (did you know, for example, that beneath Glastonbury Tor there’s a portal to the otherworld? Or that neolithical burial mounds and stones circles of dancers petrified by the devil abound?). The more I pulled a thread, the more I found… and the more I wanted to create my own folk legend inspired by everything I’d learned: e…
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Emiko Jean, who already has a devoted following for her well-crafted ya fiction, released her debut novel for adult audiences, The Return of Ellie Black, this past month to wide acclaim. In the novel, also set in the Pacific Northwest and also featuring an intersectional exploration of Asian-American women’s stories, explores the complex fallout when a long-missing girl is reunited with her community, only to quickly spark as much suspicion as relief. Jamie Lee Sogn’s novel Salthouse Place was released from Lake Union earlier this year and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. The debut thriller follows a woman in Washington drawn to investigate the lo…
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What kind of city is this Denver, Colorado we hear reports of? To those of us who inhabit distinctly grimier, grittier cities, far off Denver can appear dreamlike, pristine, virginal. Clear blue skies, fresh crisp air, the Rocky Mountains just over there in full view! You can’t miss them; they’re massive! Only 715,000 people too – the “Mile High City” apparently (I may have misunderstood the origin of that appellation however – its height above sea level apparently). Turns out though it’s also quite the crime writing city too…so forget the 1995 box office bomb Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead here’s a few Things to Read in Denver if You’re Curious… Let’s start wit…
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One night in the rainy summer of 1816, at Lord Byron’s summer estate, Villa Diodati, in Cologny, near Geneva, Switzerland, Byron, and his friends Percy and Mary Shelley passed the time by telling ghost stories. The stories they created would lay the groundwork for future, publishable works. Perhaps most notable among these contributions was Mary Shelley’s, which she would turn into her opus Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus and publish approximately two years later. This tale—of the assemblage of several of the Romantic movement’s most significant writers, all brainstorming hallmark contributions against the dreary, sublime backdrop of a stormy summer night—is speci…
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For a long time, if someone would have asked me how I decide which parts of my life and work to share on the internet, I would have responded with a shrug. I don’t think about it too much, I might have said, or maybe: I just try to be honest. I genuinely thought I was telling the truth. By the time I graduated from college and started my first job as a fashion editor, sharing snippets of my day and thoughts via Instagram was second-nature, something I did without thinking much about it at all. Or at least that’s what I would have said. The truth, though, is that for most of my 10+ years sharing online, every post and Instagram story and video was filtered through a very s…
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I was sitting in the back of an auditorium two years ago, listening to S.A. Cosby ruminate on the beginnings of his since gone thermonuclear writing career, when he mentioned a magazine that had escaped my mind for too long. Cosby was heaping praise on one of the first places he was published. Thuglit, the long defunct New York City magazine that was once a haven for gritty, ugly, nasty imaginations, a name I would have hoped meant something to the room full of avowed thriller fans. The shoutout drew a cheer from me. And maybe two others. I was annoyed about the lack of reaction then. I’m still kind of annoyed about it now. Because to hear Cosby tell it, those people…
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When I started writing The Wilderness of Girls—a young adult novel about a pack of feral girls thrust into civilization and the troubled teenager who rescues them—I told myself this book isn’t going to include sexual assault. I knew in my gut, my feral girls wouldn’t have to deal with that. It’s not part of their mystery, even if they were all kidnapped by a man who called himself Mother and may or may not have been a prophet (or a madman). But aside from my knowing, there was also resistance. While this book was written to express some pretty difficult feelings about growing up female in America, I was tired of thinking about sexual assault. After all, I’ve been thinking…
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Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is the best movie about Batman. That’s not because it has the most villains with the most memorable superpowers, or the flashiest gadgets, or the most extravagant vehicles. Instead, it is the best one about Batman because it is the one which makes the greatest use of him as a character. It grounds him in visual and narrative tropes from film noir and gothic literature to unlock his fullest potential and dig into his psychology in a way which no other film ever quite achieved. In doing so, it provided a singular portrait of one of the world’s most iconic superheroes and demonstrated the strengths of animation as a medium to tell adult stories. …
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