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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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Ron Corbett, The Sweet Goodbye (Berkley) “Small town secrets and big time corruption. The Sweet Goodbye is a throwback to the days of moody, flawed heroes and fun, complex bad guys. Compelling classic noir that plays out in a forgotten America.” Ace Atkins Sascha Rothchild, Blood Sugar (G. P. Putnam) “Mesmerizing. . . Rothchild does a terrific job keeping readers wondering about Simon’s reliability, and pulls off the considerable challenge of engendering sympathy for an unrepentant killer. Vivid prose is another plus.” Publishers Weekly, starred review David Baldacci, Dream T…
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For a new book to take flame, a writer needs a bit of kindling: a story overheard at a party, a couple observed in a restaurant, an odd fact glimpsed in a newspaper. I think what sparked Pesticide, the first mystery in my Polizei Bern series, was noticing how fast the organic food sections in Swiss grocery stores were expanding. I wondered how many farms in Switzerland were organic and what farmers had to do—or not do—to qualify as what the Swiss call bio. Interviewing organic farmers, I developed a great respect for them: they are men and women who work very hard both to feed and to save the planet (well, feed and save a small part of it, since only 15% of Switzerland’s…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Dervla McTiernan, The Murder Rule (William Morrow) “Dervla McTiernan has become one of my favorite writers, and if you read The Murder Rule, she will quickly become one of yours. This book is diabolically clever, highly compelling, and deeply moving. I loved The Murder Rule and did not want it to end.” Don Winslow Connie Berry, The Shadow of Memory (Crooked Lane) “A seamlessly plotted mystery for fans of English puzzles.” Library Journal, starred review Jason Rekulek, Hidden Pictures (Flatiron) “The explosive third act gives this story a nail-biting ending sure to thrill. Pa…
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Adolf Eichmann’s superior officer, the man he tried so hard to please, was Reinhard Heydrich; and with Heydrich at last, we arrive at some-one with character and responsibility comparable to his terrible power. Heydrich was the official custodian of the new morality. Neither his career nor his personality could be described as banal; in fact, so many elements of social significance collided at his desk that one historian has labeled him “a symbol and perhaps the representative figure of the Third Reich at the peak of its internal and external power.” It is easy to see why: if ever a man killed in cold blood, that man was Reinhard Heydrich; if ever a man lived his life wi…
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Within St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium stands a masterpiece. Not the first work ever painted in oil, but definitely the first to maximize all of the advantages that new medium offered. In total it is a sublime example of Northern Renaissance expression and has the distinction of being the most stolen, damaged, and vandalized work of art in the world. It’s name? The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb or, as it is more widely known, the Ghent Altarpiece. Which takes center stage in my new novel The Omega Factor. It was created by two brothers. Started by Hubert van Eyck in 1426, and finished by Jan van Eyck in 1432. This is known thanks to a Latin poem inscribed on th…
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My debut novel, The Awoken, is a different kind of science fiction in that it is actually about an absence of science. Despite the story being set a century into our future, most scientific and medical innovation has been halted, and in some cases even made illegal. The story is centered around a young woman who dies and then is brought back to life from cryogenic preservation a century later. The issue is, in this future world, it is illegal to be a resurrected person. The technology to resurrect humans from preservation has been discovered, but the science has been criminalized due to society’s fear of wielding such a Godlike power. The result is that the millions of pe…
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You won’t find Von Goom’s Gambit described in any chess textbook. But here’s the history. On April 5 1997, Von Goom entered his first ever chess tournament: the Minnesota State Championship. In his initial match, he lost to a man named Curt Brasket in twenty nine moves. A series of equally humiliating defeats was to come. Von Goom lost the further six games he played, including one in three moves, and another – after 102 moves – to a five-year-old child. He fared no better in the years that followed. Close to half a decade later, in fact, after studying relentlessly and entering numerous tournaments, Von Goom had failed to win even a single competitive game of chess. T…
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Shark! Coming soon to an Eastport, Maine beach near you – sharks! Big ones, little ones, even huge, bitey ones: In 2021, nearly 50 Great White sharks were seen on marine scientists’ tracking devices in Passamaquoddy Bay and nearby waters. And that’s just one species; eight different kinds of shark visit Maine, eating seals and any other tasty creatures unlucky enough to encounter one of these toothy apex predators. Tasty creatures like us, for example. Before Europeans arrived in North America, ancestors of the nearby Canadian Micmac tribe had special weapons for battling the sharks that attacked their ocean-going canoes. More recently, in 2010 a Maine lobsterman leaned…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new crime fiction. * Delilah S. Dawson, The Violence (Ballantine) The Violence continues a trend in dystopian thrillers concerned with gendered violence, including Vox and The Power. In The Violence, a new pandemic arrives—this one with the power to infect its hosts into committing unstoppable acts of savagery against all those nearby. It isn’t long, however, before some begin to see their infection as their savior, for finally those with the Violence can fight back against those who are bigger and stronger than they are. Throw in a bat-shit professional wrestling plot arc, and this one is not to be missed. –Molly Od…
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To work with words in their hundreds and thousands in a world increasingly obsessed with brevity is not easy. Stubborn, we continue in the face of a new hierarchy of posts, tweets, tik-toks that amplify the bon-mot not the thesis. We resist despite the crushing efficiency of a brief text message of less than ten words to demonstrate that the game might be lost. And such texts usually are about loss, potential or realized. There have been many in the past two years – ‘He’s ill,’ ‘It’s bad,’ ‘She’s gone,’ ‘I’m sorry’—and we are all sorry for that. The most economic use of words to transmit immediate information, style an unnecessary companion to brutal fact. I received suc…
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Oscar, for the twentieth—maybe even thirtieth time since he got here—is lost in the medina. The problem this time is that his phone has died, so he can’t use it to navigate, and he has no cash, having given it to a man whose wife was dying and needed medical care. (A man who, in retrospect, might not have been telling the truth.) The medina is a maze as mysterious to Oscar as the many branches of his own misfiring neurons. Circlings; dead ends; occasional, unexpected connections. Above it all, the call to prayer, rising and undulating, in a language he can’t interpret.Which means Oscar can’t have grown up here. Useful information. One country, Morocco, ticked off the li…
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I’ve been a mystery lover since I picked up my first Nancy Drew book. For me, reading mysteries is about enjoying the writing while trying to figure out “who done it.” As an adult, many of the mysteries I’ve been drawn to feature a main character coping with grief while trying to navigate their way forward. Sometimes there’s an added twist of the protagonist being falsely accused of the crime and the situation forces them to prove their innocence—in addition to bringing the guilty party to justice. With the worlds of these protagonists no longer making sense, they often take risks outside their norms, making life or death choices as grief fuels their quest. But by taking …
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This spring is so packed full with new and returning crime series, we decided to lay out a viewing guide to help you keep track of all the dates and streaming services. There’s almost no way you’re going to be able to watch all these shows, so plan carefully. Slow Horses Apple TV – Premieres April 1st Based on the widely acclaimed Mick Herron novels, Slow Horses follows the exploits of Slough House, where the bottomed-out agents of MI5 are sent to shuffle through the rest of their careers in quiet disgrace. But then, of course, something happens that brings them back into action. A compelling thriller bundled up with grace notes of dark humor, this adaptation boasts …
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“Adeena, can you please shut that off? If I have to listen to that Mariah Carey song one more time . . .” I scratched out the third mistake I’d made while trying to finalize the menu for the annual Shady Palms Winter Bash. It tied with the Founder’s Day Celebration as the biggest event in my tiny town of Shady Palms, Illinois (population: 18,751), and this was the first year my business—my dream—the Brew-ha Cafe, would be participating. Considering what a mess the Founder’s Day Celebration had turned out to be, I really needed to wow at this party. Despite obsessing over it for the past month, I had less than two weeks till the big bash and hadn’t finalized anything. My…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood (Simon and Schuster) “Burke rolls together the driving themes that have dominated his work—the inescapable presence of evil, the restorative power of love, the desecration of the planet, humanity’s long slouch toward Armageddon—into an intensely, heartrendingly personal exploration of grief.” –Booklist, starred review Kiersten White, Hide (Del Rey) “The suspenseful plot combines elements of Thomas Tryon’s classic Harvest Home, Netflix’s Squid Game, and the social commentary of Jordan Peele’s film oeuvre and mixes these with a revelator…
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This year’s top horror novels distinguished themselves not only through quality but with their use of metaphor to approach societal ills obliquely. Through the lens of horror, and the examination of monstrosity, we see the many ways that hatred, prejudice, and and the enforcement of conformity warp our communities and our own minds. These novels also function as a graceful way of lifting ourselves out of the traps of circular thinking that are so often the cause of repetitive, unwelcome, and problematic assertions. Some of the selections achieve this project through a hilarious skewering of modern morality, while others go deep into the darkness, only to lead us out with …
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A reptilian line of hills, the Serrata del Marchante, drags itself from the east like fossilized vertebrae. Beyond it lie the windings of a bleached and twisted labyrinth. Through the haze I have an impression of ravines and riven rock, but if I stare at them too long the lines detach and lose their form, dissolving into pale glare. My eyes cannot get a grip; it is too hot to see. Downward now on a slope of dust, past shattered canyons of grey and kidney-purple rock. The sun is high overhead. Trees are an extinct species. My boots crunch on gypsum shards which I mistake, at first glance, for broken windscreen glass. The ground is white, baked hard, interspersed with flak…
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Over the course of my life, I’ve read different types of crime fiction and mysteries from innocent cozies to gory thrillers, and while I’ve enjoyed many books along that spectrum, I find that I have liked, and remember, the lighter fare the best—ones that entertain me more than they stress me. That especially is true for books with memorable detectives, as I have attempted to craft in my novel Pignon Scorbion & the Barbershop Detectives. While there are many wonderful mysteries being written today, we should never stop reading classic books by the masters of the genre and experiencing the characters and environments they created. In spite of the twelve authors on my …
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David Corbett entered college never intending on becoming a novelist. In fact, he had no intentions at all—so he dropped out for a year to play bass in a bar band. He toured the Great Midwest, landing in such musical hotspots as Lima, Ohio, Ft. Wayne, Indiana and Midland, Michigan. It was a formative time for the nineteen-year-old Catholic boy who met many cocktail waitresses along the way. Returning to college, he majored in math, largely because of his professors. “They were the most humble, intelligent, honest, hard-working people I’ve ever been around—totally committed to their students, no gas bags, no phonies.” However, he soon found his talents drifting toward the…
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Western China in the late 600s of the seventh century. In a candle-lit bedroom of a shabby tavern on the outskirts of the Tang Dynasty capital Chang’an (now known as Xian) sits Dee Renjie. A man more commonly known simply as Judge Dee. He is the Imperial Circuit Supervisor of the Tang Empire, appointed by no-lesser personage than the Empress Wu herself. Judge Dee has a white beard, wears a blue robe and a black skull cap, while sipping his favourite Dragon Well tea. He is out of favour at court, a victim of the internecine infighting between the squabbling Wu and Li political clans throughout the troublesome middle years of the dynasty. He is a Confucian scholar-turned-ma…
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Women in peril is a common theme in fiction. Crafting storylines about damsels in distress has long been a trope in the thriller genre. That theme dominated the subject matter of pulp fiction way back in the twentieth century. A broad hint of the plot within those paperback novels was provided by the cover art: garish color images of attractive young women, invariably bound, eyes wide with terror, popping out of a form-fitting dress (usually red). From our contemporary perspective, were those women-in-peril stories lurid? Absolutely. Did they objectify women? Most certainly. But the market for those stories didn’t end with pulp novels. It still exists in fiction, nonfic…
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We’re all likely aware of examples of the law of unintended or unexpected consequences—when an unforeseen benefit, drawback, or perverse result flows from a purposeful societal policy or individual action. For example, on the benefits scorecard, the longtime pain reliever aspirin gained new purpose when found to help prevent heart attacks, and of course, there’s the blood pressure drug that found an entirely new purpose and worldwide fame as a little blue pill called Viagra. In the drawbacks category, there are many examples of societies introducing animals or plants for purposes of food (rabbits in Australia), decoration (kudzu in the US), or pest control (European sta…
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Growing-up in New York in the 1970s, parts of city had become heroin paradises. Whether the junkies were Vietnam vets who returned to the states with a monkey (addiction) on their back or homegrown hop heads who shot up in public school bathrooms, it was impossible to walk through town without seeing a runny nose, arm scratching, head nodding addict. As a boy dwelling between Hamilton Heights and Harlem, I saw my share of drug casualties hanging out in the middle of the block, standing over trashcan bonfires, lurking in doorways, slouching on Riverside Drive benches or roaming wild eyed in the pursuit of cash, smack and a place to get high. It wasn’t always easy to avoid …
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For writers of fiction and non-fiction, serial killers are the gift that keeps giving. Recently, the New Yorker profiled a French “researcher” and “expert” on serial killers who turned out not to be, and that lovable psychopath Dexter is back on TV for another round of sick mayhem. As a subgenre of both crime fiction and the true crime narratives, serial killer stories provide a vicarious pleasure for readers with the confidence that “it won’t happen to me.” But what if it did? What if the unsolved murder from 1978 of your beloved, vibrant sister may well have been committed by one? In the new book (published in Canada in 2020), Wish You Were Here, John Allore and Patr…
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The passing of comic book maestro Neal Adams is a real fist-to-the-gut for his many fans—and if you bought a super-hero comic anytime between 1967 and 2021, you were a fan. Since Michael Barson and Hector DeJean were among the throngs who consider Adams to be as talented as he was prolific, they thought they’d share some of our favorite career highlights of his. HD: I’ll go first: I’ve gushed about Deadman in the past, but it’s a jaw-dropping achievement, and more of a series of pulpy crime short stories than a typical superhero comic. The story is the now-familiar tale of a murdered man whose ghost is trying to track down his killer–and the ghost has the super power of …
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