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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In Mystery at Windswept Farm, the third book in my mystery series, Rosalie Hart has been surprised with the opportunity to study with an Italian chef. While researching Italian food and culture, something I could do all day every day, I came upon an Italian saying: Il Dolce Far Niente. Translation: the sweetness of doing nothing. Further research revealed that Italians embrace this concept in all aspects of their lives: friends and family, food, even their work. I was intrigued. Writers have a particularly odd way of viewing what we do. Although we refer to our job as a craft, an art, we often bemoan how difficult it is. We talk of writer’s block, attention deficits, is…
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The best journalism movies emphasize dogged research and writerly integrity, with “Truth” clearly framed as the guiding principle and ultimate purpose of such investigations, and “justice” as its primary effect. She Said follows suit, but it also develops a highly personal and empathetic tone—more social and compassionate and intimate, more Spotlight and less All the President’s Men or The Post. The film, directed by Maria Schrader, is about how two New York Times reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, broke the story about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long pattern of abusing and assaulting his female employees and colleagues. Essential to the film’s t…
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What is it about the sea that has made it a literary obsession since The Odyssey? For me, it’s the mystery, the thrill of adventure, the fear of the horrible beasts lurking under the waves, and the dangerous men lying in wait just over the horizon. It’s the visceral feel of the wind and the waves, the raw smells of saltwater mixed with fuel and fish and fear, where the weather is a capricious character, and the ships are lonely fortresses against the unknown. But I find the strongest appeal in how the sea shapes and reveals a person’s character; it can raise men and women to the heights of courage or plunge them into the depths of madness. Who doesn’t know their names: …
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In 2013, I applied to join the Los Angeles Police Department for many reasons. Far too many to explore in this piece, but most notably, I wanted to be a positive force within a flawed department and maybe, hopefully, impart change. I spent six months preparing to enter the police academy. I exercised and got into peak physical shape, and I read everything I could on police work, the history of Los Angeles, and memoirs written by retired officers. When I received word that I was accepted into Class 7-14, I thought the worst part of training would be the brutal summer heat, but halfway into my training, I injured my lower back and was forced to resign. I was sent home, wher…
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In 2013/14, my wife and I became fearful of a phenomenon that might have led to a civilizational collapse, and so we started ‘prepping’. ‘Preppers’ or ‘Doomsday Preppers’ are essentially any people who take it into their own hands to prepare for the survival of their group or family in the face of a predicted life-threatening catastrophic event. We were amateurs, but nonetheless, with prepper manuals in hand, we bought a tiny shack in the middle of nowhere and tried to grow food we could eat so that we wouldn’t have to rely on stores, aka civilisation. After a year our garden failed to become self-sustaining but the novel How to Survive Everything was born and we learne…
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Wes can’t get the song out of his head. It plays on a loop, over and over, until he finds himself humming it out loud. So addictive, and he doesn’t have a clue who sings it. The music doesn’t stop until an alert pops up on his phone. His famous quotes app sends daily words of wisdom. Love is a serious mental disease. -Plato Wes swipes it away. Love is the last thing on his mind, especially today. The only thing that matters is time. His calendar is a wall of meetings, back to back to back without a single break. Wes has to leave the office by five-thirty, drive home, shower, shave, dress, and get back out of the house by six forty-five. Assuming he wants to be on tim…
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Although the word “Blaxploitation” has become an acceptable one to describe African-American films released from the early-to-late 1970s, many of the actors and directors never liked the term. Still, that was the era when any movie with more melanin was tossed on the Blaxploitation pile. Recently watching a ReelBlack interview with the actor/director Ivan Dixon, whose directorial debut Trouble Man celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, he referred to the film as an “action/adventure” before sarcastically using the dreaded term. In the film Robert Hooks plays Mr. T, a neighborhood fixer in South Central, Los Angeles who is also a private detective. Like Phillip Marlow…
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Have you ever cared about an issue so much that you marched for it? Maybe you organized an activist group or volunteered or donated money to a non-profit. Perhaps you wrote letters to your representatives. Or maybe you just felt overwhelmed and weren’t sure you could even make a difference and instead were bogged down by inaction. One valuable tool writers have to address an issue or champion a cause is our pens. We can not only write those letters to government officials or create clever blog entries, tweets, and posts, we can use the world of our writing to present the issue and even inspire people to act. One option a writer has when addressing an issue is to write a…
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“It made you want to resign as a member of the human race.”—Edna Ferber on the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. The trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping and death of Charles Lindbergh Jr. was a national spectacle. Media flooded the New Jersey town of Flemington. Hordes of sightseers arrived, trying to get inside the courthouse or waiting outside for a glimpse of Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh. Naturally, the local businesses did quite well. Hotels were full. Restaurants offered ice cream sundaes called Lindys. People sold fake autographed pictures of the famous aviator. Other souvenirs included tiny ladders on green ribbon. One man sold bags of blond curls, c…
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In 1992, two of the year’s most memorable independent films depicted gay men committing murder. Gregg Araki’s The Living End and Tom Kalin’s Swoon arrived at the peak of what critic B. Ruby Rich coined the “New Queer Cinema”, an informal movement of transgressive, formally inventive films from young queer filmmakers, usually with a political or historical bent. Araki and Kalin’s films were representative of one of the major strains of New Queer Cinema—centralizing queer villains from a queer point of view. The Living End is a jagged, Godard-esque lovers-on-the-run film with an HIV-positive couple at its center. While The Living End raged at contemporary oppression, Swoon …
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I fell in love with reading and mysteries at the same time through Trixie Belden mysteries. While our lives had nothing in common, I identified with Trixie over our curly hair. It would be decades before I felt that moment of identity with a character again. I learned to avoid mysteries with Native American characters after sampling several written by non-Natives. They depicted Native characters with the same stereotypes as TV Indians, which represented no one I knew. Tony Hillerman changed that. I discovered Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee while reading Hillerman’s Thief of Time in 1988. Though written by a non-Native, Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee series opened my eyes to…
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Many of the clichés from the detective stories of the Golden Age of Mystery Writing and the old black and white films of the 1940s pop up in Murder at Black Oaks, the latest entry in my Robin Lockwood series. But you have to go back in time to my days in elementary school to learn why I put them and many others in a contemporary legal thriller. I have been a voracious reader, devouring two to three books a week, since elementary school. The books I liked the most were the fair play mysteries of Ellery Queen, with their bizarre murders and clues you could use to figure out whodunnit, and Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason courtroom thrillers. Perry inspired my twenty-fiv…
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When I was ten years old my mother handed me a worn paperback called THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving. “What’s it about?” I asked her. “Life,” she said. I had never read anything so brilliant. She used to take me to the used bookstore and let me buy stacks of paperbacks because I read so fast it was hard to keep me in books. And if we got the usual comment. What’s a little girl like you doing with so many big books…she would look at them and snap…She’s reading them. How may books have you read this week? My mom had one rule about what books I read growing up. Which was there were no rules and I could read anything I wanted. You know what she told me? Use your o…
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Leda was taking a lunch break when a heads-up knock on her door and a friendly “Hello” announced that Grady Merritt was doing the same. “Hey there!” she attempted to reply, but she was still working on a mouthful of pizza, so it came out garbled and a little bit gooey. “Hold on a sec,” she added, and that didn’t come out too much clearer. Grady pulled up a secondhand IKEA seat while she chewed and then swabbed her mouth with a napkin. He crossed one leg over the other and grinned. “Don’t choke. If you choke, I can’t ask you for a real quick favor.” Her final swallow was too big by half, and it stuck in her throat. She seized her soda and chugged it. “Sorry,” she belched…
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—This story is a co-publication with The Delacorte Review. Debra Star Rizzo, age fifteen, disappeared shortly after 4 p.m. on Monday, July 24, 1978. Her badly decomposed remains were discovered nine days later. That’s a long time ago, but I have not forgotten. On that long-ago afternoon, Debbie had just left her daily one-hour counseling session at Comprehensive Mental Health Services of Pinellas, Inc., on South Belcher Road in Clearwater, Florida. It has since been rebranded as Directions for Living (“Life Gets Better Here”), but the center is still there. Landscaped oaks and palms shelter it from the sweltering sun and surrounding sprawl. A green awning wraps around t…
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When I started writing Welcome to The Game, I knew the car would be a lead character. I’m not claiming any of Wernher von Braun’s deductive powers here. After all, the novel’s protagonist is an ex-rally driver who sells niche performance cars in not just any old city, but the Motor City, and who unwittingly becomes involved in a heist, the successful execution of which requires a very specific driving ability. Cars bring to the modern thriller what horses brought to the Western; namely, speed and excitement, car chases, drive–bys, hit and runs and so forth. I’m not saying one needs a car chase to make a bank robbery exciting. That’s the wonderful thing about imagination …
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Ninety-two-year-old Kathryn Johnston was dead, which meant big trouble for police officers Jason Smith and Gregg Junnier. Three hours earlier, everything had looked so promising. Atlanta police had busted Fabian Sheats for the third time in four months. In exchange for his release, the local drug dealer-turned-informant had tipped them off to a major stash at 933 Neal Street—an entire kilo of cocaine. Sheats wasn’t one of their registered informants so they couldn’t legally use him to get a warrant, but Smith and Junnier applied for a warrant anyway by inventing an imaginary snitch. They called him a “reliable confidential informant” and told the magistrate judge that th…
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In 43 AD, the Romans founded the settlement of Londinium. In 61 AD it was stormed by Iceni Queen Boudica and burnt to the ground but, by 100 AD, Londinium had superseded Colchester to become the capital of the Roman province of Britannia. Roman London had a population of around 60,000, nowadays the city is home to almost nine million people. Given London’s rich history, it’s not surprising that the metropolis has been the setting for many classic novels. Think of Sherlock Holmes: Baker Street, hansom cabs, Big Ben looming out of swirling fog. Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was from Edinburgh but he knew there could only be one address for his sleuth. Charles Dicken…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Anthony Horowitz, The Twist of a Knife (Harper) “This humorous homage to golden age closed-circle mysteries is not to be missed.” –Publishers Weekly Amita Murray, Arya Winters and the Cupcakes of Doom (Agora) “A captivating blend of mystery and romance that explores themes of diversity and social dysfunction with subtlety and empathy but also with wacky, sometimes ribald humor. Offbeat, irreverent, funny, and boasting a broad, multifaceted plot, this one will appeal to fans who enjoy quirky, genre-defying reads.” –Booklist Sevgi Soysal (transl. Maureen Freely), Dawn (Archip…
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From Holmes to Marlowe, Dupin to Spade, depictions of a brilliant man solving crime outside the law became the default canon for the private investigator. He’s a lone wolf, capable of taking a punch but taking no bull. His keen powers of observation and understanding of human frailty provide insight into every crime. Femmes were fatales or Fridays, honeytraps or helpers. Rarely the sleuth in charge. One of the queens of sleuth fiction herself, Dorothy L. Sayers, bemoaned in an introduction to the first Omnibus of Crime in 1928: “There have . . . been a few women detectives, but on the whole, they have not been very successful.” Crime fiction is often considered a misogy…
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There is a saying that there is no one more devout than a convert. And when it comes to a committed relationship with a city that runs deep and runs true, there is no writer more devoted to Los Angeles and its environs than Robert Crais, whose latest Elvis Cole and Joe Pike novel, Racing the Light, was published on November 1, 2022. That’s not to say that other writers past and present haven’t given the City of Angels its rightful due, or that Bob’s Los Angeles is all moonbeams and unicorns—after all, this is crime fiction, bad things happen to good people— it’s just that Bob’s affection for the locations where the denizens of his novel work and live pours out on the page…
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Whenever I’m asked for tips about writing, the first piece of advice I give is always the same: The trick to crafting a good mystery is reading a good mystery. Any time a story surprises you, any time a twist takes your breath away or makes you rethink everything you thought you knew up to that point, you’re learning something essential about the art of building a top-notch whodunit. I cut my teeth as a writer on books by Agatha Christie, Gillian Flynn, and Sara Shepard, authors well-versed in the art of red herrings and sleight of hand, whose novels made me itch to open my laptop. And the late, great Sue Grafton taught me you could play your hand face-out and still shoc…
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Blackwater Falls is a book I wrote during the pandemic. It was inspired by the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and by the wave of the protests that swept the nation after his death. George Floyd was a Black man killed by a white police officer who knelt on his neck for nearly ten minutes, despite Floyd pleading for his life. That police officer, Derek Chauvin, was eventually convicted on charges of second degree murder, third degree murder and manslaughter, and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. As a police officer, Chauvin had a record of at least seventeen misconduct complaints prior to his killing of George Floyd. It was not the first killing of a Black…
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The job du jour in thrillers is the influencer, an unfortunate but accurate reflection of life. Time was a beautiful, fashionable woman would be a model, or an actress, or a waitress who wants to be a model or an actress and sometimes teaches yoga too. Or meditation. Anything where she can be photographed in enviable scenic locations doing something Insta worthy: headstands! Jet skiing! Joking with some native children! She’s plugging several athleisure companies, a pop-up that makes pure beeswax candles infused with exotic oils, and a new and better bottled water. Lots to cover this month. Stay tuned for the aforementioned influencers, an extreme prepper, a tech whiz, …
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In my literature classes, I often asked students to investigate literary texts for their representation of contemporary social issues. What, for example, does Franz Kafka’s The Trial say about the absurdity of life and the legal system in the early twentieth century? Or, how does a natural disaster reveal a crisis of the social order in Heinrich von Kleist’s 1807 “The Earthquake in Chile”? This probing of human truths is an exercise often applied to literary fiction, but less so to genre. And yet, crime, like other examples of literature, holds a magnifying glass to the vices and virtues of the human condition. The first time I spoke with my editor, he asked me, why, as …
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