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 this series, our editor Olivia Rutigliano rereads every Sherlock Holmes story, and puts together a small close-reading. This week: “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). ___________________________________ I reread “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” the ninth of the twelve stories that comprise The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), so that I might deliver a toast at a recent meeting of The Three Garridebs, the Sherlock Holmes society and scion group of the Baker Street Irregulars, where I was a guest. The toast was way too long, perhaps because the story is so strange and fascinating. It goes like this: Wat…
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From the other, all terrors flow. Since the advent of horror as a genre, fear of the unknown—and fear of what we think we know—has largely driven the narrative. Likewise, there is little more frighteningly unknown to us than that generalized monster commonly referred to as the other. You know the one—the monster with green skin and a flat head, the alien from a distant planet, the beast that drinks blood instead of red wine, the necromancer that conjures spirits in a foreign tongue. The one that doesn’t fit neatly into the small boxes in which our rigid frames of reference so comfortably exist is the one we’ve been conditioned to fear the most. As the film and genre exp…
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Ah, series. Most readers love them, and most writers love to write them. We get to know the imaginary world we’ve created, and it is fun and rewarding to slip back into that headspace and get caught up on what our protagonist has going on. I don’t believe most authors set out to write a series that lengthens from three or four to eight or more. We start out with what we know, then readers demand more so we happily oblige. Of course, we all hope the work we’ve put into planning out that series will be rewarded with avid readers, but what elements cause readers to care enough to keep reading? I decided to take a look at my favorites and why I love them. The Detective…
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Hanging on a rack in a local department store, a sweater can be seen as nothing more than an innocuous piece of everyday clothing. But a sweater worn by Aileen Wuornos gives an insight into the psychological and physical torture she put herself through while on death row. As well as believing the guards were going to steal her eyeballs postmortem, Wuornos was convinced that they were perpetually trying to make her sick by keeping her cell exceptionally cold (an accusation the guards always denied). She wore the same sweater almost every day to try and stay warm. Male inmate clothing, female inmate clothing, and female clothing worn by male inmates. The collection of Bran…
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Lately I have needed novels that not only keep but wholly command my attention, which means most books are out. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for a tender friendship or the patience to follow a trail to a dead body. I can’t bear to hope for an alternate universe—and I don’t want to read about the one I’m currently in, either. None of the usual formats are even remotely sufficient. I need to be captured, made into an active reader, solve a puzzle from the get-go in a world that looks like one thing but is gradually revealed to be another. I want tricks of the light, sleight of hand—anything that keeps my eyes on the ball. I want to follow a primary narrative underwr…
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Just Like Home is dedicated “to everyone who ever loved a monster.” It is the easiest thing in the world to love a monster. It’s easy to love a monster because love isn’t a decision. It’s no one’s fault that love happens. Emotions, urges, and impulses are themselves beyond our ability to control. Love in its many forms wells up out of the human spirit irrepressibly. Like anger or sadness or the desire to kill, it arrives without invitation or intention. Action might spring from emotion—love might lead to an expression of affection, anger might lead to violence, a powerful impulse might lead to a monstrous act. But on its own, love is no different from any other feeling. …
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This article is part of an ongoing series in which we ask contributors to anthologies to weigh in on the collection’s theme. The new anthology Other Terrors sets out to examine the fear of the other in society and turn that fear into understanding. What does “other” mean to you? Holly Lyn Walrath: My story “The Asylum” is about women living in an 1800s asylum and the horrors they endure. Every detail in the story is drawn from real events. I think society has long “othered” people who are “different” and categorized them as “insane”. Others are those who are “other than”—often people normative society has failed. This reality has been particularly horrific for wome…
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“For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination’s caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.” ― Joyce Carol Oates This well-known, incisive quote serves as a fitting introduction to the work of Nadine Matheson, a defense attorney in London who has just published her second Anjelica Henley thriller, The Binding Room. A sequel to her debut crime novel, The Jigsaw Man, a truly – and suitably – macabre exploration into the mind and actions of an unrelentingly evil serial killer who’s terror…
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At this point, after reading every one of Ruth Ware’s books as soon as I could get my greedy little hands on them, I would call myself a Ruth Ware fan. Nay, a Ruth Ware stan! Ware has been writing some of the most intelligent, incisive, well-paced psychological thrillers around since 2014, and her latest continues to uphold her impeccable standards. In The It Girl, a new student to Oxford becomes obsessed with her glamorous roommate, who never misses a party and always gets good grades. When her roommate is murdered, a porter takes the blame, but 10 years later, the question of true guilt is once again wide open. Who killed the It Girl? Did they want her or want to be her…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jennifer Hillier, Things We Do In the Dark (Minotaur) “Jennifer Hillier writes the kind of propulsive, no-holds-barred crime fiction that keeps you up at night, with a style and verve that is unmatched. Things We Do in the Dark is a timely, engrossing thriller that will keep you turning the pages until dawn’s light starts to creep through your bedroom window. Hillier is a master.” –Alex Segura Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Daughters of Doctor Moreau (Del Rey) “The imagination of Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a thing of wonder, restless and romantic, fearless in the face of genre, embracing…
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I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ordinary people being put in extraordinary situations. I’m ordinary, after all. I find it relatable. Could I land a plane? Fight off a shark? Stop a country-crippling cyber attack? (Spoiler: No, probably not.) But I like thinking about people who have, or who could, or who, quite unexpectedly, might. But these scenarios aren’t always heroic. What about ordinary people who find themselves in difficult situations who choose extraordinary (maybe not “good” extraordinary) solutions to those perceived problems? What do they do when they’re backed into a corner? What do they do when they decide enough is enough? Too many true crime s…
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As a road musician and entertainer many years ago, I stayed in a lot of hotels. Seven nights a week, I observed the tourists, the business class, the gamblers who came to play the ponies and the hustlers, swindlers, drunks and pick-up artists. I wrote songs about them, told jokes and now, along with seven other talented authors, we’re writing stories about them. Hotel California includes an original Jack Reacher story by Andrew Child (New Kid in Town), a story by Reed Farrel Coleman who has written the Robert Parker Jesse Stone series, a story by Heather Graham, John Gilstrap, Rick Bleiweiss, Jennifer Graeser Dornbush and Amanda Flower. The plots are wonderful, and the d…
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I have a recurring dream of dark spaces. I’m in a large house, always with a different layout. My journey through the rooms invariably brings me to a cave-like basement that seems never to end—a warren of small chambers full of jumbled objects, each space more sinister than the last. I don’t need a psychoanalyst to tell me that caves, basements, and crawl spaces are our ways of visualizing the dark places within our own minds. That’s why they’re perennially popular settings for fiction genres in which everything hinges on the revelation of terrible secrets. Basement dungeons are, of course, a mainstay of serial killer tales. But even when nobody gets locked up in the da…
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Twenty minutes into Michael Mann’s theatrical debut feature, Thief (1981), James Caan storms into an office and aims a gun—expertly wielded—at the head of a sleazy Chicago schmuck who refuses to give him the time of day and confess to stealing the payoff money owed Caan from his jewelry fence. “I am the last guy in the world that you want to fuck with.” Caan delivers these lines slowly, quietly, precisely. His speech is oddly formal with no contractions—a Windy City dialectical eccentricity—that he delivers seamlessly. He’s ice cold—and he’s terrifying. James Caan was a brute force. In a career that spanned seven decades in film and television, he brought an air of charg…
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I don’t know about you, but I am grateful for everything that makes me laugh these days. I am also seeking and finding humor wherever I can: my dog’s inability to understand the rules of fetch; reruns of The Good Place; reader reviews of Chelsea G. Summers’ A Certain Hunger. I’m also wondering why there aren’t more funny crime writers. Some of the greats were very funny: Elmore Leonard immediately comes to mind, and there is humor in classic noir of the mordant wit variety. Lisa Lutz’s Spellman books, Timothy Halloran’s Junior Bender series, Amy Gentry’s Last Woman Standing, Caroline Kepnes’s You books all have laughs along with the scary. Crime writers hear my plea: mor…
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I’ve long wanted to understand how family members can love and hurt one another at the same time. It was this idea that I held onto when I sat down to write my second novel, Half Outlaw. My goal was to write a story about a family with problematic views relating to race, ethnicity, gender, and identity because it was something that I, as a Mixed (half-Mexican, half-white) woman, was trying to understand within my own family. Somewhere along the way, I turned the fictional family into an all-white outlaw motorcycle club called the Lawless and gave the main character, Raqi, the same racial and ethnic identity as me. They say write what you know, but it was only through Ra…
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By early 1776, the upstart Americans had made considerable progress in taking the fight to sea. Between state navies, Washington’s navy, privateers from some individual colonies, and the nascent Continental navy, the colonies were demonstrating their maritime creativity and potency. But one major feature of their maritime strategy was conspicuous in its absence: privateers commissioned by Congress. Delegates had received many entreaties urging them to pursue this course. In late November 1775, for example, Simeon Deane, a Connecticut merchant, wrote to Silas, his brother and a congressional delegate, “I am desired by a number of gentlemen here, to ask, through your influ…
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A few weeks ago, I directed the television clicker to a Dateline NBC program. Of course, it was about crime! My spouse wasn’t in the mood for a crime show and complained that there was entirely too much crime genre coverage on TV in general. I responded that there was, in fact, a good reason for its frequency. Television has adopted the old newspaper adage—if it bleeds, it leads—as a programing directive. The plain and simple reality is that Americans have a penchant for crime shows and have for a long time. Dateline NBC began in 1992, while Cold Case Files goes back to 1999. My personal favorite, Forensic Files, debuted in 1996. It is still going strong! The Menendez br…
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Why Godot Wouldn’t Come With a clear head, I turned my attention to Beckett’s interviews and memoirs, and tried to clarify his dry and mysterious answers, word by word. By ‘memoirs’, I mean anecdotes related by people who knew him. When Waiting for Godot was first performed in London in 1953 and Peter Woodthorpe was cast as Estragon, he was twenty-two and studying chemistry at Cambridge University. He impressed even Beckett with his performance. During rehearsals, they attended a party and left it at the same time. They were both going in the same direction, so they shared a cab. Woodthorpe said to Beckett, ‘Everyone’s marching to a different drummer. What’s Waiting for …
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Let’s get something out of the way: what exactly do we mean by the term “locked-room mystery”? It’s a phrase I’ve seen used incorrectly in the past to refer to works in the similar but distinct “closed circle mystery” subgenre. What sets locked-room mysteries apart from the rest is an element of impossibility. As a matter of fact, I tend to use the term synonymously with “impossible crime,” meaning a story in which a crime (usually murder) is committed under seemingly impossible circumstances. Often these stories have an ambiance of the eerie and macabre, with apparently supernatural occurrences and foreboding atmosphere. However (and this is crucial) the whole thing is u…
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Earlier this year, when my second novel was published, an interviewer asked me which writer, alive or dead, I’d like to meet and under what circumstances. I wanted to say Susie Steiner in a pub somewhere in Cambridge, England, where Steiner’s novels are set. In my mind, I imagined it would be an opportunity to be in the presence, even for a short time, of the author who created detective Manon Bradshaw. I knew I’d need to be on my toes. From her social media and interviews, she came across as smart, brutally honest, and unlikely to suffer fools. In the end, though, knowing of her grave illness at the time, I decided the choice was inappropriate and named someone else. No…
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As someone who stormed through Succession, White Lotus and Big Little Lies with their jaw permanently attached to the floor, I will quite happily confess that I am a sucker for portrayals of ‘how the other half lives.’ Gossip magazines, documentaries, reality tv shows, and, of course, dark fiction: we as a society have an unquenchable thirst for lifting the lid on the lifestyles of the super wealthy, and we tend to have a particular vigour for when those super wealthy behave super appallingly. This is exactly the theme I touch upon in my novel, Out of her Depth, in which Rachel, an unassuming girl from a nondescript London suburb, lands a Summer job in the hills of Flo…
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“London” You only have to say the word, and like a powerful spell, an entire world is instantly conjured. If you happen to have visited, you’re probably picturing red buses, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and those guards with the funny hats. You may be picturing all those things anyway, even if you’ve never set foot in London just because you’ve seen it a million times on TV and in movies and so it all seems so familiar. Or maybe the spell conjures a different London for you, a city of fog and shadows, where horse drawn hansom cabs clip through crooked streets and men in top hats and capes make their way beneath the flickering glow of gaslights, the tips of their silver-to…
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I’ve been really enjoying Dark Fantasy this year—my theory as to why? As the world gets worse, magical thinking gets more potent, and as we lose faith in the future and the concept of innocence, fairy tales get more twisted. But you don’t need to be a nihilist to enjoy Liz Michalski’s Darling Girl—just a person interested unpacking the creepiness behind Peter Pan, a story about a boy kidnapping a girl and making her take care of him as his mother-wife. In Darling Girl, Holly Darling, the granddaughter of Wendy, has harnessed the power of Neverland as a youth serum for a beauty company, but the secret to the formula is her sickly daughter, the product of rape by Peter Pan.…
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When I was in my twenties, I traveled the world as if nothing could ever go wrong. I slept in an African beach hut for six months with twenty total strangers, took a crew job in Australia on some boat with a dad and two random male backpackers. I don’t say this proudly; it’s astonishing I even survived. What I will say, though, is that it’s given me a sharp eye into the world of travel thrillers. I’m now basing my writing career on my lifetime’s disastrous choices, and there’s limitless material to be had. It’s a glorious primetime, too, for stories of adventure. We’re all craving a little travel as we emerge from the dark, tight enclosure of the pandemic. We’re renewing…
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