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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A man in a suit enters a darkened, empty house. He sets his gun and keys on the table and walks over to the windows overlooking the ocean. He stares into the watery void, lost in his thoughts. That’s an iconic scene—among many—from Michael Mann’s “Heat,” which is widely regarded as a masterpiece 27 years after its release. Critics and cinephiles love picking apart the movie’s expertly choreographed robberies and gun battles, but it’s the quiet moments that provide the texture: Robber Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) at their most introspective, staring off into the L.A. night. “Heat 2,” the newly released novel by Michael Ma…
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There’s nothing more ironic than thrillers set at weddings. You take something typically romantic where everyone is expecting a happily ever after, and turn it around so you wish you’d never RSVPd in the first place! It’s this very contrast (and slight obsession with watching Say Yes To The Dress) that led me to write my own wedding thriller—You’re Invited. It has all the elements for wedded bliss— a lavish Sri Lankan wedding at the stunning, beachside Mt Lavinia Hotel, an instagram-worthy bride from an affluent Colombo family, and a handsome, successful groom. Oh, and murder, of course. Here are a few more thrillers set at weddings that I think you’ll enjoy. The Gues…
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My brother, John, is an actor. A few years ago, he was cast in an independent Irish horror movie called Beyond the Woods. Filming took place in a secluded house in the Cork countryside in the dead of winter, mostly at night, over the course of a couple of weeks, with the small cast and skeletal crew staying onsite. Before shooting could begin, the director had to visit the local Garda (police) station to say that if they got a report in the middle of the night of blood-curdling screams coming from the woods, it wasn’t someone getting murdered. It was just them, shooting their horror movie. It’s a hazard of my job (crime writer; yes, spare a thought for our parents but th…
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Slow cookin’, slow dancing, I’m a big fan. Slow first chapters, you’re probably going to lose me. You see, I’m a big believer in launching your first chapter with a major bang. Ever seen a James Bond movie? Before you’ve had your popcorn good old Bond is zooming along the Autobahn in his Aston Martin where—kaboom!—he gets shot at and skids into a ditch. Undaunted, 007 dons a pair of skis, schusses down a glacier, and ends up piloting a Russian MiG while heat-seeking missiles buzz around him like errant mosquitos. Now that’s what I call a thrilling, reach-out-and-grab-ya opening. And I truly appreciate that same type of nail-biting excitement in the opening chapters of the…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Amanda Jayatissa, You’re Invited (Berkley) “This story is deliciously messy…Buckle up. This is a psychological thriller with corkscrew-tight twists and surprising depth as the novel explores issues of class, identity, and friendship.” –Oprah Daily Zac Bissonnette, A Killing in Costumes (Crooked Lane) “A Killing in Costumes has all the hallmarks of a great cozy: a unique setting, an intriguing cast of characters and an exciting mystery.” –Bookpage Martin Walker, To Kill a Troubadour (Knopf) “Smoothly integrated into Bruno’s investigation is information on a multitude of sub…
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Damascus – capital of Syria and the oldest continuous capital city in the world. The ‘City of Jasmine’ is of course sadly bomb damaged and war-torn these days, its two million population in dire straits and so many forced to flee as refugees. But still, the city has a long history from the third millennium BC and not least, a lot more recently, as a plaything of competing Empires with the French and British vying for control. Fertile ground for some good crime writing. Damascus is also a major cultural centre of the Levant, the Eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. The master of the pre-war accidental spy genre Eric Ambler wrote The Levanter in 1971. It deals with mach…
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Quick Confession Let me start by admitting something that may be a little shameful, a little anathema, on a site like this: I’m not a crime fiction aficionado. Honestly, I read other genres much more extensively. I’ve never read Agatha Christie (gasp!), Lee Child, Gillian Flynn, Harlan Coben, Dean Koontz, James Patterson, John Grisham etc. Sadly, the list goes on. Are you still reading? Am I still invited to this club? Maybe, maybe not. Let me also say, I fully enjoy the thriller/crime/mystery genre. I love Tana French, Kate Atkinson, and Val McDermid; I especially enjoy thrillers that toe the line between other genres like Julie Phillips’ Disappearing Earth or Jeff Va…
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Chances are, your favorite suspense novels are stories filled with unexpected twists and turns; pulse-pounding, page-turning action; and gritty, dark discoveries. But even the darkest thriller is balanced with a sliver of light. And what better to bring in that light than love—a compelling love interest who stands by the main character amidst all the chaos. Many readers have commented on the creep factor of my new novel, Iris in the Dark, when the main character hears a chilling voice in the night while staying at a remote hunting lodge on the South Dakota prairie. But just as many readers have raved about the love interest, the swoony lodge caretaker, Sawyer. To me, ea…
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As a writer of speculative fiction, by definition, I make things up. I imagine things into existence, at least on the page. It’s an act of creating something from nothing, and it’s limited only by one’s imagination. There’s a kind of beautiful of freedom in that. Andy Weir has never been to Mars, but that didn’t stop him from writing The Martian. Tom Clancy was never in the military, but that didn’t stop him from becoming one of the most prolific military thriller writers to ever work in the genre. Octavia E. Butler never had to trek across countless miles of lawless wasteland fighting for her life in the apocalypse, but that didn’t stop her from writing Parable of the So…
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In Bodies Bodies Bodies, the new film from director Halina Reijn and writers Sarah DeLappe and Kristen Roupenian (of “Cat Person” fame), a group of mean, rich, and very high twentysomethings weather a storm in a huge mansion, believing one among them to be a killer after the lights go out and a party game goes awry. When wealthy, newly sober Sophie (Amandla Steinberg) brings her new girlfriend Bee (Academy Award-nominee Maria Bakalova) to her friend’s manor house for a super-sleepover, not only are the party-attendees surprised to see Sophie and meet Bee (Sophie is briefly excoriated for not responding to their group chat), but they’re also dealing with their own petty f…
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When I first set my sights on writing crime fiction, it was a no-brainer that it would have to be a culinary mystery. Not only have I been obsessed with food and cooking since my teens, but I even returned to school as an adult to obtain a degree in culinary arts (while working as an attorney, mind you—but that’s a whole other story). Now, with five books in the Sally Solari culinary mystery series under my belt, I find myself looking back to my time in cooking school and wondering, did that experience have an impact on my later vocation as an author of mystery novels? It seems obvious, of course, that being comfortable handling a filleting knife and understanding what …
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When Cop Land came out in August of 1997, the vast majority of attention was, understandingly and deservedly, given over to star Sylvester Stallone’s turn as sad sack suburban sheriff Freddy Heflin, a role which required the Italian Stallion put on 40 pounds and dig deep into his acting chops—something he hadn’t really done since First Blood, 15 years earlier. It was widely hailed as his finest performance since the original Rocky, if not ever, and for a long time afterwards, Cop Land was best remembered as the movie that should have nabbed Sly an Oscar for Best Actor (or at the very least, a nomination), but not much else. Twenty-five years on, however, the tide has slo…
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While crime novels, especially those with courtroom scenes, are the most satisfying to read, they’re the most challenging to write. I say this not just as a long-time aficionado but as an author. After publishing four family dramas—lots of feelings, not much plot—I wanted to level up in my fifth. In When We Were Bright and Beautiful, a white, uber-wealthy Princeton athlete is accused of raping his former girlfriend. His sister Cassie narrates the story, and we follow the fallout on their family, from indictment through verdict. In my rendering, a series of twists culminates in a courtroom reveal that casts everything that came before in a different light. By the end, the …
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Imagine being arrested for killing someone. Imagine that there are witnesses to the crime, that there is evidence, a trail and trial. The extensive details are presented before a jury of your peers and you are found guilty without a shadow of a doubt. And now imagine that you cannot remember any of it. Not the murder, not what led to it, not even who the victim was. Imagine being put in prison for years, decades, waiting to be executed, and you sit there day in and day out, alone, scared, confused, trying to figure out what exactly you did and why. You feel like you were framed. It’s a slow torture. You beat your head against the wall trying to remember, trying to put the…
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Around the year 2000 I had an idea for a book about British aristocrats who aided Hitler during WWII. I sent the idea to my agent who replied with a scathing letter that nobody was interested in WWII, and it was disgusting to show people having an easy time in the British countryside when so many were suffering on the Continent. So, I put the idea aside. Many years and a new agent later, I found it again and decided it would still make a good story. I shared it with my current agent who loved it. It was snapped up by Lake Union (Amazon’s women’s fiction line) and came out as IN FARLEIGH FIELD. It has since sold half a million copies. Since then, I have written THE TUSC…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Winnie M. Li, Complicit (Emily Bestler Books) Winnie Li stunned the crime and literary worlds with her intense debut, Dark Chapter, based around a traumatic incident in the author’s own life and nominee for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Now she’s back with another story that mines her own experiences, this time centered on the toxicity of the film industry. Complicit is both a # thriller and a complex literary achievement that sheds an important light on Hollywood’s darkest secrets and brings an essential and underrepresented perspective—that of an Asian-American fi…
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I was in a canoe on the Edisto River in South Carolina with my dad when I stumbled onto a crime story that would, over the course of many years, shake me to my core. It was a reverse murder mystery. I was presented with the killer, but not a victim. It was raining and we were sheltering beneath a bridge when I asked him why his father, who was white, had the name Hernando. My dad told me that Hernando’s father, Dr. I.M. Woods had to hide out in Texas for a time after the Civil War and a Spanish speaking woman saved his life and he promised to name a child after her husband. “Why did he have to hide out after the war?” I asked. “He killed a man,” Dad said, looking away…
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Nothing annoys me more than hearing people describe watching movies as a “brainless” activity—as if it involves somehow turning off your brain’s circuitry and relying solely on your eyeballs to coast through the movie’s run time. Plot twist: your brain is very much involved, engaged, and making the experience for you. Nothing makes this engagement more apparent than watching horror movies, where the filmmakers are crafting scares with your brain’s and body’s most likely reactions in mind. Let’s start with a scene that appears in almost every horror flick ever made. Our protagonist is home alone at night, and the house is dark. They hear sounds they can’t explain, so they…
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It is safe bet that not too many people know about the stifling Tehran night in August 1953 when the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service conspired to overthrow a democratically elected government and its profoundly popular leader, with the enthusiastic participation of right-wing elements in the Iranian military and the unequivocal backing of President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Churchill. But we perhaps should. It was a harbinger of events to come—all over the world—and remains to this day one of the great examples of the law of unintended consequences. Given that it took place in the heart of the Middle East, you’ll be much less surprised to learn—if it i…
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All reporters have to learn to deal with sources who lie. Lies were at the heart of my last book, I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad (co-written with Brandon Soderberg). The story centered around a group of plainclothes cops who lied on warrants, in arrests, and on the stand, robbing from drug dealers and selling the drugs. They lied to each other—about how much money they found, what happened to the drugs, and on overtime slips that allowed them to fleece the citizenry as well. When all of this came tumbling down with a federal RICO indictment in 2017, those with reasons to lie proliferated. Each of the eight cops initially arreste…
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I have always considered my childhood to be rather idyllic, complete with family bike rides, Monopoly marathons, my dad reading from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe after dinner, my mom making me into my bed on laundry day. Yet, even as a child, I knew my family had skeletons in the closet—things which, without anyone having to say so, were clearly to be kept quiet: my uncle’s mental illness and subsequent death by suicide, my grandfather’s tendency to drink too much in the small bar area he called “purgatory,” that stood between his workroom and my grandmother’s kitchen, the fact that the sound of ice clinking in a glass signaled my own father had arrived home. I …
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I wish I had a better reason, but the story of how I came to be interested in stories that feature collective narration is a bit petty, really. I was speaking to a good female friend who had recently started dating a man who, as it happens, I had also dated many years before (it adds a certain frisson to say that as a bisexual woman I don’t tend to fall for straight women, but it just so happened that I had an active crush on this straight female friend, because, hey—sometimes life just isn’t complicated enough). I talked to my female friend about the unusually warm weather. She said, declaratively, ‘We’ll go to the pool this weekend, it’ll be beautiful’. ‘Great!’ I said.…
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Long before undertakers organized themselves into the professional group of funeral directors, tradesmen undertakers and families battled a group of ghoulish men called resurrectionists who operated by the light of moon. The resurrectionists were body snatchers, yanking freshly buried remains from the earth and selling them to medical men. Body snatching was such an uncontrolled problem that it led to the invention of the burial vault, a device still used today. The tipping point in the ghoulish behavior was a sensational body snatching splashed across the front pages of every major newspaper. The incident involved a president’s son and a future president, and it uncover…
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Many of us are familiar with the men of the Manhattan Project: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, dozens of male scientists rolling up their shirtsleeves in the Nevada desert. You may not be aware that thousands of women also contributed to the project, both in developing the science that made it possible and in running the top secret facilities where the atomic bomb was made. The Woman With Two Shadows follows Lillian, who travels to the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee where her twin sister Eleanor works on the Manhattan Project as a calutron girl. In order to find her twin, Lillian must pretend to be her. While researching Oak Ridge and the time period, I learne…
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Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are no strangers to comics and noir, blending both primal elements of story into everything they do—whether it’s mainstream superhero work or their more recent, and more personal, forays into creator-owned, character-driven crime comics. Brubaker and Phillips have worked together so long they’ve become synonymous, a pair of names that complete each other, building a legendary reputation with series like Criminal, Fatale, Kill or be Killed, Incognito, Bad Weekend, and more. Their latest collaboration, while still firmly entrenched in the dark corners of graphic novel crime, marks a departure of sorts. Instead of releasing their stories via m…
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