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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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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Sometimes the crimes for which we’re most harshly judged and punished are the ones that break no laws. And for young women, pushing back against tradition, expected codes of behavior, and the social contract can provoke the severest of reactions. In my debut novel, The Nobodies, two girls discover they have the ability to swap bodies, a power they use to intervene in each other’s lives—sometimes to disastrous effect–over twenty years of friendship. As they literally step into each other’s worlds, Nina and Jess form judgments about what they find and act upon them, unearthing and divulging secrets, disrupting relationships, and making life-altering changes. Their power, t…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jason Starr, The Next Time I Die (Hard Case Crime) “So fresh and clever and compelling. I don’t know when I last turned pages so quickly.” Ian Rankin Patrick Radden Keefe, Rogues (Doubleday) “A new book by Keefe means drop everything and close the blinds; you’ll be turning pages for hours…. It’s highly entertaining, of course, but what shines through most brightly is Keefe’s fascination with what makes us human even when we’re at our most imperfect.” Los Angeles Times Isabella Maldonado, The Falcon (Thomas and Mercer) “Another great read from [Isabella Maldonado]! I’m a Ni…
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Santiago – the country’s capital and the largest city of Chile. Eight million people in a densely packed metropolis. Charming nineteenth-century neo-classical architecture all with the majestic Andes visible off in the distance. Out of the central city, through the surrounding vineyards, and the Pacific Ocean is a mere hour away. Surely one of Latin America’s most liveable metropolises? Peaceful now and a low crime rate by regional standards while, thankfully, General Pinochet and his dictatorship are long gone. But there’s also plenty of crime, though the nation’s turbulent political history seems never far away… My own introduction to Chilean crime fiction was being re…
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On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh, a former Army soldier, parked a Ryder rental truck outside the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. The truck was loaded with a two-ton ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel bomb. McVeigh lit two timed fuses and stole away in a getaway car. At 9:02 A.M., the bomb exploded, obliterating the building’s façade and pancaking nine floors of office space. One hundred and sixty-eight people were murdered and over five hundred were injured. Until 9/11, it was the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil. It remains the deadliest homegrown terrorist attack in the U.S.—for now. Later, when McVeigh was arrested on a weapo…
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Earlier this year, I rounded up 16 horror novels coming out this year, and now I’m back, this time with more intestines, more fungi, and most importantly, more books. Here are 23 new and upcoming nightmarish reads that will keep you awake long into the night, even as they dissect and reinvent the very elements of fear itself. Whether you’re looking for eerie folk horror, atmospheric gothics, gruesome thrillers, twisted noirs, or mind-blowing metafiction, there’s sure to be a title below to please. Or terrify. Andrew Joseph White, Hell Followed With Us (Peachtree Teen, June 7) Body horror meets apocalypse noir meets queer love story in Andrew Joseph White’s viscera-fi…
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Norman Lloyd’s first big-screen role, in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 thriller “Saboteur,” ended with his death in one of the greatest climaxes in movie history: Lloyd, playing a Nazi spy and saboteur, falls from the Statue of Liberty. The camera focuses on his shocked and frightened face and, in those seconds, Lloyd almost makes us pity the Nazi. If Lloyd’s time in Hollywood had been limited to that role, he would still be a film legend. His role as Daniel Auschlander, a wise and sympathetic doctor, was one of the highlights of the TV series “St. Elsewhere” in the 1980s But it’s perhaps Lloyd’s years as a writer and producer of Alfred Hitchcock’s two television series, “Alf…
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