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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As a girl, I believed in fairies. Did you? Did you believe in ghosts and goblins? There was a house in a forest near me that my friends and I were certain was inhabited by a witch. She had at least thirteen cats, and, for sure, I thought her cats—as well as my own—had mental powers beyond the human realm. Needless to say, as a child, I had an actively creative life. I loved making up stories. I didn’t need my parents or friends as an audience. I usually dug into my imagination to entertain myself. One of my favorite holidays of the year was Halloween, where I could dress up and “be” whatever magical creature I imagined. I was a genie. A mermaid. A witch. A fairy. Did y…
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The average victim of a kidnapping is dead less than 48 hours from the point of abduction. Captivity is an unusual choice for a murderer, both in life and in fiction. It requires resources, introduces variables, and produces a bizarre form of intimacy. What scares us most about captivity-centered narratives is that they break the immediacy and predictability of even the grisliest murders. The corpse is to be expected, the shock is rote. Captivity spools out endless time, interstitial between the disruption of normal life and the end—whatever the end may be. Captivity breaks the clock, and renders horrors we couldn’t have dreamt. I was working my way through college at a …
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There are many surprises to come for a newly published author, but one that surely seized Virginia’s attention was that almost immediately upon publication, Flowers in the Attic was banned from almost every high school library as well as adult ones, some bookstores, and especially by many parents who forbade their children— daughters in particular—to read the novel. What had Virginia revealed in the young female characters she captured that so unnerved or challenged these people who wouldn’t open the cover of one of her novels? What were they afraid to read? A young girl like Cathy Dollanganger coming alive, feeling things she had never felt—what woke her at night, “pu…
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I had always intended to be a writer of adult mysteries. When I conceived of the first novel I would eventually publish, it concerned a murdered hippopotamus at a zoo. I had imagined that one of the zoo’s veterinary staff would discover something suspicious during the autopsy and decide to investigate the crime. But I soon realized (with the help of my literary agent) that this novel might make more sense in the middle grade space, with a tween cracking the case. Now that I was setting out to write a mystery for young readers, I decided to reread the stories of three seminal junior detectives to see what made them successful as both novels and mysteries—ones that appeale…
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Being trans means that you compare a lot of things to being trans. Getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, for example— that feeling, “nobody is ever going to mention me or study my medical outcomes,” is so familiar that I sometimes have to remind myself that cis people also got the J&J vax. Fanfic, moving in fan circles, is similar: “I know how you talk about us when you think we’re not around.” Despite a lot of progress on this issue—Publishers Weekly wrote that my new novel, Dead Collections, “charmingly evokes the fanfic genre,” and you’d better believe that I’m carving that on my gravestone along with “***Starred Review***”—it’s still easy to dismiss a work o…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Rob Hart, The Paradox Hotel (Ballantine) “While there are enough science-fiction elements here to make this a novel that comfortably fits into that genre, the many crime fiction elements present make it a hybrid narrative that instead inhabits the interstitial space between science fiction and crime … This wildly entertaining combination, along with Hart’s relentless pacing, make this a rare hybrid that has something for everyone. Hart’s preoccupation with the future, which he started exploring in The Warehouse, his previous novel, takes center stage here, and the result is a tale of lo…
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During my awkward teenage years, I produced a lot of angst-ridden poetry on topics such as boredom and unrequited love. I kept those poems in a trunk with a stack of short stories that were also about things that seemed important to teenage me, like the unfairness of parents and teachers. I always thought that one day I would try to write a novel. I never once aspired to be a screenwriter in the glamorous world of film. It simply didn’t occur to me. Until I moved to Los Angeles. I escaped Kansas for California, where my older brother lived. He’d left a few years earlier to pursue a career in acting. At first, I had no interest in his obsession, the television and film b…
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April’s international titles are all distinguished by stunning writing and a noir sensibility, and include, unusually, two nonfiction titles. This month, take a journey from Mexico to Ukraine, France to Lebanon, Chile to an unnamed East Asian country, for a perfect reminder that the particulars of setting may be quite specific, but obsession, greed, envy, and need are shared the whole world over. Fernanda Melchor, Paradais Translated by Sophie Hughes (New Directions) In the luxury community of Paradais, two teenagers, one rich and overweight, the other poor and working as the community’s gardener, drink together and bond over their shared obsession with a woman in th…
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Imagine a walled garden buried deep in the English countryside where every flower or plant has been chosen to send you a message. Now imagine that the person who sent you the message is dead and that the key to deciphering the message has been lost. Loosely speaking, that’s the idea behind my debut novel, The Walled Garden. Halfway into my novel, I realized I needed a code that two gardeners writing to one another in the 1950s might use. Elizabeth Blackspear, a deeply reserved English poet who’s dealing with a potentially scandalous personal crisis, needs a way to express her feelings to her friend and only confidant, Amanda Silver, in California. I’ve always been fasci…
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The CrimeReads editors select their favorite new fiction this month. * Katie Gutierrez, More Than You’ll Ever Know (William Morrow) In Katie Gutierrez’s powerhouse debut, a woman with two husbands loses one to the violence of the other, and a true crime writer uncovers shocking secrets decades after. I love this book more than Delores “Lore” Rivera loves both her families and now you have to read this book to understand what I mean. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor Chris Offutt, Shifty’s Boys (Grove) Offutt’s powerful follow-up to The Killing Hills is just as rich in atmospherics and a master-class in the craft of crime fiction. Mick Hardin is back in th…
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Despite billionaires’ obsession with space tourism, I think I would pay even more to time-travel back to one of George Plimpton’s legendary parties. I’d shell out at least a grand to be a fly on the wall on a Friday night in the fifties or sixties, preferably one of the nights Truman Capote or Jackie Kennedy were parked on the sofa, or the time Doc Humes wrestled Norman Mailer on the balcony, or that evening when Terry Southern propositioned William Styron’s wife, Rose. Plimpton—blue-blooded Yale man, co-founder of The Paris Review and inventor of what he termed “participatory journalism”—had the money, the connections, and the charm to host a damn good party. The cockt…
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Welcome to the CrimeReads Streaming Guide, where we spotlight a very specific category of crime movies we think you should be watching right now. ___________________________________ As everybody knows, the best movie genre is the one in which a character gets to say “someone in this house is a murderer!” And since this is December and December is a time of giving, I’m rounding up a bunch of movies with that general vibe, for you to enjoy this month. Here are a bunch of movies where a party at an estate goes horribly wrong, probably because someone gets killed or something is stolen. What I would not give for a good film adaptation of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, or t…
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All I Want began with part of a story that my mom heard from her friend, who heard it from a friend of a friend, who heard it from someone else. A young woman and her husband bought a country house in northern Michigan. The rambling structure was once a retirement home for opera singers who had performed throughout the Midwest. The house needed a lot of work, but it was huge and weirdly beautiful. It was—or so it seemed—a steal. One night, while the house was being renovated, the woman spent a weekend alone there. Her husband was on business, in Chicago. At about seven on Saturday night, she was surprised and a little alarmed to hear a woman singing opera. The music wa…
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Welcome to the CrimeReads Streaming Guide, where we spotlight a very specific category of crime movies we think you should be watching right now. ___________________________________ Yeah, so, now is the winter of our discontent, right? Its January, and it’s not as cold as it should be by this time of winter thanks to the seasonal lag caused by global warming, which is terrible. But it will be very cold very soon, and that is also terrible. Plus, this is our third winter spent living through a pandemic, which does not look like it will be ending soon. I’m tired, you’re tired, I’m angry, you’re angry, and look, even Elmo has grown delirious with rage, so here are some nic…
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We’ll follow them anywhere. That’s the key. We want to visit Three Pines to consume a delectable meal with Armand Gamache or kick back listening to an LP jazz record in Harry Bosch’s L.A. hillside hideaway. We want to jet around in Nancy Drew’s little roadster or share a peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich with Kinsey Millhone. A series detective has to be clever—that’s a given—but intelligence alone is not enough to carry the weight of five, ten, or twenty novels. If you’re crafting your sleuth for the duration, here are five essential character traits to keep readers turning pages long past book one. They have a lot to learn. Most characters are created with a major miss…
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I was going to title this essay ‘Dragons, Butterflies, and Professional Wrestlers’, but then I realized that you’re not here for a college essay that deconstructs Thomas Harris’s use of William Blake’s art as a tool for metamorphosis. You’re here for the down and dirty on pumping up your story via character arc. Therefore, let us continue as we have begun: with your book’s metaphorical rump. When you alight on a story idea, it’s generally either in the form of a character, a setting, or a hook. Whichever one comes first, your job is to create a perfectly balanced triangle in which your story could only happen to this particular character in a setting that uniquely challe…
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Rob Hart hit the bookish bigtime with 2019’s The Warehouse, a dystopian thriller that exposes the seamy underside of late-stage capitalism. Prior to that, he penned the terrific five-book series about PI Ash McKenna. But all this time, Hart knew he had a time-travel book in him. In the just-published The Paradox Hotel, it’s 2072, and January Cole heads security at the government-run hotel, where tourists stay before their journeys to Ancient Egypt, the Renaissance, or the Battle of Gettysburg via the Einstein Intercentury Timeport. January used to be a time-traveling detective for the Time Enforcement Agency, but it turns out that too much professional mucking about in th…
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One of the most valuable qualities of books is their ability to introduce readers to perspectives very different from their own. Some authors play with that ability in unusual ways, taking on perspectives that are particularly strange or unfamiliar. In my novel Reptile Memoirs, part of the story is told from the perspective of a pet Burmese python. Here is a list of six other novels told from an unusual perspective. Ian McEwan, Nutshell Nutshell by Ian McEwan builds on the story of Hamlet but with a highly original twist. Trudy is married to Johnand is carrying his child, but she is secretly meeting with Claude with whom she is plotting to kill her husband. What they …
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Tonight in New York City, the Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of the 76th annual Edgar Awards. Congratulations to all the winners and nominees. ___________________________________ BEST NOVEL ___________________________________ WINNER Five Decembers by James Kestrel (Hard Case Crime) *** NOMINEES The Venice Sketchbook by Rhys Bowen (Amazon Publishing – Lake Union) Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby (Macmillan Publishers – Flatiron Books) Five Decembers by James Kestrel (Hard Case Crime) How Lucky by Will Leitch (HarperCollins – Harper) No One Will Miss Her by Kat Rosenfield (HarperCollins – William Morrow) *** Rhys Bowen on mystery series with a s…
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Even before I sat down to write Magpie, I knew I wanted there to be a stomach-flipping twist in the middle of the book. If writing is the great vocational love of my life, the longer relationship is the one I’ve had with reading. And as an inveterate reader, there is nothing I enjoy more than being swept up in a plot and then—suddenly—having all my preconceptions pulled out from under me with a deft authorial sleight of hand. It’s the literary equivalent of swimming in the sea and being lifted up by a large wave. There’s a thrilling sense of not quite knowing what will happen next, a moment of terror…and then you’re deposited safely back, feet once again grazing the sand…
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Tension is the jet fuel that propels a thriller. From the slow burn to the shocking reveal, I strive to pack as much of it as possible into my stories. I am often labeled as a medical thriller writer, but I don’t view myself as such, because I also write psychological thrillers and historical suspense. Besides, it’s a deep rabbit hole to fall down to try categorizing suspenseful novels into specific genres and sub-genres of mystery, thriller, or crime fiction. For the sake of this article, and my sanity, can we lump them all into one giant category of suspense fiction? Because, regardless of which of those sub-genres you put a novel into, I guarantee you’re not going to …
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Today was supposed to be the last day of the world, the day four horseman would ride across the sky on sinewy white steeds—sweat and spit falling to Earth like hailstones. If the Book of Revelation was any guide for what the end of the world would look like, I imagined that the bassy cacophony of those hooves would be so thunderous, people everywhere would drop to their knees, clapping hands over ears, horrified and awed by their power. The clouds—red and towering higher than we ever knew the sky could go—would part like the Red Sea to make way for the bringers of our doom. It is 7:02 pm Pacific Standard Time on July 22, 2020, and the world has not ended. Yet. I do not t…
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In crime fiction, there is always a victim. Someone is murdered or a body is found, and the police are called in to investigate. The murder victim generally leaves behind loved ones who mourn them. They want the crime solved, and the culprit brought to justice. On the other hand, someone wanted the victim dead, so chances are they weren’t all sweetness and light. That’s the line mystery writers walk. We generally want a victim sympathetic enough to make readers want to see justice served, but they also have to believe the victim did something bad enough to move the villain to murder. Generally. Once in a while you find a victim who lived their life in such a way that the…
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When we moved to Aix-en-Provence in 1997 it was a sleepy provincial town. You could park your car on the Cours Mirabeau, which at that time still had some mom-and-pop shops. Nowadays, only international chain stores can afford the rent on one of France’s most beloved main streets, and the obligatory underground parking garages can be full by noon. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence was only eight years old (I devoured it on the plane moving here), and Occitane didn’t yet have a shop on the rue Espariat, nor in airports around the world or in downtown Dubai and Tokyo and Helsinki. As a writer I find it completely normal to be inspired by the place where you live, and des…
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One of our favorite things, over at the CrimeReads desk, is when a character in a movie grabs a pen and uses it as a weapon in a fight scene. Don’t ask me why we enjoy it so much. Maybe it’s because we’re writers. I wouldn’t read too much into it. Anyway, for fun, we picked the ten best movie scenes where someone gets offed by a pen. What are the criteria? Well, first of all, I’m accepting “pencils” in lieu of pens. They might not be interchangeable on a Scantron, but they are for the purposes of this list. Second, we are not counting staking vampires or other undead entities with pencils, so this rules out From Dusk Til Dawn and Fright Night. Third, and this is the b…
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