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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There’s no place like a diner, nowhere at all like a diner. A separate piece, a more focused essay, would simply muse on the ontology of “the diner,” trace the history of the diner, evaluate the American-ness of the diner. This piece is not that, but I would like to write it anyway, because diners are my favorite things, but besides that, they also have a particular, elusive mystique. What is it about the diner that is so appealing, so satisfying? Is it the cheapness, the accessibility of the diner? The local-ness, the nostalgia? That so many of the diners we encounter today are actually relics of earlier times and different aesthetics: roadhouses along interstates, break…
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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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“Are you trying to bust my balls?” The speaker is Inspector Salvo Montalbano, head of the fictional municipality of Vigata, Sicily’s, police department, and in the 28 novels and two short story collections written by Andrea Camilleri and published in Italian and English…someone always is. The criminals, from petty to monstrous, who occupy his frustrating days (and sometimes alarming nightmares); the Mafia thugs who spread their tentacles into every Sicilian institution; the corrupt politicians who march hand in hand with them; the witless press that blindly supports whatever government is in charge at the moment; the colleagues who, for all their police skills, can’t h…
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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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Chicago newspaperman Ben Hecht was about to embark on a new career as a playwright and Academy Award-winning scriptwriter when he first met the infamous Joseph Weil. In fact, the encounter took place amid the chaos and clutter of a press room that would inspire the setting for The Front Page, the hit play Hecht co-wrote in 1928 with colleague Charles MacArthur. As usual, Weil—most people knew him only by his nickname, the “Yellow Kid”—looked like a wealthy, respectable citizen. “Our town’s most brilliant confidence man…always dressed like a matinee idol,” Hecht recalled in his 1963 memoir, Gaily, Gaily, “down to his pearl-gray spats.” The mustache of his neatly trimmed, …
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When I tell people that I write cozy mysteries, the most common question I get is “Who are you and why are you knocking on my door at three o’clock in the morning?” The second most common question is “What are cozies?” Cozy mysteries are fun, light-hearted adventures—with a side of murder. A reluctant sleuth in a quaint town filled with zany characters follows a twisty trail of suspects and clues to uncover the unlikely killer. Compared with their more hard-boiled mystery cousins, cozies have surprisingly little blood with their murders, and limited adult situations—with no strong language and no sex. The first full-length cozy mystery appeared in the 1930s, featuring A…
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Photo credit: Sally Good/Chicago Tribune You know the story of John Wayne Gacy. You’ve seen the pictures of the smiling clown standing proudly outside the suburban home. You’ve heard of the young men and boys buried in the dark crawl space below Gacy’s ranch house. Maybe you’ve watched the news footage of the investigators bringing them out from the house in white body bags and loading them into a coroner’s van, the flash of camera lights illuminating it all for the eyes of America. But you don’t know the story of those boys. You might think you know; you might have heard them called—dismissed as—runaways or hustlers. But you don’t know their names; you don’t know th…
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“Crime writers are the nicest people.” I’d heard this for years, and it puzzled me. Really? How is that possible? People who spend their time dreaming up the grisliest, most ghoulish acts of human barbary. If they’re such nice people, what on earth drives them to write such ghastly things? Now suddenly I was one. And still asking the same question. Hey, I’d spent more than a decade of my life writing nice, quiet nonfiction books about agreeable things. Leadership. Motivation. Personal development. Some memoirs, mostly of business leaders overcoming hardships to carve out careers making quiet contributions to society. Hell, I’d coauthored the sequel to Who Moved My Chees…
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In the summer of 1939, Father Charles Edward Coughlin, famed “Radio Priest” of Detroit, Michigan, called for the creation of a Christian Front. He hoped the group would act as a counterpoise to the Popular Front, adopted by the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in 1935 and ostensibly aimed at reconciling revolutionary objectives with a commitment to democracy. As far as Coughlin was concerned, this was merely sleight of hand—a “nefarious . . . endeavor to Sovietize America” wearing “the false mask of liberalism.” In his broadcasts and his publications, Coughlin pushed his millions of followers to reject atheistic Communism in the name of Christ and cou…
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“Be gay, do crime.” These four short words have become the new rallying cry at Pride demonstrations, but a glance at the canon of queer film suggests you might not hear this sentiment at the cinema. Classic films like The Children’s Hour and Suddenly, Last Summer often take up Gothic elements to convey the paranoia and sense of entrapment felt by queer characters, but their plots are focused on individual psychology rather than the detection of a crime, as are more overt crime films, such Harold Prince’s gay murder mystery Something for Everyone from 1970. This disconnect between queer cinema and crime film might be surprising, given that, until fifty years ago, to be g…
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Like a lot of people (or a lot of writers, anyway) I’ve been fascinated by serial killers since I was a child. Whether pilfering my cousin’s true crime magazines or trying to sneak out of the library those non-fiction books with a section of grisly black and white photos in the centre, I was compelled to find out more about them. Despite being what my family charitably termed “a sensitive kid,” I was very much drawn towards horror and dark things, and I’ve never grown out of that. I loved horror movies too, even though half the time I was much too scared to actually watch them, and I would especially crave those that seemed to have one foot in the real world. Freddy Krueg…
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For a number of years, I taught an intensive, week-long course at the University of Toronto called How To Write A Bestseller. Each year brought a dozen eager, would-be authors to my class, hoping to learn the secrets to writing a book that would make its way to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. Everyone thinks they have a book in them. The truth is that most people don’t. The truth is that even those who do have a book lurking somewhere inside them will not write a book that more than a handful of people will want to read or pay money to buy. And the hardest truth of all is that no one—and I mean no one, not your editor, not the publisher, not the critics—ha…
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Her hand emerges from beneath the covers to caress her granddaughter’s dark hair, but Eugénie is no longer looking at her: her attention is focused elsewhere. She is staring at a corner of the room. It is not the first time that the girl has frozen, gazing at some point in the idle distance. Such episodes do not last long enough to be truly worrying; is it some idea, some memory flashing into her mind, that seems to trouble her so deeply? Or is it like that time when Eugénie was twelve and swore that she had seen something? The old woman turns to follow her granddaughter’s gaze: in the corner of the room there is a dresser, a vase of flowers and a few books. ‘What is it,…
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Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s question in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial is the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history. Prosecuting Penguin Books for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s novel three decades after the author’s death, Griffith-Jones asked the jury how they would feel having the novel lying around at home: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” Griffith-Jones was used to cutting an intimidating figure in court. He had prosecuted Nazis at Nuremburg. But when he asked this question jurors laughed. Griffith-Jones had talked past the three women in the jury box, and by 1960 very few British families employed live-in se…
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My heart fills with a sinking feeling, a weight I can’t shake. That’s the only way I can describe it to my husband, Ted. He’s driving and I’m trying to be calm. It’s not working. “I suppose that’s apropos of something, sweetie, given we’ll be boating this weekend.” Ted grins. In front of us, the light changes. He pounds the steering wheel in frustration. “Seriously? Another red light? We’re going to be late now, for sure.” Most of the reason for our tardiness lies with me. I hate leaving the kids. Even now. They’re teenage twins, just graduated high school, and they’re fine without me for one night, I know. It’s an irrational, deep-seated-control thing called motherhood…
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I’m called a writer, or often more specifically, a mystery writer. But the truth is that I think of myself primarily as a storyteller. And as a storyteller, I believe I have a sacred duty, a sacred promise to fulfill. Homer states it beautifully in his epic Odyssey: “Sing in me muse, and through me tell the story.” I believe the best stories come from a place deeper than our conscience thought, and as storytellers, we’re simply the vessels for the telling, channels for the greater truths. When I was a child, I was blessed with parents who read to me. I never went down for a nap or to bed at night without hearing a story from a book. I grew up thinking of the world in ter…
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Little John’s, near Churchill Downs Racetrack, attracted tourists from all over the world. In a presidential tone and tailored suit, the diminutive Filipino pawnbroker explained that gold was selling at “an awesome” fifteen hundred dollars an ounce, “but not for long.” Now was the time to sell your unwanted jewelry, he insisted. In the breakfast room, I popped the last bite of toasted onion bagel into my mouth before grabbing the remote. Behind Little John, a cop, a construction worker, a cowboy, and a Native American clumsily danced and sang to the melody of the disco classic “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People. “We’re going to Little John’s today / To take our jewelry in …
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You couldn’t have asked for better weather. She was sitting with her tour group, admiring the view of the glacier and rummaging in her daypack for a sandwich, when her gaze happened to fall on a bump in the snow crust. It looked like a human face. It took her a moment to register what she was seeing. Then she was on her feet, screaming her head off, shattering the silence of the ice cap. The German tourists sitting in a huddle around her almost jumped out of their skins. They couldn’t understand what had triggered such a violent reaction in their Icelandic guide, an older woman who up to now had seemed so calm and unflappable. They were coming to the end of their glaci…
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Brisbane, capital of Australia’s state of Queensland and the country’s third biggest city. Sitting on the banks of the Brisbane River (which has been known to seriously flood the town) and the northern end of the Gold Coast of long sandy beaches and surfing spots, it’s home to over two million people. Now Brisbane is an architectural mix of low rise colonial era buildings with cooling verandas and glittering new central business district skyscrapers. You get the contrast if you watch the hit Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) show Harrow, about a Brisbane forensic pathologist with a healthy disregard for authority and an uneasy relationship with the city’s cops. Of…
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Let’s face it, all readers have the same dream—to own a bookstore! Ah, the images it conjures. Spending our days with books, reveling in the aromas of paper and ink, tingling with anticipation when we think of the fictional worlds waiting for us inside the covers of books. It’s no surprise that books about books are so popular or that as both book lover and writer, I wanted to explore the possibilities of bookstore fiction. Since I like nothing better than a twisty-turny mystery, I began with that idea in mind. But my roots are in romance. In fact, I started my career writing historicals. That’s how Love Under the Covers was born, the romance bookshop in my Love Is Murd…
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Virginia recently passed a bill that bans the use of gay and trans “panic” defenses in criminal proceedings. The panic defense argues that violence is justifiable when the victim is perceived to be gay or trans. The most egregious version of this defense happens in cases where defendants will claim that a sexual advance from the victim triggered an uncontrollable, violent response in the defendant. In cases such as these, defendants are not making a claim about their own gender or sexual identity. The assumption rests solely on the idea that minorities are the cause of their own victimization. In 1998, the two men who beat Matthew Shepherd to death employed a version of t…
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The flashing blue lights were noticeable the minute I turned the corner onto Park Street. My house was just down the block, and I had been at enough crime scenes as a reporter to understand that this meant the police were there. Midnight, after midnight actually, on a Saturday, was not always quiet in Atlanta. But all was usually serene on the street where I lived. I had just finished anchoring the weekend news at the CBS affiliate in Atlanta. Had I, by chance, come across a breaking news story? As I got closer, I realized the swirling blue lights–– and all the police cars attached to them ––were at my house. My house. I screeched into a parking space, leaped out of t…
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It’s more or less impossible to describe the new true crime podcast “Hemingway’s Picasso” in a few lines, but here it goes: there was a man named Steve Kough who probably played in the NFL, but that’s beside the point, or it’s the essence of the point, one or the other, and later on when he was no longer probably playing in the NFL he started smuggling drugs across the Caribbean, mostly from Jamaica into the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, but also to and from Cuba, and one time when he was in Cuba he got his hands on an artifact—a ceramic, possibly collateral on a drug deal—that may or may not have come from Hemingway’s house and may or may not have been created by Pablo Pic…
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The future is bleak, whether you’re at the bottom of an underwater sea-scraper, in a spaceship headed to a distant galaxy, or just searching for plastic in the polluted rivers of Scrappalachia. More tech leads to more debt, and AI is as likely to compete with humans as to help them. The denizens of the future are buried in the trash of today, and doomed by the politics of yesterday and tomorrow. And yet, as is the surprisingly hopeful message behind any dystopian novel, life continues. Life will always continue. And sometimes, life even finds a way to thrive. Greg McKinney, Midnight, Water City (Soho) Greg McKinney takes the future underwater in this Hawaiian noir, w…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Erin Mayer, Fan Club (MIRA) If Catie Disabato and Amina Akhtar had written the screenplay for Josie and the Pussycats, it might read something like Fan Club. In former Bustle editor Erin Mayer’s blistering debut, her millennial narrator is bored out of her mind working at a women’s magazine, obsessing over the beauty editor’s many freebies and taking as many coffee breaks as possible. “One day, she finds new purpose in the hidden meanings of a pop star’s new hit, joining a devoted group of superfans whose dedication to their diva knows no bounds. What’s the true meaning behind the …
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