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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When I was asked to contribute an essay to CrimeReads, I was given a choice between compiling a Reading List, or to come up with something pertaining to the Themes in my debut novel, Hollywood Hustle. I can tell you, I hate making lists (even for grocery shopping) but since I couldn’t get anything done without them, I make them anyway. And though, as a new author, I have found other author’s suggestion lists to be invaluable to me, being so new to this game I fear a reading list of my favorite books would be a mere echo of so many better curated ones. Kind of like a recipe for spaghetti: Everybody got one, you don’t need mine. But “Theme” is something I can get behind. …
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Pharaoh Ramesses II was an unrepentant warmonger and slaver, but he is also credited with building the earliest known library in the 1200s BCE. To paraphrase the equally problematic Walt Whitman, he contained multitudes. Inscribed in stone over the sacred library doors was a Greek phrase meaning “healing place of the soul.” Rather elegant for a man who almost certainly married at least four of his daughters, but I can’t argue the point. Stories heal. Books save lives. I’m proof, and odds are, some of you are too. The first book I remember finding myself in was Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Like Jonas, I had seen things I could never unsee, things I could not explain to other k…
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Peg Tyre and Peter Blauner are New York Times bestselling authors who have over a dozen published novels and multiple awards between them. They’ve also been married for 34 years. Their novels STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT and THE INTRUDER, originally published in the 90s, are both being released for the first time in hardcover by Dead Sky Publishing. Peter Blauner: Most people these days mainly know you as a responsible and respectable journalist who writes very seriously about subjects like education. They have no idea you published a pair of funny, scary, sexy crime novels back in the 1990s. You want to tell them how that happened or should I spill the beans? Peg Tyre: Well,…
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My debut novel is a tribute to my hero, Jane Austen, in the format of a murder mystery. It is fitting because Austen’s classic works are essentially mysteries where the heroine must uncover the true characters of those around her, especially the hero. In a world where a women’s entire future depends upon who she marries, it pays to investigates one’s love interest thoroughly. With that in mind, here are all six of Jane Austen’s heroines, ranked from worst to best for their detection skills. There is one young woman who combines all these qualities in abundance and whose prowess at sleuthing outshines even her greatest protagonist, and that’s Austen herself. Throughout he…
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Spenser’s Boston, Temperance Brennan’s North Carolina, Dave Robicheaux’s New Iberia…real places with fictional detectives. The setting is an important part of any series of books and is often informed by a deep connection the author has with the location they have chosen. Robert B. Parker spent his whole life living and writing in Boston. Kathy Reichs, like her protagonist, is a forensic investigator based out of Charlotte who also worked in Quebec, both locations brought vividly to life in her novels, and James Lee Burke sets the majority of his work in his hometown, except when he occasionally detours to place a mystery in Montana. When we were coming up with the cha…
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The hero of Leave No Trace, Michael Walker, is a former park ranger and current special agent for the Investigative Services Branch (ISB) of the National Park Service (the park service’s version of the FBI). So to celebrate the upcoming publication of Michael’s inaugural adventure (February 27 from Minotaur Books), I thought I’d provide some context for the role park rangers have played in pop culture, specifically film and television: Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear (1964) Of course, we had to start with the animated film that was based upon the syndicated TV show “The Yogi Bear Show.” Ranger Smith, Yogi’s perpetual, decades-long nemesis in Jellystone National Park, was ve…
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Various medical phenomena have shocked, surprised and fascinated us since the dawn of time. From the terrifyingly named Alien Hand Syndrome to alleged accounts of spontaneous human combustion, we are insatiable for stories which slip outside our realm of understanding. We are driven—be it through empathy, morbid curiosity, fear or intellectual interest—to ponder the meaning of our existence, and wonder: what does this mean? why does this happen? how can we feel safe, when our field of knowledge is incomplete? In If I Die Before I Wake, the protagonist suffers a fall which leaves him in a coma, suffering from locked-in syndrome. However, the realization quickly dawns that…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Rebecca Roque, Till Human Voices Wake Us (Blackstone) “Debut author Roque confidently weaves together dynamic characters with complex histories to riveting effect.” –Publishers Weekly Ian Ferguson and Will Ferguson, I Only Read Murder (MIRA) “The brothers Ferguson pull out all the comedic stops, taking on Hollywood elitism, community theater, and small-town quirkiness in a fast-paced, lighthearted murder mystery…readers will enjoy following the hilariously inept Miranda as she tries to solve the crime in this promising series starter.” –Booklist Christoffer Carlsson, Under th…
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The city of the Highlands, located on Scotland’s dramatic northeast coast, where the River Ness meets the Moray Firth. 65,000 or so folk but apparently one of northern Europe’s fastest growing cities that gets consistently ranked in the top five UK cities for quality of life. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a few murders to write about though in this northeastern outpost of Tartan Noir…. GR Halliday’s trilogy features Detective Inspector Monica Kennedy. In book one, From the Shadows (2019), Kennedy teams up with Inverness-based social worker Michael Bach. Sixteen-year-old Robert arrives home late. Without a word to his dad, he goes up to his bedroom. Robert is never seen alive …
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As a licensed psychotherapist, I can attest to the importance of mirroring in therapy when a patient shares their feelings, thoughts, and experiences, and the clinician mirrors them back in a supportive way. For example, if a patient discloses something they’ve never shared with anyone before due to a fear of being judged, and the clinician applauds the bravery of their disclosure, the patient has the opportunity to feel seen for the first time. The act of mirroring affirms their experience and may leave them feeling less alone, as one of the antidotes to despair is human connection. The same can be said and has been said about books—novels in particular: “Books are s…
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A 38-year-old English woman sits on a bench at the Gare de l’Est train station in Paris, on her first solo trip abroad. It’s a providential time for an escape. Her marriage has collapsed. She has survived a suicide attempt. She has embarrassed herself in front of the entire country (although only she knows exactly how, and why). She has found some success as a writer, but it’s far from clear that she’ll be able to recapture that early magic. She needs inspiration! Something new. Smoke drifts across the platform. A whistle pierces the air. It’s time to board the train. With hands trembling from excitement and trepidation, Agatha Christie steps onto the Orient Express… The…
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Recently, for the first time since they started making movies together in 1984, we’ve been able to guess what each Coen Brother might bring to their cinematic partnership. The Brothers, Joel and Ethan, who have collaborated constantly since their debut feature Blood Simple, have spent the last few years making films apart. Joel made the fascinating, heady nouveau-expressionist adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021 and (in addition to a propulsive documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis), Ethan made Drive-Away Dolls, the droll crimey road-trip lesbian buddy comedy which hits theaters this weekend. The Brothers, who are even more secretive about their process than they are a…
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It’s another great year for historical fiction, as many of my favorite trends from the past few years continue; in the list below, you’ll find con artists and queens, spies and spiritualists, nurses and ne’er-do-wells, vagabonds and vigilantes, and marginal characters of all kinds fighting to stay afloat in a cruel and inconsiderate world. The works below have a bit of a 19th and 20th century bias, in particular focusing on the mid-1800s and the Interwar Period, as well as several set just after the end of WWII. You’ll find the familiar within the strange, and the strange within the familiar, in each of these works, for the job of the historical novelist is to walk the ti…
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At my desk in the office at the bottom of the garden, under a jacaranda tree, in one of the most violent countries in the world, I write a murder mystery series set in a pretty village in the Cotswolds, in England. In real life, the Cotswolds is a place where the murder rate is close to zero. A local news article “Rise in violent crime in Cotswolds” tells us that there was one homicide – a category which includes both murder and manslaughter – in the year 2022. In the previous 12 months, there had been none. In our books, life in the Cotswolds is far more perilous. Under the pen name Katie Gayle, my co-author Gail Schimmel and I have killed off a dozen or so people in si…
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“You have a magic lamp,” Bunny began, taking a pull on her cigarette. She exhaled and squinted through a ribbon of smoke. “And you have one wish. What is it?” “One wish?” Amanda’s gaze swept across the moon-bathed rooftops in contemplation. She laughed mirthlessly. “Just the one?” “Not easy, is it? See, most people would say they want to be rich, but you already know what that’s like. Or someone might say they want to be famous, but you already know what that’s like too, don’t you?” “Not anymore,” Amanda said, turning to face her. “There,” Bunny pointed her cigarette at Amanda. “That’s it. Money is money, it comes and goes, and it never really makes anyone happier. Do…
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Summer is coming. I promise. It’s right around the corner. If you’re anything like me, summer means the beach. And the beach means getting in some uninterrupted reading. That’s a luxury for most of us. One year, I took a beach vacation with just a girlfriend and myself, with no children and husbands—it was complete heaven. We ate when we wanted, slept when we wanted, and read uninterrupted. At one point I turned to my friend and said, “The only thing that would make this beach better is a bookstore.” Voila! My Beach Reads series was born. The third book in my series A Killer Romance, takes place during the off-season. Have you ever wondered what becomes of those little…
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The rise of the unreliable narrator in fiction has made huge success of bestsellers like The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and Fight Club. The narrators of these stories have compelling tales to share, but what makes them even more exciting and keeps us turning those pages is not what they’re telling us…but rather, what they aren’t. I first listened to The Girl on the Train and was immediately drawn in by the weaving stories of several different main points of view. It’s Rachel, though, who’s telling a story we simply can’t be expected to believe. Her drinking means that she can’t really trust her memories (or rather, those big blank spots in them) and therefore, neither…
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It’s that season again—the time to plan summer vacations. How about touring small towns and visiting some occasionally wacky, but always fun, festivals? In Wisconsin, for instance, where the Deputy Donut Mystery series is set, provides a wealth of summer fairs, festivals, and family-fun weekends. At one gem and mineral show, kids can dig for treasures in an agate pit! Three different festivals provide sawdust piles where kids can grub around looking for things. At least one of these sawdust piles is stocked with money. And speaking of not exactly staying pristine, you could participate in, or merely watch (maybe from a distance), a cow chip hurling competition. There are …
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Whether it’s whispered around a campfire, or passed down across generations, folk tales have often been the spark that ignited much of our love for stories. They give us brief glimpses into different times and different cultures, and it’s always a treat for me to find these threads woven into works of fiction today. It has even inspired me to reimagine my favourite Sri Lankan folktale in my latest book, Island Witch. In my new novel, set in 1880s Ceylon, Amara, the daughter of the local demon priest, is caught in the cross currents of her traditional beliefs and the new colonial ideas that have been brought into her coastal town, while being bullied and called a “witch” …
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My initial exposure to Juanita Sheridan was harrowing: I’d just sent my publisher my first Hawaiʻi murder mystery when a friend asked, “Have you read the Hawaiʻi mysteries of Juanita Sheridan?” Unsettled, I scrambled to find Sheridan’s books – all out of print, so it wasn’t easy. When they finally arrived, I opened The Kahuna Killer at random and found to my consternation that Sheridan had ended a chapter this way: “Pilikia. That word means trouble.” I’d ended a chapter of my book nearly identically: “Pilikia. Trouble.” Yikes! I snapped her book shut and resolved not to read another word until I’d completed at least my second Hawaiʻi murder mystery. I didn’t want m…
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I am eight years old. The bullies are waiting for me outside the girls’ bathroom. I race down the school hall as fast as my young legs can carry me, but the bullies are faster. They pounce, pushing me down, and I hit the floor hard, the air slamming out of my lungs. You’re a killer. A boy yells. Like your mom. Killer, killer. I tell myself not to look at them. That gloating stretch of their mouths. The shadows lengthening over me. The front door bursts open, and Mimi appears, her eyes spitting black fire. My cousin, only a year older, but her rage fills the hall. The bullies scatter like frantic ants, but this time, she is faster. A well-aimed punch and the leade…
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There is a famous image of a ballet dancer’s feet—one clad in pale tights and a pristine pink pointe shoe, ribbons neatly tied, while the other foot is bare. Band-Aids, blackened toenails. Blisters and bunions. The contrast is stark, the statement obvious: in ballet, there is the illusion and there is the reality. There is beauty, but underlying that beauty is pain. As the mother of a professional ballet dancer, this image resonates with me. And when I began writing my most recent novel, The Still Point, about a group of pre-professional ballet dancers in their final year of high school and their ambitious mothers, I wanted to offer both sides of this world. I wanted to …
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When I set out to write my second novel, A Step Part Darkness, I knew it was a lot more ambitious than my debut had been. Several elements made it more complicated: it has a dual-timeline with a separate but related mystery in each and it had an ensemble cast. Specifically, it had six main characters, each of whom would have their own POV in both timelines. When ensemble casts are good, they are so satisfying to readers, but when they are bad, they feel quite hollow, often because they’re rendered somewhat lifelessly—we’re simply told that this is the gang and that they’re bonded rather than this sentiment being earned through elbow grease. A Step Past Darkness is very d…
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Gothic novels, those strange, melancholy reads that drip with atmosphere, have been around for over 250 years. Ever since Horace Walpole’s gloomy Castle of Otranto, readers have reveled in morbid delight when turning the pages of these books. Safe and tucked away under the eaves reading our hearts out—far from the gloomy moors, haunted castles, and asylums that often figure large in these stories—we dare to be transported to mysterious places, the unexplained, the hidden, the lost, and yes, the supernatural. Why? Because we know Things That Go Bump in the Night are imaginary. Or are they? Perhaps the best thing about these dark stories is that they might have elements o…
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It was at a small writer’s workshop in New York City when one of the instructors, Paula Munier (senior agent for Talcott Notch Literary Services and the USA Today bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mystery series) introduced a literary agent to our group of twenty. The idea was to pitch our work to the agent in hopes he might want to represent one of us. I think of pitches like the Hunger Games of publishing—survival depends on slashing your competition to bits with just a few short sentences that you hope are lethal enough to convince an agent that your book is better than the rest and worthy of publishing. Midway into my pitch, the guest agent, Adam Chromy, Preside…
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