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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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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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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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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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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I’ve been really enjoying Dark Fantasy this year—my theory as to why? As the world gets worse, magical thinking gets more potent, and as we lose faith in the future and the concept of innocence, fairy tales get more twisted. But you don’t need to be a nihilist to enjoy Liz Michalski’s Darling Girl—just a person interested unpacking the creepiness behind Peter Pan, a story about a boy kidnapping a girl and making her take care of him as his mother-wife. In Darling Girl, Holly Darling, the granddaughter of Wendy, has harnessed the power of Neverland as a youth serum for a beauty company, but the secret to the formula is her sickly daughter, the product of rape by Peter Pan.…
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Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are no strangers to comics and noir, blending both primal elements of story into everything they do—whether it’s mainstream superhero work or their more recent, and more personal, forays into creator-owned, character-driven crime comics. Brubaker and Phillips have worked together so long they’ve become synonymous, a pair of names that complete each other, building a legendary reputation with series like Criminal, Fatale, Kill or be Killed, Incognito, Bad Weekend, and more. Their latest collaboration, while still firmly entrenched in the dark corners of graphic novel crime, marks a departure of sorts. Instead of releasing their stories via m…
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My writer’s group gets together weekly at a local winery. There’s as much drinking and catching up as there is putting words on the page, but we’ve convinced it’s productive since it “sustains our art”. A frequent topic of conversation is the crime fiction TV series each of us is streaming, where mysteries take center stage. Recently, I noticed that as different as our styles of writing are, we seem to be watching the same shows, including Mare of Easttown and Only Murders in the Building, and when we go old-school, Midsummer Murders and Miss Marple. I thought it would be fun to check out what we might be missing. After viewing a dozen streaming mystery series, below…
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When I couldn’t see my youngest for two years because we were in a global pandemic and she lived on the other side of the world, I had to find a way to endure it. What other choice did I have? My partner Karyn and I live in Santa Cruz, California. Our daughter, Eliza, lover of languages and travel, resides in Amman, Jordan, 7500 miles away. When your child lives ten time zones away, you get a crash course in separation. I learned to shelter my emotions and look on the bright side: our daughter was living her dream. She was 24 years old. Independent. Doing what she loved: living in another country, speaking fluent Arabic, working with refugees. She’d met a Jordanian man …
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The mystery genre has a long and varied history, going back close to two centuries in its present form. (What actually constitutes the origin of the genre is a subject for an article much duller than this one.) There’s a lot to be gained from dipping into the older stories that inform and influence current books, but where to start? You could go from the beginning and work forward in time, seek out the most popular in their era, the most enduring, the most highly regarded by critics or widely cited by present-day authors as their inspiration. Or, if you like, you could trust your zodiac sign to help you choose. Aries (March 21 – April 19) Wilkie Collins Aries love dr…
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When my publisher asked me to write a new historical crime series with a female protagonist, my first thought was to set it in New York, where I live. I thought I knew something of the city’s history, having wandered its streets happily for many years in search of historical treasures—old buildings, hidden secrets in dark alleys, street names reminiscent of its Dutch past—even visiting the caves once inhabited by its native people, the Lenape tribe, who gave Manhattan its name (“the island of many hills”). I am a frequent visitor to the New York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York; I had two friends who were city tour guides I thought the research …
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As the author of several works of popular history, I knew when I began to write Hot Time, a mystery novel set in Gilded Age New York, that most of my characters would already be familiar to me from my extensive research on the period—Theodore Roosevelt, the gruff commissioner of police; Otto Raphael, one of the first Jewish officers on the force; and Minnie Gertrude Kelly, the first female stenographer hired by the NYPD. When I stumbled across William d’Alton Mann, a real-life magazine publisher who made a fortune extorting the crème of New York society, I knew I had found my victim. Known for his choleric temperament, long white beard, and flaming red bowtie, Mann was …
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We knew where this was going to end. From the beginning of Better Call Saul, the prequel series to Breaking Bad, we’ve known that Jimmy McGill, a talented con man turned dodgy lawyer, would eventually become Saul Goodman, the attorney who launders money for drug dealers (for a small percentage). The first two episodes of Saul’s final season, drawing us closer in time to the events of Breaking Bad, threw out several different plot points and feints that could suggest how we might end up at the status quo from the opening of that previous series. A show that thrives on plot twists and slow-burn narrative arcs, it has set several things in motion, any of which could lead to …
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Since the dawn of humanity, since the moment we’ve been able to think, games have been part of our interactions with others. From the imagination games of children to interactive video games of teens, and even the sudoku puzzles and crosswords of adults – as social creatures, there’s a reason why our brains delight in games. The rules give us enough structure to keep us from going off the rails but enough wiggle room to keep our attention. I would even argue that it is what make the game worth playing–especially when some rules are more flexible than others. Horror movies are their own game of survival. There is a formula, a set of rules that are meant to be followed. Y…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Deon Meyer, The Dark Flood (Atlantic Monthly Press) “… a compelling, rip-roaring crime story peppered with dry South African humour … Meyer’s depiction of Stellenbosch is spot on, from the persistent traffic and parking issues to income disparities … includes a wonderfully vivid depiction of the Stellenbosch setting and the multiple references to its neighbourhoods and restaurants warmed this reader’s Stellenbosch heart … It’s clear why his books have been translated into 127 languages. He knows how to craft an engaging and clever plot through multiple threads without losing the attention …
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Gone Girl is ten, and the virtual ink of the think piece is spilling all over the internet. As I read them, I sank into a familiar disappointment. The monotony of one writer after another discussing the book as a publishing phenomenon, the near ancestor of a proliferation of books categorized as domestic suspense or psychological thrillers, is not only not a novel observation it’s dismissive of Gone Girl as literature. Of course, Gone Girl has spawned a genre’s worth of books about troubled marriages and pretty missing white women. If anyone knows from this phenomenon, it’s me: I cover these books, and month after month I sort through a pile of them and find a few to reco…
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“Helltown. The nickname fits this place perfectly,” said Norman Mailer as he peered out at Long Point and the Provincetown harbor from the third-floor study of his home at the east end of Commercial Street. Sitting at his desk, he also had a pristine view of the Pilgrim Monument, the 252-foot granite tower looming like a colossal sentry in the distance. To Mailer, the town in July was “as colorful as St. Tropez on Saturday morning and as dirty as Coney Island come Sunday night.” But it was autumn now, and the leaves were dead. The town was dead too. Mailer had just returned from Chicago, and he was all alone in his five-bedroom, 5,800-square-foot brick fortress, w…
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Small towns are rife with stereotypes—most of which are well-deserved, justly earned, documentary-like observations. Comforting familiarity, slow pace, and the charm of knowing several generations of the same bloodline give certain people an ease that cannot be achieved in more sophisticated, sprawling environs. We generally like the idea of a small town with its quirky neighbors, stories everyone knows, quaint—if not hokey—parades and celebrations. In contrast, there’s also the concept of the backwards small town, the rural area from which all people worth their salt are trying to flee. The escape from which is romantic and esteemed. Of course, no one wants to live amon…
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“London” You only have to say the word, and like a powerful spell, an entire world is instantly conjured. If you happen to have visited, you’re probably picturing red buses, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and those guards with the funny hats. You may be picturing all those things anyway, even if you’ve never set foot in London just because you’ve seen it a million times on TV and in movies and so it all seems so familiar. Or maybe the spell conjures a different London for you, a city of fog and shadows, where horse drawn hansom cabs clip through crooked streets and men in top hats and capes make their way beneath the flickering glow of gaslights, the tips of their silver-to…
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Around seven thirty on the evening of Thursday, September 14, 1922, two nights before Edward Hall’s body was found beside an unidentified female corpse, on a lover’s lane outside of New Brunswick, New Jersey, the phone rang at 23 Nichol Avenue, a Victorian mansion where Hall had lived with his wife, Frances, for a little more than a decade. One of the couple’s maids, twenty-year-old Louise Geist, paused her work in a bedroom on the second floor and scurried across the hallway to answer the call. A woman on the other end of the line asked for the reverend. “Is that for me?” Edward called out from the bathroom. “Yes,” Louise replied. “I’ll be out in a minute.” Louise …
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Cozy mysteries have been subtly changing in recent years to try and appeal to a more diverse and younger audience. While the rule of no graphic violence remains, the unwritten rule of no sex and no swearing seems to be showing some flexibility. There has also been a shift to promote a slate of younger sleuths in their 20s, whereas traditionally, cozies have featured sleuths that trend older. Mature sleuths such as Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher have been cozy mystery staples for many generations, and there’s a reason for this. They are likeable and invoke a feeling of connection and community within their cozy settings. These iconic sleuths have sharp minds that can d…
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One and I had a novel, two and I had a sequel, three and I finally felt I could say I had a series. So the occasion of my third Charlie Waldo book, Pay or Play, has me thinking about the works that shaped my own instincts about how to build and sustain a run. Truth be told, I was a child of television, so that’s where my biggest influences lie. I’d had a long career writing TV and movies, too, before I became a serious reader of crime fiction. I was also a child of the 70s, the celebrated decade of Columbo and The Rockford Files. But for me, the 80s were the true Golden Age of TV crime, the decade that changed what and how we watched and laid the foundation for all the…
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I was only nine years old in 1947, when The Fabulous Clipjoint was published, so it was probably another eight years before I read it. I discovered Fredric Brown during my freshman year at Antioch College, and I must have read a half-dozen of his Bantam paperbacks, along with a few hundred other books I tore through back then. Most of the others had at least some claim to consideration as serious literature, which was a phrase that meant rather more to me than it does now, but I don’t know that anything I read was more engaging or entertaining than Fredric Brown’s fiction, and even then I knew that was important. Was The Fabulous Clipjoint one of those early reads? It se…
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Several years ago, I sat in a Toronto theater watching a production of Les Miserables. The two leads’ singing were technical masterpieces. They were perfect. Indulge me a moment, this is going to get weird—as I sat in that theatre listening to one of the secondary characters sing her solo, I had an inexplicable sensory moment that, to this day, I have not been able to explain. At one point during her solo, I stopped perceiving the music and lyrics. In those few precious moments, I didn’t hear anything, I felt everything. I didn’t even know that was a thing. On the way home, my husband confirmed his favorites were the two leads. As an audio guy, he understood their techni…
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Screenwriters are taught: “Do not write what you cannot see.” And this is why, after a career of writing screenplays and directing films, I wrote a crime novel. A screenplay is a blue print, drawn with action and dialogue, something that exists in a slippery space, to inspire a director to film, to suggest actors fulfill characters, for a production designer to envision set dressings and costumes and hair designs that likely were not even on the page. You can’t write about what’s inside someone’s head because, well, you can’t see that. You learn to write only what people say, and what they do. Don’t direct the movie by suggesting how someone is sipping tea while loading…
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David Cronenberg is that rare filmmaker who is a genre unto himself, such that his name has become an adjective. Yet, when his name is invoked, it’s usually as shorthand for body horror. Certainly, and in spite of his objections, this is to be expected: more than any other director, Cronenberg has examined, in detail both coldly clinical and gleefully perverse, the ways in which psychosexual desire, trauma, and society’s increasing dependency on technology manifest in the gruesome evolution and/or evisceration of the human body. Indeed, we see a fresh example of this in the promotion and reception of his latest film—his first in eight years—Crimes of the Future (availab…
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