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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When I contemplated writing my action thriller series, I accepted advice that new authors should write about what they know. This was sound advice because over my twenty-eight year career in the Foreign Service, mostly within the Diplomatic Security Service, I felt my experiences provided an exciting basis for the development of fictional stories. I drew on settings where I had lived, worked, or visited for business, such as Islamabad, Rome, Paris, Cairo, and London. For my latest book, Crescent City Carnage, I decided to use a domestic setting where I had lived several times. I speak of New Orleans, a unique city in America. There are many more locations in my six books…
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All books, at least in part, are inspired by something or someone, if not entirely conjured by the inspiration of creativity alone, and my latest novel, Sleep Tight, is no different, even if that inspiration comes as a deeply rooted, convoluted bundle of fact, fiction, and misconception over the controversial mental disorder once known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), now referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Dissociative Identity Disorder has been portrayed countless times in movies and books and on TV over the decades, so in tackling the concept in Sleep Tight, I was very cognizant to fact that if I was going to do it, I wanted to accomplish two t…
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The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, it was just announced, have called off the search for Robert Nairac’s body. Captain Nairac was a 29-year-old Grenadier Guards officer who was working undercover, more or less off his own initiative, in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. On the 14th of May 1977 he went to the Three Steps Inn on the slopes of Slieve Gullion and was never seen again. Nairac had gone to the Three Steps seemingly to meet a source and while there, according to various accounts, got up and sang a song. A few of the locals became suspicious that he was a British officer and accosted him in the carpark before taking him south of t…
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In the mid-nineteen-sixties, my father faced a dilemma. At the time, he was an executive with the Butterick Company in Manhattan, which specialized in sewing patterns. He had worked for Butterick for many years, but the company was in the process of being sold to a giant conglomerate. My father had to make a choice: stay with the new organization in a different capacity or cash out his Butterick stock and find new opportunities. He was in his early forties and recently divorced, and his friends and family wondered what he’d decide to do. His announcement couldn’t have shocked them more: “I’m moving to the mountains of western North Carolina to build a golf course.” Mind …
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The big, balding man who visited Washington socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean in March of 1932 claimed he could solve a shocking, mysterious crime that was making headlines around the world. Gaston Means, a fifty-three-year-old former detective who had served time in federal prison for fraud, told McLean he knew who had snatched the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, from the couple’s New Jersey home. And, for a fee, he was willing to contact the kidnappers, deliver the ransom, and ensure the boy’s safe return to his distraught parents. McLean was one of the richest women in America. Not only had she inherited her father’s mining fortune – her estran…
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We are living in dire times and decaying homes, diseased bodies and disastrous policies, dark visions and disturbed mentalities. Perhaps that why the gothic revival continues apace, with 2024 as the best year yet to immerse oneself in the genre. The following titles are not only great books, but exemplary gothics, both honoring the roots of the genre and pushing it into new territories with increasingly explicit connections between haunted vibes and real-world issues. Kay Chronister, The Bog Wife (Counterpoint) This book will leave you thinking, wtf did I just read?!? As Brat Summer ends and we head into to #bogcore fall, you can pick up the latest from Kay Chroniste…
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Inevitably, when I am making small talk at a cocktail party and someone finds out that I am a lawyer, I get asked one of two questions (or both): What’s the most interesting case you ever had? Do you watch Law & Order? I despise both of these questions. The first question is impossible to answer both because it’s the equivalent of asking a non-lawyer, “What’s the most exciting presentation you ever made at work?” and because lawyers have to keep a lot of stuff under wraps because of attorney-client privilege. The second question always makes me sound like a grump. Do I watch Law & Order? No. Why not? For one, the very first Law & Order iteration sta…
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“Romantasy” is a recently coined term for a pre-existing and popular subgenre of books that combine elements of fantasy and romance, but there’s still some debate about exactly which books qualify. Does the term “romantasy” encompass standalone romance novels with fantasy elements (like supernatural romances This Spells Disaster by Tori Anne Martin, My Roommate Is A Vampire by Jenna Levine, or my own book A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating a Demon?) Or does it apply to fantasy novels with romantic subplots (like the Kushiel’s Legacy series by Jacqueline Carey, the A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas, or my newest book Servant of Earth?) Should it only be used …
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A historical mystery set in 1920s French-colonial Vietnam, Those Opulent Days is the debut of Vietnamese-Australian author Jacquie Pham. The novel opens with a death, and the prophecy that foretold it many years before. Four friends, close since childhood when they attended the same exclusive boarding school, have become Saigon’s most powerful elite. As they gather in a lavish mansion in Dalat for an opium-fueled evening, one dies mysteriously. The novel’s following chapters alternate between that fatal night and the preceding days, peeling the layers of conflicts and loyalties that might have led to the death. Written in precise, elegant prose, Those Opulent Days exp…
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When I began my research for All’s Fair in Love and Treachery, the second book in my Lady Petra Inquires series, I already had two mysteries teed up for my plot. Both had been created in the epilogue of my first book, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Lord. One was of the suspicious death of the matron of an orphanage for young girls, and the other was that of a stunning revelation about Petra’s paramour, Duncan Shawcross—but I won’t spoil it other than that! By the happenstance that is my pantser writing style, my first-book epilogue put my second book starting in June of 1815. While I vaguely recalled reading in my previous research moments that the end of the Napoleonic W…
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Books with a strong protagonist have always attracted me as a reader, from a very early age. I learned that young characters that drive an entire story can be in adult fiction and not necessarily reserved for children’s stories. The books I have loved and continue to love with such bold characters have always been quirky and macabre, with a slightly askew moral code that always seems to know right from wrong. This list of books all feature young people who have taken responsibility for their own lives when the adults around them have abandoned or betrayed them. I think this collection suggests children are more resilient and resourceful when allowed to exercise autonomy i…
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Leading up to the election, the Department of Homeland Security sounded the alarm: the country faces a “high risk” of foreign and domestic terrorism. These threats—both real and imminent—are eerily similar to the dangers portrayed in thriller novels over the years. Few authors have predicted such dangers as accurately as international best-selling author Tom Clancy. In the 1990s, Clancy—an insurance agent turned novelist—made headlines with his geopolitical thrillers that blurred the lines between fiction and reality. Clancy’s ability to predict future security risks was uncanny, making his work seem more like prophecy than fiction. But Clancy isn’t alone in foreseeing …
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Seeking the Pearl of the Orient What would have impressed Wallis Simpson on her arrival in Shanghai, as it did most visitors, was its modernity. In 1924, the International Settlement (largely run by the British) and the adjacent French Concession were significantly more developed than Canton, while few would disagree that the laissez-faire society of treaty port Shanghai was more fun than the stuffy and snobbish colonial milieu of Hong Kong. It was a city of vast department stores, neon lights, its traffic jammed with imported American automobiles, and a cacophony of noise blaring from new radio stations, gramophones, and dance halls. The streets were thronged with forei…
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I’ve always loved stories about thieves who rely on their wits. When I was writing Safecracker, I thought of my hero, Grantchester “Duke” Ducaine, a little bit like he was MacGyver if MacGyver had been a third-generation crook. Duke and his sister were trained to within an inch of their lives to be the best thieves in the world, but as Duke would say, his sister’s more classical, he’s a little more jazz. The set pieces were fun to write because Duke’s an artist, not just a technician. Like a jazz musician, he sees what can be, the space in-between, the improvisation: among other things, in the first book in the series, Duke makes thermite out of a bucket of rusty bolts an…
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By 10:30 on that summer night in 1972, the party at the remote woodland campsite had run out of steam. Beer cans littered the ground. Garbage bins overflowed with discarded food, greasy paper plates, plastic cups, and other refuse. Every now and then, the faint stench of overused pit toilets drifted across the clearing. About half of the twenty-five men and women staying there had gone to bed, but those awake were in good spirits. They were young, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-six, and all but one came from central Florida, around Clearwater. Two days of hard driving had brought them here, to Yancey County, deep in the North Carolina mountains, a place so diffe…
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My favorite detectives are involved studying their surrounding world as much as they are involved in solving crimes. Think of Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles or Miss Marple in her garden. James Lee Burke in Montana. Think of Jim Hall or Carl Hiaasen in South Florida. I am drawn to detectives as naturalists, and I think I came by this preference honestly. My mother loved to read. She read crime novels by the hundreds. Often one or two books a week. She also read mainstream novels and often read to me: Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy boys or Nancy Drew. They all had the sharp minds of scientists and sleuths. My mother loved the…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jacquie Pham, Those Opulent Days (Atlantic Monthly Press) “Pham debuts with a memorable and disturbing historical set in French-occupied Vietnam…Pham’s prose is lyrical, and her evocation of the period immersive…this is a tense and unique dispatch from a key period in Vietnamese history.” –Publishers Weekly Mia P. Manansala, Guilt and Ginataan (Berkley) “The plot has satisfying twists to go along with the mouth-watering food.” –Booklist Marie Tierney, Deadly Animals (Henry Holt) “A fast-paced, brilliantly plotted mystery … As the book progresses, the stakes become higher an…
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Sheffield, South Yorkshire, Northern England. Once the powerhouse of the British Empire’s steel manufacturing – hardly a house or hotel in the British Empire didn’t have knives and forks stamped with the “Sheffield Steel” logo. It still exists, but late twentieth century deindustrialisation has seen the city fall on harder times and have to look for new industries. Perhaps the worst of the loss of manufacturing (coal and manufacturing as well as steel) is behind Sheffield now but it’s still a tough town, as its crime writing reflects…. Let’s start with the 12-book DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) Matilda Darke series, a dozen procedurals set in and around Sheffield. Dark…
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Pour yourself a hot toddy and grab your fluffiest blanket—this round-up from Queer Crime Writers* will entertain you as the days grow shorter and chiller. From sun-drenched Palm Springs to snowed-in lodges, 1950s San Francisco, and even the mysterious Northwoods, the list spans a wide range of settings, characters, and crime fiction subgenres. These new novels offer everything from lost treasure hunts and AI conspiracies to magical whodunits and international intrigue. You’ll laugh, cry, and, just maybe … scream! Dante and Jazz return to solve a Palm Springs murder, Andy Mills faces the mob in San Francisco, and Peter Barnett uncovers pirate lore in Maple Bay. Meanwhile,…
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Years ago, I read an article in which a journalist described living in a haunted house, and a line from the article has stayed with me ever since. It wasn’t about the bloodstain on the stairway, or the mirror that leapt inexplicably from the wall. It was what the journalist’s mother said, after sleeping just once in the house’s creepiest bedroom. Locking the room for good, she refused to tell her family what had happened during the night – except to say that it had ‘something to do with time’. This, for me, is one of the things that makes ghosts so unsettling: their relationship to time. Ghosts are fragments of the past, stubbornly remaining as the future appears around …
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“Every novel that’s worth its salt is about something other than the story; something other than the plot.” — Walter Mosley “Be curious, not judgmental” — as quoted by Ted Lasso When I came out as a transgender woman and transitioned in 2009, I was the managing partner of a 19-lawyer law firm. At that time, most people didn’t even understand what it meant to be transgender. Even today, a Pew Research Center study found that more than 55% of Americans don’t personally know someone who is transgender, and about 75% don’t know anyone who is non-binary. This lack of familiarity may come from the fact that, according to the same study, only about 1.6% of the population is tr…
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For anyone passionate about both Agatha Christie as well as a wee bit nerdy when it comes to names, in reading any of her novels or short stories readers are immediately provided with a wealth of memorable and often unique names: Hercule, Amyas, Linnet, Odell and Honoria are a small sampling of some of her more unusual and eclectic character nomenclatures. Aside from simply being fun to come across, though, Christie’s use of names in her mysteries also give us a glimpse into a variety of fascinating topics, from societal conventions to Christie’s takes on characters who hail from outside of England. Names reveal quite a bit about how the social classes of Christie’s time…
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Premiering in 1972, Sanford and Son was an every Friday night at eight o’clock event in my Harlem household. “What channel does it come on again?” my grandmother would ask every week and every week I’d turn the television to channel four and patiently wait for the cool-ass intro music to kick in. While most program themes had lyrics, it was only fitting that a funky show like Sanford had a juke-joint instrumental to introduce this bugged junk man and his son. Yet, being a nine year old music buff who bought countless 45s from Freddy’s Record Shack on Broadway and read religiously the Soul Brothers Top 20 in Jet magazine, I began noticing Quincy Jones’ name on several tel…
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On March 26, 1925, during a Commons session, Mr. Cecil Wilson raised an eyebrow-raising question: why were so many women in prison repeat offenders? In fact, 2,886 women had been convicted more than twenty times that year. What is more, many of these habitual criminals were elderly. Harmless while locked up, they became petty thieves or hawkers the moment they were freed, their lives a revolving door of incarceration. Wilson, in a stroke of compassionate genius, suggested that perhaps these women were feeble-minded and ought to be handled differently rather than being endlessly recycled through the expense of the prison system. Feeble-minded? Bit of a stretch given no p…
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Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story. One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom? Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few wee…
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
What should you accept as credible?
Where it All Began
