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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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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How much we love the “perfect murder.” (Talking fiction here. Right?) It means many things to many people. Just getting away with murder doesn’t make it perfect—by that definition, every murder that does not result in a conviction would be “perfect.” No, we need more than that. A murder so immaculately planned that nobody is even charged? So perfectly committed that it doesn’t even look like murder? So diabolical that someone else takes the fall? An impulsive killing hastily but brilliantly covered up after the fact? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I love all those different variations so much that I couldn’t choose just one—I put all of them in my new novel, LOOK CLOSER, a dom…
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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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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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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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“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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“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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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Jennifer Hillier, Things We Do In The Dark (Minotaur) I’ve been obsessed with Jennifer Hillier’s sly psychological thrillers since her breakout hit Jar of Hearts, and Things We Do In the Dark promises to showcase her characters’ signature slippery grasp on morality once again. Paris Peralta is found at the center of a shocking crime scene, but she’s not afraid of the police: she’s afraid of the woman from her past who will recognize the crime and come calling. I cannot wait to read this book. –MO Daniel Silva, Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Harper) Every Daniel Silva h…
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I shouldn’t be alive today.” That was one of the first things Boris Nayfeld told me when I met him four years ago. On a sweltering Saturday in late June 2018, we sat outdoors at Tatiana Grill, a popular restaurant on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, tossing back shots of Russian vodka chased by the warm salty Atlantic breeze, surrounded by young women from St. Petersburg and Kiev and Odessa who wore more makeup than clothes. Known to his friends and family as “Biba” and described in the New York tabloids as “the last boss of the original Russian Mafia in America,” Boris had every right to marvel at the fact that he was alive and smiling and talking into my digital recor…
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Elements of the Gothic permeate every aspect of American media. We see it in film, music, literature and on TV shows, where it continues to grow in popularity from the crumbling plantations of HBO’s True Blood, to the lush landscapes of Louisiana’s Oak Valley Plantation in the first season of True Detective. More recently, Ozark and Love Craft Country have captured the imagination with its Gothic settings and characters. It’s no surprise that the Gothic is making its presence felt in the pages of crime fiction. But why should we care? We should care because the stories we tell ourselves shape our society, and crime fiction is the second bestselling genre in the country…
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The Bloodless Boy begins with a gruesome discovery: a dead boy entirely drained of his blood. (The title is apt.) A Justice of Peace seeks help from the Curator of the Royal Society, Robert Hooke, who brings with him his assistant, Harry Hunt. From various signs on the body, the two ‘natural philosophers’ quickly establish that the boy’s blood was partly removed at various times, then all of it was taken. With their experience of blood transfusion, the pair conclude that someone has subjected the boy to a series of grisly experiments. As thrillers do, this initial finding leads to a greater mystery. Set during the Popish Plot—when anti-Catholic hysteria was fanned by fa…
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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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In my new Maggie D’arcy mystery, The Drowning Sea, Maggie, a former homicide detective, is trying to relax and take a vacation. She’s out of a job and spending the entire summer on a gorgeous and remote West Cork peninsula, where she and her boyfriend and their children plan to get to know each other and decide if Maggie and her daughter should move to Ireland in the fall. When a body washes up at the base of the cliffs, she’s thrust back into her old line of work. I’ve always loved the trope of the professional detective who goes on vacation, but is pressed into service when the discovery of a body interrupts the leisurely rhythms of a recreational trip or restorative h…
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The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, and the historical fiction is proliferating! Here are a whole bunch of very good historical crime novels coming out over the summer months (with a few titles from spring and fall thrown in there), each one a richly detailed historical imagining that channels history for a modern audience while remaining true to the ideas and mores of its time period. While every day is a good day to read crime fiction set in the past, I personally feel this summer of setbacks to be a perfect time to remember the ways that ordinary people fought against powerful repressive forces in the past, and even managed to find some joy while doing so. Th…
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“James Kestrel” is a pseudonym for the author of Five Decembers, recipient of this year’s Edgar Award for “Best Novel.” The man behind the nom de plume is a successful author in his own right with six published novels already under his belt. He’s also a partner at a Honolulu-based law firm. Oh, and one time he canoed from New Orleans to Mississippi. This was before cell phones, by the way. Before the age of weather calls and GPS. A few months back, I was lucky enough to strike up an online friendship with Kestrel. When we first connected, I didn’t know anything about the pen name. I didn’t know anything about Five Decembers either. I recently tore through the four-h…
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In my new thriller, Reputation, my protagonist, Emma Webster, fears she is being followed as she cycles home from work one night. Her apparent stalker is a teenage boy who loops behind her, leering, then cycles past while bestowing a dead-eyed stare. The boy’s fourteen at most, but the sense of threat is so acute that Emma panics as she races up the steps to her front door and fumbles to get in. Once inside, she fears he’s listening outside; that he’s primed to post something unwelcome through the box; and – when her phone pings – that he’s sent an abusive text. Of course, she suspects – as many a protagonist of a psychological thriller does – that she’s being irrationa…
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Mystery novels are both timeless and popular because the reader is a participant in the action more so than in other genres—just as the detective or investigator is trying to figure out whodunnit, the story always implicitly challenges the reader to solve the crime first. But what if in addition to discovering things about the crime, you were also discovering things about a new and speculative world at the same time? My debut novel, The Peacekeeper, is a murder mystery set in the present day in an alternative history in which North America was never colonized. Specifically, it is set in an independent Ojibwe nation surrounding the Great Lakes. As we follow our detective,…
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Debts play a prominent role in crime novels. Someone owes someone else money, and if they don’t pay it back on time…well, you know what happens. A threat. A beating. A body part removed. And then— As readers, we understand the lengths the debtor will go to either avoid the punishment or to make the debt right. Beg, borrow, plead, bargain, steal. We can relate because we’ve all had debts to pay. It’s the American way of life. Hell, the government owes over thirty trillion dollars. That’s more than 91k for each citizen in the country. Not to mention mortgages, car payments, credit cards. Student loans. Yup, I went there. I said it. Student frickin’ loans. Twenty-f…
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