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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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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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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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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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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I wasn’t much of a reader in high school. In fact, other than sports books about my beloved New York Yankees, I doubt I read more than four or five novels in my three years of high school. Why would I waste my time on books when there were girls to chase and time to waste? In college that started to change. For various English classes, I read some of the classics: Grapes of Wrath, Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Catcher in the Rye, and so on. Then I came to The Stranger by Camus, and it was love at first sight. Not because of the heavy themes of existentialism or absurdism, but because about halfway through the novel, the protagonist, Meursault, turns into a cold-bloode…
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Stories about male con artists abound. The handsome man, sliding into his victim’s life, charming them, infiltrating their lives so completely that by the time the con is set, it’s not only too late to extricate themselves, it’s often too embarrassing to report to authorities. One study I came across in my research showed that only 37% of victims over the age of 55 will admit to being conned. A little over 50% of people under 55 will report it. Most con artists are never brought to trial because the people they con don’t ever report the fraud to police. I used that fact in my upcoming novel, The Lies I Tell, to explain how easy it was for my main character, Meg, to slide …
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Lighthouses: Charming, historical, comforting. Also: foreboding, mysterious, terrifying in their isolation. People are fascinated by lighthouses and with good reason. Not only are they important historical sites and highly visible landmarks, lighthouses speak of reliability and safety, a constant point in a changing world, yet at the same time they contain an aura of isolation and hints of mysterious goings on that might have happened within. The first lighthouses were nothing more than buckets of flaming pitch hauled up to the top of a tall pole, to show fisherman or sailors the way home. These lights were essentially to help one’s family or villagers find their way…
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“A man with a gun is God…” –Howard Street by Nathan Heard, 1968 The debate over gun control happens whenever there’s another mass shooting or the murder rate rises with the summertime temperatures in Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark and other cities where lethal shootings are out of control. Whenever these issues arise there is an opposite outcry by N.R.A. members, gun enthusiasts and the politicians who get their financial support screaming about their 2nd amendment right to bear arms as though muskets and pistols were still the weapons of choice. While it’s obvious “that something needs to be done,” no one can agree what that “something” should be, which t…
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If you’ve a bad, bad past It finds you out at last. —From “A Bad, Bad Past” (Lyrics by Clifford Orr) Introduction The practice of “drag” or cross-dressing—i.e., performatively adopting the dress and manners of the opposite sex—is familiar in detective fiction published between the First and Second World Wars, where, with devious and often deadly courses in mind, men may mum as women and women as men. Likewise, at all-male Ivy League universities in the first quarter of the twentieth century, young men decked out in drag commonly performed female roles in college theatricals—albeit strictly for comedic, rather than criminal, purposes. While drag acts, as it were, conti…
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Today was supposed to be the last day of the world, the day four horseman would ride across the sky on sinewy white steeds—sweat and spit falling to Earth like hailstones. If the Book of Revelation was any guide for what the end of the world would look like, I imagined that the bassy cacophony of those hooves would be so thunderous, people everywhere would drop to their knees, clapping hands over ears, horrified and awed by their power. The clouds—red and towering higher than we ever knew the sky could go—would part like the Red Sea to make way for the bringers of our doom. It is 7:02 pm Pacific Standard Time on July 22, 2020, and the world has not ended. Yet. I do not t…
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When I set out to write my young adult novel Never Coming Home, my number one goal was to create a killer mystery. My number two was to write a cast of characters that the reader just couldn’t wait to see die. Never Coming Home is a contemporary, social media-based retelling of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the story of 10 strangers who are all invited to a mysterious island under sketchy circumstances. Once they arrive, it isn’t too long before they’re hit with the big M: murder. While Queen Christie’s masterful storytelling and deft deployment of the red herring definitely drew me to the idea of reimagining this story, what really hooked me was that many …
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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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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Vaughan, Reputation (Atria) “Vaughan offers a cast of strong characters that are sharply realistic and consummately human. A complex, slow-burning examination of double standards, misogyny, and public image that shares strong appeal with Scott Turow’s literary legal thrillers.” –Booklist, starred review Denise Mina, Confidence (Mulholland) “Mina keeps the plot charging at a breathless pace, and Anna is an engagingly tart narrator. Even for true-crime podcasters, the truth is tough to find in this brisk, entertaining thriller.” –Kirkus Reviews, starred review Paul Trembl…
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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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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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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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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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