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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Books adapted from movies don’t have a sterling reputation. They’re often viewed as slapdash cash-grabs by writers-for-hire, despite some notable examples to the contrary—for example, Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (written concurrently with the screenplay) and Alan Dean Foster’s “Alien.” Now Quentin Tarantino is providing his own twist on this odd genre with the novelization of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the 2019 movie he wrote and directed. The story follows fading Western-movie star Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie) and his stuntman/assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) as they navigate Hollywood in 1969, drinking and talking and lur…
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“A girl dies today at 3 p.m.” —Posted on Facebook, January 14, 2012 at 1:04 p.m. *** Joyce Hau had her whole life ahead of her. Known to everyone as “Winsie,” she had a smile that lit up her face, and she wasn’t afraid to show it. An attractive and outgoing fifteen-year-old, she enjoyed the kinds of things other young people her age enjoyed: hanging out with friends, going to parties, chatting on social media. Winsie also maintained close ties with other young people in the Chinese Dutch community and often attended Asian cultural events. Always into the latest fashions, she sported a piercing beneath her lower lip. She danced and played the piano and was even skilled …
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Magic is mysterious, and mystery is magical: we are enthralled by that which we don’t (yet) know, and many of us are under the spell of a near-visceral compulsion to learn the truth—“solve” the mystery. It’s a natural instinct, to wish to know. Problems exist to be solved but mystery is ever elusive. Even if we know who has committed the crime, we need to know how; we need to know why. Beyond that, we crave to know meaning. In magic, the ingenious magician is one who not only knows how to perform magic but knows how to deflect his viewers’ avid attention from the workings of magic itself, which are (of course) illusory—the magician is the “illusionist.” Of magic it is co…
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As she was approaching Skálar, fog rolled in without warning, blotting out the landscape and merging sea with sky. It felt like driving into an Impressionist painting, in which her destination kept receding as fast as she approached it; like entering a void in which time had ceased to have any meaning. Maybe, in a sense, this was true: maybe time was less important there; it mattered less what day it was, what hour it was, out here where people lived at one with nature. When she finally reached it, the tiny hamlet of Skálar was wreathed in dense cloud. And now the feeling was more like being in a folk tale, an ominous, supernatural tale, set in a vague, shifting world. Th…
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Ask any woman who writes fiction meant to shock or disturb about response to her work, and she will no doubt offer up at least one anecdote involving something like, “You write that? But you look so nice!” It’s certainly commonplace among modern female horror writers, and it seems likely that their sisters in the past occasionally endured similar responses. It’s hard to say exactly what readers imagine a female horror writer looks like. Women have been writing this sort of fiction more than even the most avid of readers may realize and for just as long—perhaps longer—than their male counterparts. Why aren’t they as well-known today as their male contemporaries? Why did…
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Let me be up-front about this: I am a story nerd. I love words and books and storytelling, and I gush about them with the energy level of an excitable first grader who just saw the Best. Movie. Ever. So when CrimeReads asked me to talk about balancing worldbuilding and action, I jumped at the chance to revisit a subject that’s near and dear to my heart. After all, I write noir with a twist of magic and a disco chaser, and I know firsthand how important it is to find that precarious balance. Because worldbuilding without action is boring, and action without worldbuilding is confusing. I don’t know if I always get that balance right. But I do know that I spend an almost …
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A man walks unsteadily into an impressive art deco building. There are police officers inside, milling about. He asks a question we don’t hear as an anxious score fills our ears. He turns left down a long hallway. Now, he’s outside the Homicide Division—room 44—and enters. There are a half-dozen men sitting around, doing nothing much. Not many homicides in this town, I guess. He asks for the man in charge. He’s shown into an interior office and says he wants to report a murder. He’s invited to sit down and is asked where it occurred. “San Francisco, last night.” “Who was murdered?” “I was.” The Captain looks less shocked than you’d think given the declaration the …
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It has been suggested that Voltaire’s interest in the legend of the Man in the Iron Mask had been stimulated as early as 1714, when he began attending the salon of Louis-Urbain Lefebvre de Caumartin. He first conceived the idea of writing a history of the age of Louis XIV in 1732, although he anticipated that the work would take a long time to accomplish. Six years later, in October 1738, Voltaire wrote to a friend, the abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, noting that he had been well informed about the prisoner he called l’homme au masque de fer, who had died at the Bastille, claiming that he had spoken to men who had served this person. In fact, Voltaire had himself been impri…
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I’m a 4th Degree Black Belt and Certified Instructor of Taekwondo. I trained and taught as a career for over 20 years. I also write suspense novels, and it drives me a little nuts whenever I read a fight scene that isn’t realistic. It’s probably hard to write a fight scene if you’ve never trained or never been in a fight. A lot of people fall into that category, so here are a few tips on mistakes to avoid. 1. You think movies are accurate. In a lot of ways, they are not. We all love watching those movies that are all about the tough guy/girl who kicks butt over and over. Sometimes, those scenes will go on for 30 minutes. The problem? Who has that kind of stamina? No on…
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Agatha Christie had an astonishing talent for writing detective novels. Her short story And Then There Was None is the world’s best-selling mystery. With over 100 million copies sold, Publications International lists the novel as the world’s sixth best-selling title of all time. But writing aside she was also one of the most adventurous women of her age—and she found her passion for surfing every bit as fervent as her enthusiasm for entrancing murder plots. In the summer of 1924, she and her husband Archie had taken a side trip from their planned round-the-world sailing route specifically to try the surf in Hawaii. This was the leg of their voyage they had been most exci…
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I got married in 2012. I remember sitting on the plane en route to our honeymoon staring at my brand new wedding band and thinking: I am somebody’s wife now. A small thrill passed through me at the idea of belonging to someone in this way. Ever since, I have always enjoyed introducing myself to my husband’s coworkers or high school classmates as “Rob Baker’s wife.” Hey, he’s a great guy to be married to! But also, let me be perfectly clear, as much as I love him, ‘til death do us part and whatnot, that sobriquet better not be the thing engraved on my tombstone. And furthermore, if someday I become rich and famous or just really interesting, y’all better not title the ensu…
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A few months ago, I jokingly wondered whether Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011), a movie I was in the midst of celebrating as the greatest spy film ever made, hadn’t actually cut the legs out on a few careers, based on a quick glance at the IMDb pages of some of the top people involved in the production, notably director Tomas Alfredson, who did a brilliant job with the complex le Carré material but somehow wasn’t given another opportunity at the helm of a film until 2017. (And when they did give him something to do, it was The Snowman, of all things.) In that same article I also implored—implored might not be a strong enough word, it was more of a cosmic plea—that some…
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Many of my fans seem surprised to learn that before I was a published author I was a solicitor for the Legal Aid Commission. For the benefit of my not-quite-so-learned friends, perhaps I should explain that it is nothing like anything you see on TV or in films. I see lawyers onscreen and they only seem to have one, or at most two, cases. And we all ask ourselves the obvious question. What on earth do these people DO all day? Perhaps you may have seen a chess master giving a simultaneous display. There is an entire room filled with people sitting at chess-boards. In the middle, the master walks around from board to board; their opponent makes a move; the master stares at …
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Hello again! Here I am with another group of excellent writers: Ivy Pochoda (These Women), Amy Gentry (Bad Habits), Cynthia Pelayo (Children of Chicago), Elisabeth de Mariaffi (The Retreat), and a special appearance by Lisa Taddeo (Animal). Our topic was deliberately broad: women and violence. We talked about that and a whole bushel of related and unrelated topics: horror, Momfluencers, Cottagecore, arrogant women, likeability, the Texas mom cheerleader murder, Medea, bookstagram, ambition and, Ivy’s mic drop revelation about a job she had in proximity to the rich and famous. Don’t steal our ideas, aspiring crime writers. If someone publishes a crime novel in Instagram st…
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The woman born Julia Clara Catherine Maria Dolores Robins wrote dozens of novels under four names: the pseudonyms D. B. Olsen, Dolan Birkley, Noel Burke, and, of course, her second married name, Dolores Hitchens. She was a prolific writer with the kind of range that might necessitate multiple pen names, traipsing around the genre with agility and bravado throughout a career that spanned decades—from the 1938 publication of The Clue in the Clay to her death in 1973. Her Rachel Murdock series, which featured a spinster detective with a feline sidekick, was an early example of the cat mystery subgenre, now firmly associated with cozy mysteries. Her two James Sader books, Sle…
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One should regularly refresh one’s acquaintance with the classics, for it is always an instructive exercise. What we imagine we remember of them as often as not turns out to be a hotchpotch of fragments retained from sleepy mishearings at bedtime, from condensed and bowdlerised ‘versions for children’ devoured on rainy Saturday afternoons—amongst an older generation, Dell Comics have a lot to answer for—and, above all, from the cinema. Bram Stoker’s Dracula in particular suffers, some might say gains, by association with the many film adaptations that have been made of it, although ‘adaptation’ is not always the justified word. In most of our minds now, when we think of t…
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The rule of thumb in book publishing is simple: Unless your name is Harper Lee, your first novel will not be your best and most likely won’t be a bestseller either. All other mere mortals in the world must rely on a well-measured publishing axiom known as the learning curve. Tom Straw is no exception to the rule for first-time authors, but the rest of his publishing career broke every rule in the book. The first rule he broke was his identity. It was a closely held secret for seven years. This seven-time New York Times bestselling author (yes, he hit number one), was only outed in recent years and has earned the moniker as the best unknown author on the New York Times li…
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The absence of a goodwill communiqué from America to the All African People’s Conference in Accra had been noted with regret by the delegates. Then, just before the final session, a message arrived from Vice President Nixon. He had been advised of the bad impression created by America’s silence and was seeking to put this right. Even so, one of the American delegates described the telegram as ‘a lukewarm statement quite out of keeping with the spirit of the conference’. In any case, his telegram arrived too late: the hardworking committees did not have time to read it out. However, the US had, in fact, been well represented throughout the conference— in covert and unfores…
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In 1969, Sam Melville and an activist group known as “the Crazies” conspired to bomb the Federal Office Building in downtown New York. He was later serving in Attica Prison during the uprisings, when he was shot and killed. His son, Joshua Melville, is the author of the new book, American Time Bomb, Attica, Sam Melville, and a Son’s Search for Answers. The following is an excerpt from that book. ___________________________________ The Sharon Krebs and Pat Swinton I met in mid-1988 looked nothing like the pictures of them I had found in archives at the Donnell Library. The one of Sharon was originally published in an underground newspaper and showed her walking naked; he…
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One of the bright spots of the past year has been the ability to travel virtually via the books that we read. So what a joy it was to travel from the comfort of my own couch to the world of diplomats (and their local associates) in Embassy Wife by Katie Crouch. I became obsessed with Katie’s focus on parenting and relationships and how they are complicated by being in a wildly new setting. How children become surly, how spouses become resentful, how new friendships are made. All of these things are happening in such hilarious relief in Embassy Wife. I was dying to catch up with Katie—we worked together many years ago—about so many things that we now have in common—being n…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Greg Buchanan, Sixteen Horses (Flatiron) In a small coastal town in England, a local detective and a veterinary forensics expert are confronted with the disturbing, seemingly ritualistic killing of sixteen horses. When a pathogen is found in the soil where the horses were buried and people who came into contact with it fall ill, chaos and suspicion spread through the town like a virus. This is the gripping premise of Greg Buchanan’s brooding, searching debut, of the season’s most powerful novels. Buchanan has a swift, impactful storytelling style and Sixteen Horses looks to be the …
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Kellye Garrett is the acclaimed author of Hollywood Homicide, which won the Agatha, Anthony, Lefty and Independent Publisher “IPPY” awards for best first novel and was named one of BookBub’s Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, as well as Hollywood Ending, which was featured on the Today show’s Best Summer Reads of 2019 and was nominated for both Anthony and Lefty awards. Prior to writing novels, Kellye spent eight years working in Hollywood, including a stint writing for Cold Case. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Sisters in Crime and is a co-founder of Crime Writers of Color. Her new novel, Like a Sister, will be released by Mulholland Books early next y…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * LaTanya McQueen, When the Reckoning Comes (Harper Perennial) This book details, in full, exactly what I would like to happen to every person who attends a plantation wedding expecting a “quaint” experience. In LaTanya McQueen’s stunning new addition to the growing world of Black horror fiction, a woman heads to her best friend’s plantation wedding, deeply offended by the choice of venue but ready to support her childhood bestie nonetheless. The ghosts of the estate, however, have something other than celebration in mind…As well they should because absolutely no one should ever have…
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Welcome to the CrimeReads Streaming Guide, where we spotlight a very specific category of crime movies we think you should be watching right now. ___________________________________ It’s October! The season of woolen garments, fun-sized candy, and scary movies. But this is a crime website, so rather than tell you about a bunch of straight-up scary movies to stream this month, I’m going to suggest a bunch of scary movies that are NOT horror movies! Yes that’s right… no supernatural hoopla here, folks. Just some good, old-fashioned villains whose behavior does not tip the scales towards slashers or horror tropes. No vengeful ghosts, no knife-wielding masked trespassers, n…
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Colombo—a city of five and a half million people and the largest city by far on the island of Sri Lanka. The city is also a port and a harbour, an ancient sea trade crossing in South Asia, an integral part of what is now known as the old Maritime Silk Road, and, after 1815 (following the island being under both Portuguese and later Dutch control) to independence, a part of the British Empire and the administrative capital of Ceylon. The country’s recent history has been marked by insurrections and civil war since independence as well as the devastating tsunami of 2004. Perhaps as many as a hundred thousand people died in a quarter century of civil war that ended in 2009. …
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