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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If there’s anything this Florida girl loves more than the silken sands of Siesta Key Beach, it’s the changing of the seasons—more specifically, the changing of the leaves. For better or worse, my knowledge of the photosynthesis-induced light show our arboreal friends treat us to every autumn extends no further than what I learned in elementary school (something about the sun…becoming food?), but what I can tell you is a close second to my excitement over the ~foliage~ is the brand-new crop (see what I did there?) of true-crime podcasts coming our way this fall. Grab your PSL and your coziest #fallfeels sweater and settle in for some downright chilling ear treats. Fed …
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One of the reasons I love writing cozies is because they are written in series. While each book is a complete and complex mystery that can be read on its own, my series offer readers a sense of familiarity regarding the picturesque town I’ve created where everyone knows everyone else. They enjoy reading about problems, issues, and events that sometimes pit one character against another and often end in murder. Cozy readers are especially drawn to the characters in cozy series, often viewing them as friends or as people they wish were their friends. They enjoy reading about their personalities and foibles, their growth, their relationships, and their pasts. Ensconced in …
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We only seem smarter than fictional characters when we’re indulging in horror. No one watching a crime drama or a romantic comedy sees characters walk into a deserted house says to their screen, Look out, that place is haunted! We only do it with the foreknowledge of Something Bad Happened Here, even though there are more present fears in a crime drama between serial killers, organized gangs, and murderous cops than a ghost. Except when that’s not the case. Sometimes the crime layer peels and reveals more horrific muscle underneath. Crime and horror, especially the occult, have a long-entwined history. Sometimes it’s a ruse like Sherlock Holmes faces in The Hound of the …
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I sometimes use movies to talk about books. In my experience, particularly in classroom settings, it’s easy to point to the story structure of a popular film that most, if not all, those present have seen, then compare it to a book that maybe hasn’t made the rounds. It’s not an uncommon practice. As any Black horror writer is aware of post-2017. That was the year Jordan Peele’s Get Out premiered and knocked the entire filmmaking industry back on its heels. “I would’ve voted for Obama for a third term.” The teacup. The Sunken Place. And, my favorite moment, “Where are those keys, Rose?” It is a fantastic film I revisit often. It was certainly the springboard for what we m…
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In 1990, when I was in law school, my Jessup International Moot Court team won the award for writing the best legal brief in the world. Proud and honored, I remember thinking that if I could accomplish this, I bet I could write a novel as well. Writing as a means of creative expression had always intrigued me, but I considered that pursuit far above my abilities. So, I spent the next two decades practicing law but also studying the craft of writing, working on a manuscript in my spare time. In that time, I learned that being a lawyer brought with it some important advantages when it came to writing mysteries and thrillers, but it also brought enormous obstacles that had t…
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When I went to see the new Bond film No Time to Die last year, I was surprised to find that Rami Malek’s character, the supervillain Safin, had visible facial scars. In recent years, Bond films and indeed broader cinema have been criticised for using facial scars, burns or marks as shorthand for villainy. When the British Film Institute announced in 2018 that it would no longer fund films that featured scarred villains, I thought this trope had been put to pasture—but clearly I was wrong. No Time to Die has not one but two such villains, the other being Blofeld played by Christoph Waltz. The film reminded me of another oft-used villain in both cinema and literature: the …
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Our living rooms were once called death rooms. Back in 1918, as influenza swept through households, killing millions, the pandemic necessitated a space within our own homes to host the dead. The front room—parlors, derived from the French ‘parle,’ or ‘to speak’—was the designated chamber under our very roofs where living relatives could sit with their loved ones one last time. We could reminisce with the dead and bid farewell as a family before the body was bound for its funeral. Once immunities improved and the number of flu-borne deaths decreased, these mourning rooms were no longer deemed necessary, essentially phased out of their domestic lamentation. Leave it to the…
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A look at the week’s best new releases. * Richard Osman, The Bullet That Missed (Pamela Dorman/Viking Books) “The mysteries are complex, the characters vivid, and the whole thing is laced with warm humor and—remarkably, considering the body count—good feeling. Your next must-read mystery series.” –Kirkus Joel Shulkin, MD, Toxic Effects (Blackstone) “A riveting adventure…Memorable characters and a chilling plot are certain to keep the reader turning pages deep into the night.” –Leonard Goldberg Hailey Piper, No Gods For Drowning (Agora) “Readers will be in horror heaven with this mesmerizing, original, and breathtaking debut.” –Library Journal Susa…
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We are excited to host the cover reveal of S. A. Cosby’s latest novel, All the Sinners Bleed, forthcoming from Flatiron Books in June 2023. S. A. Cosby was kind enough to answer a few questions to go along with the cover reveal. Scroll to the bottom to see the cover. Congratulations on winning the Anthony Award for Best Novel two years in a row! How does it feel? S. A. Cosby: Surreal, especially when you look at who I was nominated with. Every book in my category is an instant classic. I’m so honored. You’re one of a few writers redefining rural noir, especially for stories set in the South. What does rural noir, or Southern noir, mean to you? SA: I think it’s the go…
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Let’s be honest, few of us will age as well as Florence. Central Italy, the Tuscan capital, the birthplace of the Renaissance, perhaps more great art per square foot than any other place on earth. Local authors Dante Alighieri and Niccolò Machiavelli gave us visions of hell and a guide to how to be duplicitous but always victorious. You’d have to work hard to find a more beautiful city of over a million people. And of course there’s some great crime writing too. Let’s start in the medieval urban marvel that was Florence, the city state. DV Bishop’s Cesare Aldo books. City of Vengeance (2021) takes us back to the winter of 1536. A prominent Jewish moneylender is murdere…
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Female friendships can build us up, tear us down, define us, or destroy us. From best friends to toxic friends, having such a wide range of possible dynamics makes it the perfect fit to include in thriller and suspense stories. Is the best friend going to help the main character bury the body? Or are they the reason a person is dead? Are they going to air someone’s dirty secrets? The opportunities are endless, and a lot of readers can relate to the relationships forged in these stories on some level, even in extreme scenarios. In our novel, When She Disappeared, a female friendship plays an integral part of the story and our main character, Margo’s, evolution. After Margo…
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Someone who read an early draft of my novel The Marsh Queen wrote me to say, “Loni is like a girl-detective grown up.” She meant it as a compliment, and I took it as one. There might be more than one girl-detective, but the one I understood her to mean, of course, was Nancy Drew, the protagonist who showed girls they could be detectives and probably anything else they wanted. Nancy was a regular person—a teenager with a reasonable dad, a sometimes clueless boyfriend, and incredible curiosity. I know, I know, “Carolyn Keene” might have been a room full of writers churning out stories for an enthusiastic, if gullible, easy-reader audience base. However, the basic template …
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Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is the longest-running West End play in history. It opened in 1952 and has played continuously in its original production in its original theater since then (except for a mandatory fourteen-month break when all the West End theaters closed due to COVID). It has been seen by more than ten million people. But the characters of the new film See How They Run do not know this yet. The film, directed by Tom George and written by Mark Chappell, is set on the night of the one-hundredth performance of The Mousetrap, in 1953. Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) is the lead, playing the detective. His wife, the actress Sheila Sim (Pearl Chanda), …
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–Featured photograph by Maggie Wrigley My long love affair with Brooklyn began years back when I, a Harlem born and breed kid, took acting classes at a storefront drama school in “do or die” Bed-Stuy back in the blaxploitation ‘70s when I was a 12-year-old kid who thought I might get hired to play Diahann Carroll’s son or perhaps perform the nice kid part before the protagonist became a ruthless criminal. I missed the call when they were auditioning kids for The Education of Sonny Carson, but I did write a play about a plane being hijacked for the class to perform, which put me on different creative path. Years later, in 1981, I attended the Brooklyn Campus of Long Isla…
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Sometimes that big romance just doesn’t work out. You might wake up one day and realize you’re no longer compatible with your partner. Either that, or you’ve woken up to discover an FBI SWAT team stacking outside your front door, and you need to leap out the nearest window before the heat puts you in cuffs or shoots you down in the street. Yes, that’s just the way many romances end these days, and you can’t get upset about it. After all, you chose to disregard that sage advice about never getting attached to anything you’re not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat. How did you get into this situation in the first place? Maybe you took too much advice from Michael …
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On January 6th, 1972, inside a small Staten Island diner, a former physician from Willowbrook State School met secretly with a reporter. After describing the horrible conditions he had been fired for trying to improve at the state-run institution, he handed the reporter a key to one of the buildings. That reporter was Geraldo Rivera. With that clandestine key, he would lead a film crew unannounced into Building #6 at Willowbrook, where they would capture the appalling abuses, filth, and overcrowding inflicted upon its residents. This year, 2022, marks the 50th anniversary of when Rivera’s television exposé shocked the nation with that horrifying, raw footage. It sparked …
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Mysteries and detective fiction are usually thought of as the inventions of Edgar Allan Poe, but the truth is that they have both been popular in China for over a thousand years. The Chinese have no clear place or person of origin for mysteries and detective fiction, the way the West has Poe, but what the Chinese do have are centuries’ more mysteries and detective stories than the West does. The first Chinese proto-mysteries—that is, mysteries who some but not all of the elements of modern mystery fiction—were the “gong’an” (“court case”) stories. Told in the form of oral performances and puppetry shows, the gong’an began appearing during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1…
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See if you agree: Genre fiction guarantees a beginning, a middle, and an end. The word “genre” is a kind of shorthand for the reader: expect closure. Literary fiction? Not so much. “Literary” suggests shiny prose and real life on the page. And part of the bargain is that the ending could be inconclusive. Thought-provoking. Not always, of course, but that’s a distinct possibility. But fans of genre fiction know there is as much powerful commentary on the human condition in a good mystery as there is in any novel up for the Booker or Pulitzer. “Genre” fiction can be every bit as inventive and arty and revelatory as something dubbed literature. Of course. It’s a know…
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Life is creating order out of chaos on a daily basis. And that’s what a book is: You’re creating order out of chaos. But what astonishing order! What splendid chaos! Kate Atkinson has written several books since her first novel in 1995, but the eight that could be considered crime or suspense fiction – five featuring the grumpy, anxious, large-hearted detective Jackson Brodie, and three centered around World War II – are constructed in remarkable fashion. Balls are thrown in the air and juggled in increasingly complex patterns. Plotlines converge, separate, converge again. Puzzles are laid out for us, only to be discovered to be something else entirely. Secrets abound, …
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“Dark academia is the only kind I know,” a professor friend told me recently. While writing my novel, The Bequest, which begins at a fictional Scottish university, I was inspired in part by my own experience as a PhD student in History, and even more by books like The Secret History. As it turns out, the legacy of Donna Tartt’s debut novel extends far beyond literary circles. Over the past few years, the aesthetic known as Dark Academia, often associated with The Secret History, has become one of the hottest and most pervasive trends on social media, a veritable subculture featuring storied institutions of higher learning, autumn leaves, Gothic architecture, dark décor,…
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When I agreed to write a magazine article on past-life regression therapy, I had no idea that my research would inspire my first thriller. The assignment did not get off to a promising start. Picture this: A damp, chilly church basement on New York’s Upper West Side where forty people hankering to get in touch with their previous incarnations lay on rubber mats spread across the floor and, with eyes closed, were sinking into a hypnotic trance. “Feel your muscles melt into the floor. Focus on your breathing. In. Out. In. Out,” the workshop leader intoned, his voice so melodic he was practically singing. “Now visualize yourself in a hallway with closed doors on either side…
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Desolation. A murky recognition of a perilous past. Demons—both literal and mental. Countless signposts of Gothic Literature are in lock-step with the queer experience, making the metaphors both simple and poignant. The murky waters of the countless stagnant ponds that populate our favorite works in the subgenre can easily represent the muddy family relationships that litter the landscape of the queer community, hiding unknown skeletons. It’s not hard to see all those once grand plantation homes, framed by massive moss-draped oaks, long ago abandoned and left to rot, as standing relics of the hetero-normative expectations placed upon most young queer people—societal expe…
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In a novel, an effective setting transports the reader, immersing them in the narrative and creating a believable physical environment where plot can flourish. Like the Carolina marshes in Where the Crawdads Sing, the drought-stricken Australian outback of Jane Harper’s The Dry, or the archaic Parisian building in Lucy Foley’s The Paris Apartment, a richly drawn, distinctive setting not only anchors the story, but also has a pervasive influence on the mood, themes, and tone of a novel. The setting of a novel, whether in the context of place but also time, or more usually both, is not merely background. In the most compelling novels, setting, character and plot are inextr…
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Almost a century ago, as he prepared to cover a dramatic double murder trial for the New York Daily Mirror, name-brand newsman Damon Runyon compared the attendant hype to that surrounding a big boxing match or a World Series game. “It wasn’t merely a metaphor,” Joe Pompeo writes in Blood & Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime (William Morrow). “A telegraph switchboard used two months earlier during the world heavyweight title fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney had been installed in the courthouse basement, with a staff of twenty-eight operators at the ready.” It was 1926, and more than four years had passed since the b…
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Damon Runyon dubbed him “The Brain.” To F. Scott Fitzgerald he was the vulgarian Meyer Wolfsheim. To the sports, grifters, gyps, and conmen who wanted to work with him, he was “the Big Bankroll” or “the Big Jew Uptown.” To those who knew him well, he was A. R.—Arnold Rothstein. Born the second son of a prosperous, devout Jewish family in 1882, he rebelled against everything his father tried to teach him, particularly gambling. It was simply forbidden and that made it even more seductive to the young man. He had an innate understanding of numbers combined with competitive fire. Games like pool, poker and dice came easily to him. As a young man he was slim, athletic, and …
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