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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Serial killers and cult leaders. I’m not sure how many times I’ve Googled either of these true crime sub-categories in conjunction with the word “podcast” or “documentary” or “non-fiction.” Having cut my teeth on Stephen King and Dean Koontz and Unsolved Mysteries, this interest in the macabre has long been very on-brand for me. But since my twenties, it’s been rather important that the murder stories I consume be true, real-life stories. The fact of them having actually happened is what I apparently crave, the knowledge that fellow human beings lived through (or didn’t) that sort of darkness. It’s pretty distinctly fucked-up, hey? But I’m not prone to moralizing, partic…
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James Lee Burke’s new novel, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, is, perhaps, his most personal. The 85-year-old titan of American literature claims the worst imaginable impetus for the book – the death of his daughter, Pamala. In his fascinating and deeply moving Introduction to Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, he pays beautiful tribute to his late daughter, and also explains how he returned to his Holland family series of novels to update the story of protagonist, Aaron Holland. Every Cloak Rolled in Blood finds Holland, himself a novelist in his 80s, living in Burke’s adopted home state of Montana, grieving the unexpected loss of his daughter. Every Cloak Rolled in Blood provid…
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Over the past century of American culture, the motorcycle has proven troublesomely iconic. A two-wheeled symbol of the open road and independence? Of course. But the image of the motorcycle is also tightly bound with criminality and mayhem—it’s the vehicle of vagabonds, gangs, and others intent on undermining the nation’s moral order. This seedy reputation isn’t wholly undeserved. The Justice Department has spent the past several decades pursuing motorcycle gangs such as the Hells Angels, which they consider organized crime syndicates involved in everything from drug trafficking to prostitution. (The lawlessness hasn’t curbed the widespread fascination with motorcycle ou…
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There’s no point in heaping more praise on the 1934 film The Thin Man, frequently cited as one of the best films of all time. It’s made several of the American Film Institute’s top lists, and film critics and scholars such as Roger Ebert, Leonard Maltin, and Pauline Kael have given in high marks–in some cases, their highest. From the first screenings, audiences were dazzled by William Powell and Myrna Loy as wealthy socialites Nick and Nora Charles, and since the film heartily invited sequels (Nick keeps insisting his career as a detective is over, but Nora keeps urging him to continue sleuthing), MGM obliged and gave moviegoers five more films with Powell and Loy reprisi…
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Everyone can agree that honesty is the best policy—especially when it comes to romantic partnerships—but what happens when that honesty completely breaks down, especially when it comes to affairs, long-buried secrets—even murder? My upcoming novel, You Should Have Told Me, follows Janie, a new mother struggling to get by—her new baby won’t sleep, she seems to be insatiably hungry, and a secret from Janie’s past threatens to tear everything apart. When her partner, Max, offers to do their baby’s feedings one night, of course she jumps at the chance. Only she wakes up hours later to her daughter screaming in her bassinet and her partner gone. When a woman is murdered and M…
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The holidays are over and now the real drudge of winter is upon us. At least for those of us living in the northern climates. For me, a native Wisconsinite, I look forward to having a stack of great books to help keep me occupied during the long winter months. There’s nothing better than curling up near the fire with a great mystery while the snow piles up outside. But where to start when there are so many great books to choose from? As all mystery readers know, there are many diverse categories of cozy mysteries. I thought I would pick one book from each of my favorite genres to share with you today. These are all great stories that are sure to entertain the most voraci…
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My first novel, Dust and Shadow, is subtitled An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson. In it, Sherlock Holmes tries with every ounce of his sinewy being to both apprehend London’s most notorious serial killer and to prevent further graphic slaughter of innocent (so to speak) women. I wrote this because I have read the Sherlock Holmes mysteries so many times since I was ten that I wouldn’t be surprised if an ocular specialist found “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” emblazoned in tiny script on my retinas. While heavily historically researched, by definition Dust and Shadow is completely derivative. It’s an ode to the Great Detective and the Good Doctor…
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‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,’ reflects one of the characters in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981); ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?’ ‘Because,’ another character replies, ‘nobody imagines living here.’ Over the past half-century, some of the most vivid attempts to imagine living in Glasgow have been crime novels, from the Laidlaw trilogy of William McIlvanney to the fictions of Frederic Lindsay, Denise Mina, Louise Welsh, Christopher Brookmyre and others. And despite the assertion that ‘nobody imagines living here’, those novels take their place in a venerable tradition of writing about Scotland’s western metropolis. One of the first novelists to write about Glasgow di…
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I’ve done Durst, I’ve done the Menendez bros, I’ve done BTK and the Golden State killer. I’ve covered Bundy (duh), Cunanan, the Dating Game Killer, and even the lesser-known John Edward Robinson, who killed at least three people, but as an Eagle Scout in 1957, sang for Queen Elizabeth. As the Senior Writer for ABC’s iconic 20/20 for over a decade, I’ve become an expert on murder. And we haven’t just done the big names: if a husband or wife did it, we’ve “done it” too. With our audience-driven mission of covering true crime, we’ve pretty much done them all. But until writing my novel Rules for Being Dead, I had never written about the mysterious death of my mother—quite po…
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Military thrillers often feature strangers who become brothers after enduring combat’s fiery furnace. In Hostile Intent, the latest book in my Matt Drake series, the relationship between Matt and his best friend, Frodo, forms the novel’s centerpiece. At first glance, these two men have very little in common. Matt is white, college educated, and grew up on a Utah ranch. Frodo is an African American native of Philadelphia who enlisted in the Army straight out of high school. But their shared combat experience transforms what would otherwise be a surface level relationship into a brotherhood of arms. To accurately portray Matt and Frodo’s friendship, I drew upon my own deplo…
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When I started writing my novel, How to Be Eaten, I wasn’t really thinking about true crime. In it, I reimagine classic fairy tale characters as modern women trying to make sense of their lives in the aftermath of their traumatic stories. Yet as I considered how the women would be viewed in the public eye today, I realized that their strange and horrific stories were ripe for sensational true-crime treatment. They would be dissected in lurid detail yet oversimplified with tidy narratives telegraphed in enticing headlines. Thus, in How to Be Eaten, Little Red Riding Hood’s fateful encounter with a wolf is picked apart on true crime podcasts, details of Gretel’s mysterious …
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I suspect that every author has some novel in their memory banks that initially called them to the pen. For me, that book is James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize winning Tales of the South Pacific. Set against the American naval campaign of World War II, its sequentially plotted short stories bring all of humanity’s grace, failings, and foibles to life in a way that only literature can. The book’s narrator, a naval intelligence officer on an admiral’s staff sent to fix one problem after another, illustrates the way personality quirks of minor actors can have an outsize influence on major events. From tough-talking Marines laid low by heartache to nonagenarian Norfolk Islander…
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Honestly, if you are reading this essay, I probably already know one thing about you: You devoured the Nancy Drew mysteries as a child. And from that moment on, you were hooked on the female amateur sleuth (aka, the FAS). What drew you to her? Why did you progress at speed from the gateway drug of Nancy to Miss Jane Marple, to Amelia Peabody, to Blanche White, to… the list goes on and on. I would argue that it is because there is something about the female amateur sleuth that is, at heart, radical. Radical as in, to quote Merriam-Webster, “very different from the usual or traditional.” First of all, she consistently upends society’s traditional view of women and girls as…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut fiction. * Katie Gutierrez, More Than You’ll Ever Know (William Morrow) We have all read books and seen movies about men who live a double life, who have a couple of families who don’t know about each other until some calamity happens. Gutierrez turns that plot on its head by giving us a woman, Dolores Rivera/Russo with two husbands: one in Laredo, Texas, and one in Mexico City. When one husband murders the other, the jig is up, and a true crime writer in Austin smells a great story. But you know what happens when true crime writers show up: more crime. Still, Gutierrez is impressive in her telling of all three st…
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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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Two years before writer, director and composer John Carpenter reshaped horror films with “Halloween,” he made “7Assault on Precinct 13,” a lean, violent film made on a shoestring budget and owing a debt to predecessors like Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo” and George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.” Released in 1976, “Assault” is an influential but little-seen thriller. It’s possible that siege thrillers like “Die Hard” would have been made without Carpenter’s original film but they almost certainly would have felt different. The original “Assault” has been a favorite of critics and film industry types for going on 50 years. And “Assault” has its own off-the-screen mys…
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It’s not the deaths that make the Parvati Valley unusual, it’s the disappearances into forest or mountain or valley with little trace. And there are more accounts than those noted in police registries and written into headlines that make the news, shared as stories and desperate pleas from family members posted on online message boards and travel forums with scattered details. Communication with loved ones and friends ends abruptly, with a final letter, phone call, or email before blinking out, leaving faint trails for heartsick families to follow. Some blame the mountains. As in any range, there are gorges and cliffs that can trouble inexperienced, and even some seaso…
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After spending his weekend in bed, Michael woke up Monday morning with a throat full of glass shards. He had just pulled the comforter up around his fever-laden head and decided to call in sick, when his wife came in to stand at the foot of the bed, crossing her arms and giving him that look. Michael got up. After all, she was right. His job as crane operator at the incineration plant was still new, and he couldn’t risk making a bad first impression. Pumped up on a mixture of Tylenol and black coffee, he drove out to Copenhagen’s industrial island, Refshaleøen, the car radio alternating between soft hits and crisp commercials, and gradually he started to feel better. He…
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The concept of the frenemy is not new. A potent mixture of friend and enemy, this oxymoronic portmanteau first appeared in the English language in the late 1800s, albeit with a different spelling (“frienemy”). In recent decades the word has been dusted off, streamlined, and given new life. Fueled by the duplicity of social media—the ability to behave one way IRL and wear another face online—the frenemy appears in more guises than ever both in novels and in films. It’s little wonder that the frenemy continues to haunt us. It’s a powerful archetype; characters we both love and hate hold a unique fascination. They are more maddening than simple friends or enemies; because …
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A moment of reckoning took place earlier this month in the “stolen art” arena: After a years-long investigation, the Fine Arts Museum of Bern, Switzerland announced it is “giving up” 40 paintings from the massive Gurlitt treasure trove that they concluded to be Nazi-looted artworks or of “questionable” origin. The Bern Museum’s handling of Nazi-looted art is a fascinating case study of doing almost the right thing. In 2014, the museum became the beneficiary of the Gurlitt collection when, in an unexpected move, the reclusive German-Austrian art dealer Cornelius Gurlitt bequeathed practically his entire collection to the museum when he passed amid scandal. Gurlitt wasn’t…
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As a proper genre, spy fiction splashed onto the market in the 1950s, reaching critical mass in the ‘60s. The Cold War, well underway, provided fodder for writers to spin narratives from the readers’ worst fears: nuclear war and fallout, deadly technological gadgetry, double agents hiding in plain sight. In England, Ian Fleming published Casino Royale (1953), marking the debut of James Bond. Less fanciful and more forensically detailed than 007, John le Carré introduced intelligence officer George Smiley with Call for the Dead (1961). Across the pond, Edward S. Aarons wrote Assignment to Disaster (1955), the first in a series featuring C.I.A. agent Sam Durrell. Equipped w…
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Robert Dugoni has told the story many times. It’s a story worth telling. When the New York Times bestselling author was in seventh grade, he was assigned a class speech on slavery and chose the point of view of an abolitionist. He spoke before his classmates about how demoralizing and abhorrent slavery was. When he finished, no one clapped. They all just stared at him, and so did his teacher, Sister Kathleen. Dugoni was anxious. Was it really that bad? Standing alone before them, he felt embarrassed. Then Sister Kathleen pulled him from the classroom with no explanation. Now he was really in trouble. She told him to stand right there, outside his classroom in the hallw…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best nonfiction crime books. * Mark Arsenault, The Imposter’s War: The Press, Propaganda, and the Newsman Who Battled for the Minds of America (Pegasus) A lively, engaging history of the lead-up to WWI and German efforts to infiltrate and influence the American media, hoping to discourage the country from throwing in its lot with Britain and France. Arsenault zeroes in on the era’s complex games of espionage and propaganda, focusing on one newsman in particular, John Rathom of The Providence Journal, who became a crusader exposing German plots, but who had a secret history and secret sources of his own. M. Chris Fabricant…
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I’ve always had a weakness for stories that defy categorization, especially if they happen to include fantasy and romance. Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars is an excellent example; Tamsyn Muir’s captivating and beautifully strange Gideon the Ninth is another; Naomi Novik’s fabulous Scholomance series is a third. When I began writing Payback’s a Witch, I originally intended it to read as a more traditional rom-com, primarily a romance that just happened to revolve around two bisexual witches falling in love in a magical, Salem-inspired Halloweentown. The magic was initially intended to be a background element rather than a focal point of the plot. Something to add a little s…
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CrimeReads editors select the best new nonfiction crime books from September and August. Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Godmother: Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women (Penguin) Barbie Latza Nadeau’s new study brings us inside the mafia clans of Italy to draw a revealing portrait of the women who prop up these family structures, and who sometimes build power bases of their own, to violent ends. The book is in large part the story of Pupetta Maresca, the Naples woman who, at eighteen, avenged her husband’s gangland murder, served time in prison, and later became a media sensation. But The Godmother is also about the largely misunderstood role women play…
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