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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“Today, though, he worries that it is hard for white men to get writing gigs in film, theatre, TV, or publishing. The problem is just ‘another form of racism. What’s that all about?’ he muses. ‘Can you get a job? Yes. Is it harder? Yes. It’s even harder for older writers. You don’t meet many 52-year-old white males.'” –James Patterson: white male writers are victims of ‘racism’” The Sunday Times Ah, the classics. He’s since apologized and the news cycle has slogged on, but James Patterson’s comments were familiar to many of us. I’ve heard variations of this complaint from fellow novelists for years now, always from white men. It usually comes after they’ve confided …
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I’ve long had a love for an unconventional woman, perhaps because I consider myself to be one. I blame my mother. Growing up, I stole her books as soon as she finished with them. I immersed myself in the world of the female PI, fascinated by these independent women who didn’t need husbands and refused to give up the job they loved, even at the risk of their finances or lives. I’ve never had the aspiration to follow in their footsteps exactly, but I’ve always wanted to create characters like them; women who don’t always follow the rules of society. Lena Aldridge started off as an unnamed woman in my first novel, This Lovely City, published in the UK. My protagonists, a co…
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Our fascination with twins (and particularly identical twins) likely dates back to the dawn of humankind, as evidenced by Romulus and Remus, Artemis and Apollo, Shakespeare (Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors), the Cheeryble Brothers in Nicholas Nickleby, all the way through to contemporary literature. Monozygotic (aka identical) twins make up approximately 0.3% of the world’s population. But, thankfully, they are significantly more prevalent in crime fiction. When I ponder fictional twins the first image in my head is that of the Grady twins in the Overlook Hotel. Stephen King’s The Shining and Stanley Kubrik’s screen adaptation are both seminal pieces of work. The…
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Chris Cander found national success writing character-driven novels whose struggles play out in remote and evocative locales. The USA Today-bestseller has transported readers to such places as West Virginia, Chicago, Soviet Russia, and the California desert. But for her fourth novel, A Gracious Neighbor, Cander turned her novelistic gaze on her own neighborhood: West University, an affluent tiny city within the sprawling expanse of Houston Texas, home to business executives, doctors from the nearby medical center, and professors from Rice University—the U in the titular WEST U. At home during the pandemic, Cander found inspiration in her surroundings, transposing the 1917…
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Near the end of his enthralling 2019 book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe recalls the frustration he felt while trying to solve a cold case that had stymied detectives for almost fifty years. His main concern? That those who knew “the whole truth of this dark saga”—the 1972 kidnapping and murder of Jean McConville, a Belfast mother of ten—“would take it with them to their graves. Then, just as I was completing the manuscript, I made a startling discovery.” His digging essentially solved the case. If Say Nothing confirmed that he’s among the finest true-crime storytellers working today, Keefe’s new book suggests he…
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Always versatile, a writer of contemporary noir, domestic thrillers, horror, graphic novels, and both Marvel and DC tie-in novels, Jason Starr has now turned to the sort of alternate-reality nightmare story Philip K. Dick might have dreamed up. A criminal attorney named Steven Blitz, who lives in the New York City suburbs, is in the middle of a murder trial for his serial killer client. At the same time, he is undergoing a difficult period in his marriage. When his wife, one evening, declares that she wants a divorce, Steven leaves the house and drives away to spend the night someplace else. A stop at a local gas station leads to an altercation with a man, and a sudden…
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There’s a lot of good crime tv happening right now. In the interest of helping you sort out viewing schedules, we bring you a monthly guide to what’s coming next. We Hunt Together Showtime – Premieres July 3rd (season 2) The British detective series returns, after a bit of a hiatus, for its second season to air in the States. Serial killers, emotional traps, sexual attraction – all still at the center of the series, which has a bit of style and wit to it, setting it apart from the usual fare with an interesting perspective and a charismatic detective pairing. Black Bird Apple TV – Premieres July 8th One of the year’s most anticipated crime shows, this one comes …
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London, June 11, 2016 Backstage at London’s Wembley Arena, Dr. Ruja Ignatova was nervously pacing up and down, dressed, as usual, in a full-length ball gown. I will double your coins, I will double your coins. She could hear the whoops and cheers of thousands of adoring fans in the background. Ruja wasn’t usually nervous before events, but today she was announcing something that went against every rule of financial investment—even the idea of money itself. If she couldn’t convince the crowd, who’d already invested a fortune in her promise of a global “financial revolution,” the whole thing would be over. Up to a billion dollars were at stake. Her second-in-command,…
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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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Kellye Garrett interviews Cheryl Head about her new novel, Time’s Undoing, a searing and tender novel about a young Black journalist’s search for answers in the unsolved murder of her great-grandfather in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, decades ago—inspired by the author’s own family history. Time’s Undoing is both a passionate tale of one woman’s quest for the truth and, as newfound friends and supporters in Birmingham rally around Meghan’s search, the uplifting story of a community coming together to fight for change. Time’s Undoing is forthcoming on March 7, 2023. Cheryl Head (she/her) writes the award-winning, Charlie Mack Motown Mysteries whose female PI protagonist…
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The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 is thought to have killed over 50 million people worldwide. Yet, while the First World War provides the background for countless novels, the pandemic features in very few contemporary fictional accounts. Even modern writers tend to skate over this devastating episode. In Downton Abbey, Spanish Flu seems to last the length of a dinner party, although someone does die (after having been pronounced perfectly healthy by Dr Clarkson, the world’s worst doctor). I thought about this when planning my fourteenth Ruth Galloway novel. The previous book, The Night Hawks, ended in December 2019 so I knew that in the next instalment I had to face the p…
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“How can they call it a detective story? The thing ends like a Monty Python skit where they drop a 16-ton weight on Eric Idle,” I protested. “Edgar Allan Poe is christened the Father of the Detective Story because an escaped orangutan swung into an apartment and smashed the victims apart?” Professor Houtz likely wanted to smash me one in the kisser, but he contented himself with theatrically rolling his eyes and ambling back to the blackboard. It was my final year of high school, and my elderly World Lit instructor was having us college-bound twits read The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The class had collectively shrugged in agreement with me about the cop-out ending—it had…
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In the Robert Altman film, The Player, Tim Robbins stars as Griffin Mill, a big-time Hollywood producer who spends his days listening to pitches from aspiring movie directors and screenplay writers. Mill’s claim to fame? Only 12 out of every 50,000 pitches he hears ever get the studio nod. Why? Because in Hollywood, there are no tales that haven’t previously been told. So the enterprising supplicants package their two-minute story summaries by stringing movie tropes together like rosary beads. A comedic romp about a clueless American who travels to Africa and becomes worshiped as a god by a pagan tribe is pitched as a hybrid of Cactus Flower and Out of Africa. Mill simpli…
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It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for! Or, one of them. The sequel to Knives Out has a title and a release date. The film will be called Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and it will make its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, which takes place from September 8th to 18th, 2022. While the plot of the film is currently unknown, we do know that it finds Daniel Craig’s gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc in Greece, where he encounters a new mystery. The cast includes Janelle Monáe, Edward Norton, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Jessica Henwick, and Madelyn Cline. Stay tuned for more of our Knives Out series coverage. View the ful…
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Caution! Poison Snake On Premises! So read a handwritten sign posted at the entrance of our house. Our house was in the outskirts of Tokyo, in a town called Ōizumi in a district called Nerima. The huge Hikari-ga-oka apartment complex rose up just beside. That area had been used as an airstrip by the Japanese military during the war, and then as an encampment by American forces afterward. The grounds of Toei Studio was also nearby. Next door there lived an old lady who worked part-time painting animation cels for Toei, and behind the house, cabbage fields spread far and wide. Carpets were laid willy-nilly over the tatami floors of our house. I was the youngest of four …
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Riley Sager, The House Across the Lake (Dutton) “Sager balances the novel’s short timeline and limited setting with rich characterization for all, especially Katherine, whom the reader meets as she nearly drowns in the dark, freezing lake, and Casey, whose never-ending supply of snarky one-liners and wisecracks never quite camouflages the deep emotional turmoil that ended her once-successful acting career…The House Across the Lake is a psychological thriller that’s thoroughly personality-driven, following women whose motives, means and opportunities are as murkily fascinating as the titular …
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On June 1, Sisters in Crime (SinC) opened submissions for their 2022 Pride Award for Emerging LGBTQIA+ Crime Writers, a $2,000 grant awarded to one-up-and-coming writer who identifies as part of the LGBTQIA+ community. In addition to the selected winner, five runners-up will also be awarded a one-year Sisters in Crime membership, as well as a critique from an established Sisters in Crime member, so if you have been thinking about submitting your writing for consideration, the time is now! SinC will be accepting applications through July 31. Today, we’re speaking with two of the 2022 award judges, Leslie Karst and Brenda Buchanan to find out why the Pride Award is so impo…
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“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” –Confucius Getting even is a primal human desire as old as time. Nothing starts our blood boiling more than making someone pay for what they did. In True Grit, Charles Portis’s 1968 classic novel that was the basis for the film starring John Wayne as US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross vows to avenge her father’s murder—on her terms and the consequences be damned. A grief-stricken father who has always lived a moral and ethical life won’t rest until he has personally punished his son’s murderer in Andre Dubus’s short story Killings, which was made into the award-winning 2001 film I…
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Imagine you’re a time traveler and find yourself stuck in nineteenth-century America. The year is, say, 1883. The location, New York City. Like today, there’s lots to see and do here in the Empire City. Be sure to catch a glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge while it’s still under construction. Hop on the elevated railway and visit Central Park. Or see the newly installed electric street lamps that line Broadway. But danger lurks here too. Pickpockets and confidence men haunt the streets. Barroom brawls are a common occurrence. And then there’s disease. Cholera, typhoid, smallpox, yellow fever. Though scientists of this era are beginning to understand how these diseases are sp…
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This is not a piece on writing about abortion as crime. This is a call to do crimes in order to secure reproductive choice, and to write sympathetically about those who would break the law in a myriad of ways in order to do the right thing. Because reproductive choices just got a whole lot more expensive to make, that means a discussion of Property As Theft, and the Justified Theft of Property, so tune out now if you value $ over people. One more quick note before we begin: there is an excellent abortion thriller already out there, called Don’t Look Back, by Jessica Barry, in which two women are racing to New Mexico to make it to an abortion appointment, and someone is f…
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The first word people reach for to describe my novel Patricia Wants to Cuddle is usually something like “bonkers,” “bananas,” or “bizarre.” I get it. My book is about reality dating show contestants getting murdered by a cryptid on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest. I didn’t exactly choose a subtle premise for my fiction debut. But it took work, and years of chewing on the idea, to give myself the permission to go that big. The biggest obstacle in that process was unlearning the principles of nonfiction, detaching myself from even the semblance of truth, and allowing myself to dream up something wild and wacky: a book that basically requires the reader to use a to…
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Successful authors have a personal brand. This is advice I’ve received a lot: make sure that when someone sees your name, they have a good idea what they’re getting. That’s the way to find and cultivate an audience. It’s advice I’ve followed very badly. My output in the last few years alone includes science fiction novels, a contemporary rom-com for Audible, preschool cartoons and a spoof true-crime podcast for kids. But to me the interplay between genres is fascinating, and that’s why I love working in different ones. Genres don’t exist in isolation: whatever label we put on something to help it find its audience, there are always blurred boundaries, tropes to be borrow…
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Every novel runs to a rhythm. It’s in the fabric of the sentences, sewn into the pauses between scenes, weaved into the beats of the plot. Tied together, these threads create the pace – or the speed – of a novel. In a psychological thriller, the body count doesn’t have to be high. We don’t necessarily need grisly crimes or high-speed chases to keep readers’ hearts pumping. Pacing, first and foremost, comes from character. If readers care about our characters, then they stand in their shoes, taking that wild ride not only with them, but as them. After a decade spent crafting psychological thrillers, here are seven things I’ve learned about creating a sense of pace and p…
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It is the light. The way it plays across the city, glimmering at the ocean’s edge, slivering its way into canyons, beating down on skid row and warming the hustlers in Hollywood. The light in Los Angeles is at once scouring, soft and cruel, a tease of refuge and absolution at the edge of the continent. It tempts you with its make-believe dusks and the way it succumbs to the shadows in the San Gabriels. The trick, though, as any good noir detective knows, is navigating the illicit urges that come with the night. Crimes in the arroyos. Frantic murmurs in tent cities. Whispered deals in Brentwood mansions. All of it unfolding as police helicopters circle city hall—a pale gra…
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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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