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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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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The following is an excerpt from Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War, in which Joseph Weisberg, former CIA officer and the creator of the hit TV series The Americans, makes the case that America’s policy towards Russia is failing—and we’ll never fix it until we rethink our relationship. ___________________________________ Cherkashin In 2004, a former KGB officer named Victor Cherkashin published a memoir called Spy Handler. Cherkashin had run two of the most devastating moles in the history of U.S. intelligence, CIA officer Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen. It wasn’t the stories in the book about Ames and Hanssen that grabbed me, thoug…
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Home is supposed to be our refuge: the one place we can retreat when the outside world becomes overwhelming. But what happens when our home is no longer a safe place? Where can we go when the very walls we sleep inside twist against us? These eight books explore just that: from external threats beating at your door to the very building itself becoming corrupted, there’s no place of safety inside these stories. A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay Merry recounts her childhood where, infamously, her sister became the subject of a documentary on a possible possession. When teenage Marjorie claims to hear voices and conventional medical treatment fails to help, her p…
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One of my favorite activities in a library is roaming through the stacks and finding a book I didn’t know I needed in my life. Such happy accidents! There are great reads waiting to be discovered around virtually every corner. Look! Here’s a nonfiction book about badly behaving women in history that I haven’t seen before. I love those books. And I didn’t realize that a certain bestselling author had a new book out. And that’s just a short summary from my last trip to the library. I always bring a large tote bag with me to the library to fill with books. Browsing bookshelves at a library or a bookstore is one of my best ways of discovering new reads. However, our public…
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Max Allan Collins, a three-time winner of the PWA “Shamus” Award, writes the Nathan Heller historical thrillers. His graphic novel Road to Perdition became an Academy Award-winning Tom Hanks film. His produced screenplays include Mommy and The Last Lullaby, based on his Quarry novels, also the basis of a recent Cinemax series. He has developed a dozen Mike Hammer novels from Mickey Spillane’s files and (with wife Barbara Collins) writes the award-winning Antiques mystery series. He has scripted the Dick Tracy comic strip, Batman, and co-created Ms. Tree and Wild Dog. His New York Times and USA Today bestsellers include Saving Private Ryan, American Gangster, Air Force One…
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There it was, the looming shadow of the mountains. A petrol station flashed by out of the corner of his eye, followed by yet more trees. He’d needed to pee for over two hundred kilometers by then. He pulled off onto a side road and stumbled out of the car, through the wildflowers on the verge. Turned towards the forest and relieved himself. There was something about the scents. The flowers along the edge of the ditch. The dew in the grass and the haze in the evening air, the buttercups and fireweed and cow parsley, standing a meter tall. Or maybe it was timothy grass, what did he know. He just recognized the smell. The tarmac was bumpy with frost damage, and soon gave o…
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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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The first time anyone referred to me as a spy was 1986. I was living in the Middle East and meeting a host government official whom I had been cultivating for several months. “Bilal” had invited me to his house late in the evening, as he liked to do, when the streets were quiet, the household staff gone, and his family busied themselves in their part of the large house. As was our custom, we sat on his veranda, sipping the Johnnie Walker Black I regularly gifted him, eating nuts, and looking at the stars. Bilal liked to talk. And the first thing you noticed was his ear to ear smile while relating stories, telling jokes, or simply cracking wise at your expense. Playful …
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In late October 1965, Mehdi Ben Barka, an exiled Moroccan politician, was hustled into a Peugeot by two French vice cops outside the Brasserie Lipp in Paris. He had no reason to mistrust the French police. These police were off the clock, however. He was never seen again, alive or dead. At the time of his abduction, Ben Barka was organizing the Tricontinental Conference of newly decolonized nations, scheduled for January 1966 in Havana. He was a key figure in the Non-Aligned Movement, a colleague of Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Amílcar Cabral. In Morocco he had been sentenced to death in absentia, with eleven other politicians, for his putative role in a plot against Kin…
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The CrimeReads editors pick the month’s best new books out in paperback. * Roberto Saviano, Savage Kiss Translated by Anthony Shugaar (Picador) There’s not an ounce of Mario Puzo’s romanticism in this grimly riveting tale of crime and punishment. –Kirkus Reviews Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Scorpion’s Tail (Grand Central) “Preston and Child have designed an intricate thriller that takes several twists and turns, but never totally diverts from the crux of the story. This is a series that demands attention.” –New York Journal of Books Sophie Hannah, The Killings at Kingfisher Hill: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (William Morrow) “Yet again, the d…
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There are always shoes. No matter what the event—earthquake, flood, accident, fire, or bombing—the shoes are everywhere. Sometimes, they contain a foot—or part of a foot—because the dead are often separated not just from their clothes, but from their own extremities. There are always treasures, too. In the case of Swissair Flight 111, insurers searched the bottom of the Atlantic for literal treasure: more than ten pounds of diamonds, rubies, and other precious stones that had been lying in the cargo hold alongside an original Picasso and fifty kilos of paper money. But the treasures I look for are far more valuable. They are the personal treasures: wedding rings, heirl…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice (Pamela Dorman Books) “Osman follows The Thursday Murder Club, his supremely entertaining debut, with an even better second installment. . . A clever, funny mystery peopled with captivating characters that enhance the story at every quirky turn.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review) James Queally, All These Ashes (Polis) “Queally, himself a former crime reporter for the Star-Ledger in New Jersey, brings both reporting expertise and novelistic flair to this second Avery mystery. Absorbing throughout.” Booklist (Starred Review) Loren Estleman, C…
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Science fiction readers recognize the old distinction between stories that are rigorous about scientific plausibility (“hard” SF) and stories that are more fantastical or philosophical (“soft” SF). And writers know wherever there’s a binary, there’s artistic opportunity in breaking it. I appreciate stories that scramble the mechanical and the mystical. By treating fantastical machines, algorithms, and social processes with what feels like hard-SF rigor, we can approach ideas in a fresh way. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, “psychohistorians” use mathematics to predict the futures of entire societies (a riff, perhaps, on Marxist dialectical materialism). In Cixin Li…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new nonfiction crime books. * Douglas London, The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence (Hachette) Douglas London spent a decades-long career with the CIA, serving overseas, in conflict zones, and developing something of a specialty in recruiting foreign assets to spy on their countries. In his memoir, London brings out the expected spy stories, with a fine eye for detail and an ability to explain the craft in a compelling way, but even more he offers sharp insights into the psychology of espionage, rendering a vivid portrait of individuals operating (and double operating) under the most tense circum…
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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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It’s officially fall in the northern hemisphere and you might well be thinking this is a good weekend to stay indoors with a bottle of something earthy and the bounty that is the contemporary international streaming scene. For me, late September is a time for things that are unusual, inventive, and in that vein I’m personally going to be watching Reservation Dogs this weekend. It’s not exactly an international thriller, or else it would be the answer to the headline above, but by all means you, too, should feel free to enjoy Reservation Dogs, now streaming on FX on Hulu, since it is sort of a crime show, after all, filmed on location in northern Oklahoma and following the…
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Thomas Byrnes was still in his Sunday best on the morning of October 27, 1878, when he heard that the Manhattan Savings Institution had been robbed. It was unimaginable that this venerable bank, located at the corner of Bleecker Street and Broadway, within Byrnes’s own Fifteenth Precinct, had been breached. Thought to be an impregnable fortress, it featured a maze of bolts, locks, and thick steel doors that opened to a steel vault with a separate safe within. In addition to holding millions in cash and securities, the bank was a repository for the money, jewelry, and other valuables of wealthy New Yorkers. Just as astonishing was the reported haul: nearly $3 million in s…
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When Keats described autumn as a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” he probably didn’t have doomsday religious cults, deathbed confessions, and Silicon Valley intrigue in mind, but that (and so much more!) is exactly what’s in store for this fall. So grab your sweater, a warm beverage of your choice (no judgment if it’s the much-pilloried PSL), and your headphones, because autumn 2021 is a veritable buffet of just-in-time-for-Halloween true-crime goodness. The Dropout: Elizabeth Holmes on Trial (ABC News) and Bad Blood: The Final Chapter (Three Uncanny Four) Okay, I know these are two separate podcasts, but since they both 1) cover the same topic and 2) …
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Whenever I’m asked about my favorite reads, my go-to recommendations are almost always YA mysteries. I have an expensive habit of auto-buying any and every new release in the genre and devouring the books the moment I get my hands on them! My own YA mystery, This Is Why We Lie, is set to be released September 21st with Inkyard Press. The story follows Jenna and Adam as they race against time to solve the murder of a local teenager. With prep school sandals and small-town secrets, someone will take the fall. In the lead up to the release of This is Why We Lie, I thought I’d take a more in-depth look at some of the YA prep school mysteries that I’ve been binging lately . …
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In one of the best considerations of mystery writing that I’ve heard, American historian Karen Halttunen argued in a lecture that the genre has its foundations in public execution. Murderers used to be put to death on a public scaffold, and they were expected to confess their crimes to the crowd before they died. Often these confessions (or imagined versions of them) were then made into ballads that were printed and sold to the public. With the decline in these executions, there was a decline in public confessions, and the gap was filled by mysteries: people need to know what prompted a murderer to murder, and the detectives in mystery stories fill that need for them. Mo…
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“Tell me, tell me Delia, how can it be/You said that you loved another man, and you don’t love me” —Reese Du Pree, “One More Rounder Gone” Time can erase. Time can bury. Time can shift what was known into what was thought, what was felt. It has a way of doing that. It has a way of taking names, and dates, and faces, and shifting them, combining them, until all that’s left is story and myth. It’s happened throughout history, but rediscovery can fill in the spaces that time has left behind. Take the story of Delia Green, her name has been on the lips of singers through history— Josh White, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Harry Belafonte, among many others. But her life? That’…
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Edwin Torres turned 90 this year. The author of Carlito’s Way, Q&A, and After Hours, Torres is the Granddaddy—¡El Abuelo!—of Latinx crime fiction in the U.S. For a brief while in the 1970s, Torres picked up the mantle of Chester Himes and Miguel Piñero, keeping the door cracked open for crime fiction writers who happen to be ethnically diverse. Without Torres we might not have gotten Ernesto Quiñonez’ Bodega Dreams, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera’s Lupe Solano series, or even Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress. “His books are a brass knuckle to the groin,” said Richard Price, author of Clockers. “There isn’t a false note on any page.” Torres’ books spawned two viscer…
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The summer is officially over, the days are beginning to turn cold, the leaves are falling, and the pumpkins proliferating…which all means it’s time to put on your flannels, brew some tea, and cozy up with a chilling international thriller or two! September brings plenty of new international releases, including Scandi noir, French historical fiction, and an Italian meta-mystery. Max Seeck, The Ice Coven Translated by Kristian London (Berkely) Max Seeck burst onto the international scene with last year’s chilling debut, The Witch Hunter. Now, the story continues, as Seeck’s heroine tries move past her encounter with a coven of murderous witches by plunging into a new…
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Wesley Diggs was a tall, slender Black man who owned several bars in Harlem. A college graduate, he’d once been a hell of a b-ball player on courts throughout Harlem and had worked as an electrical engineer. In school, he developed an entrepreneurial spirit that led to him opening several bar businesses and a stationery store. One chilly Saturday afternoon in 1975, he drove across the George Washington Bridge, going home to his wife Jean and four kids in Teaneck, New Jersey for the first time in three days. Between work and mistresses, Diggs was spending less time at home than usual. It was December 6th and the following day was the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Christmas…
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I am an epic fantasy writer by trade, but I cut my teeth on mysteries. My reading teeth that is. When I was 7, I was gifted a complete set of The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner right before summer vacation. The first evening of vacation I decided to open the eponymous novel and found myself sucked into this series of children who solve mysteries. It was the first (of many) series that I binge read—waiting for my Mom to tuck me in and then hiding under the covers with a flashlight, reading long into the night until finally I couldn’t keep my eyes open. (Reader take warning, the next school year a teacher told us an apocryphal story of Kipling reading by candl…
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