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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What could be more destabilizing—or trail more fascinating narrative threads—than a person vanishing without a trace? It’s no mystery why countless authors kick off their books with people gone missing. Marry this trope with speculative fiction, and you’ve got stories whose possibilities are literally limitless. In my new book, The Bad Ones, four people vanish from around a wintry suburb in a single night. The best friend of one of the lost learns that a slumber party game centered around a figure of local lore is key in unlocking the mystery. Here are six more supernatural and horror-inflected stories in which vanishings drive the plot. Knock Knock, Open Wide, by Nei…
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Seems things can be fun in Tijuana, Mexico – TJ to the initiated – but things can also go very, very wrong. Of course a popular destination being right on the US-Mexico border, with two million people, a population seriously swelled by sojourning day trippers and US college students looking for adventure plus a few DEA agents and cross-border migrants waiting for their chance to head north. Home to the infamous Tijuana Cartel of course, nobody will be surprised to know Tijuana is a narcotics smuggling centre. The drug wars were known for their super violent turf battles between 2007 and 2010. Homicides peaked in 2010 – when 844 people were killed. In May 2022, it was repo…
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I loved Love Lies Bleeding, the otherworldly, lesbian body-horror drifter-thriller from director Rose Glass. As suggested by that long epithet, there is a lot going on in this movie, the volume of which makes the film’s thematic and even narrative succinctness all the more impressive. Kristen Stewart plays Lou (sometimes Lou Lou), the taciturn, hardworking manager of a warehouse gym in a suburban backwater of Albuquerque in 1989. She’s the one who gets things done, who cleans up messes. Her life is hardly glamorous; when we first see her, she’s unclogging a gym toilet with gloved hands, reaching into a murky nebula of shit without complaining or even wincing. Her life ch…
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There ought to be a word for the particular form of melancholy you feel, upon finishing a book you’ve been enjoying so much you never wanted it to end. If there is such a word, in some language or other—I’m looking at you, German—then I experienced the extreme form late last year, as I arrived at the hopeful concluding passages of Silverview, a slim 2021 novel about a seaside bookseller in a small British town who becomes entangled with a former spy in a bad jam. That novel, of course, is by John le Carré, nee David Cornwall, and it was quite good—not le Carré’s best, but le Carré’s best is a very high standard, indeed. What distinguishes Silverview is that it was the…
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If you’ve written a few chapters and are struggling to finish your book, I know exactly how you feel. Writing is tough work. You’re constantly stretching your imagination to spark ideas and put words on the page. The whole process is stressful, tiring, and makes you feel as if you’re burning the candle at both ends. Because you are. But there are a few tricks that can make this process a lot more streamlined – and I’m going to share them with you. First, it helps to have an outline. Some authors are totally brilliant and don’t bother with this, but I’m a big believer in outlines. They help speed up my thought process and create a roadmap for exactly where my story is goi…
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When an author begins a new novel, the blank computer screen presents a terrifying challenge and a few inevitable questions rise to the surface: How will zero words become one hundred thousand? How can one possibly create a riveting story out of thin air that will surprise and delight readers—even when writing about spies, murder, mayhem and more. Maybe especially when writing about spies, murder, mayhem, and more. When I started what eventually became The Berlin Letters, I knew two things from the get-go—I wanted to use the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall as not only bookends framing the story, but as a character within it. In the split-time narrative I envisioned, rea…
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I am a sucker for a murder ballad, so much so that I wrote an entire novel (The Last Verse) around my love of the form. I can remember the first time I heard Reba McEntire sing “the night the lights went out in Georgia” my skin broke out in goosebumps at the end of every verse. It was the lyrics that got me, the way she brought each revelation down like a sledgehammer, and brilliant way the storytelling is reflected in the music. The original true crime podcast, the murder ballad is an oral tradition that goes back centuries and tells of a gruesome killing and its consequences. The crime is sometimes explicit, other times only hinted at, and the story unfolds with dense,…
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As D-Day approached, German soldiers, sailors, and airmen who liked to smoke self-rolled cigarettes would have felt themselves most fortunate to pick up a free pack of Efka cigarette papers, with their familiar drawings of palm trees and pyramids, that someone had left behind on a café table or on the seat on a train, or to discover a pack they had completely forgotten about buried deep in the pockets of their greatcoats. But when they opened them, instead of the expected fifty cigarette papers, they found ten tightly folded sheets of thin paper. On opening these sheets, the members of the Wehrmacht found excerpts from a manual titled Krankheit rettet (Illness Saves), aut…
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When you think of Gothic fiction, the image of a woman in a diaphanous nightgown, running from a sinister house might come to mind. A classic feature of paperback novels from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, these iconic covers convey several things at a glance: fear, sensuality, mystery. Words that, in a nutshell, help define Gothic fiction. Often denigrated as campy pulp fiction, these books and their covers, in my opinion, also serve to highlight the heroine’s agency against overwhelming odds. After all, she is willfully running from the haunted house—a powerful metaphor for patriarchal oppression in the genre. It’s no coincidence that Gothic horror enjoyed a renaissance duri…
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I once attended a writing seminar that claimed the landscape of your childhood home informs the way you move, think, and talk. A rocky, mountainous place might shorten your sentences into a rhythm that makes room for quick bursts of speed; a hot and humid landscape might lead you to consider your thoughts slowly, without straining yourself. Embarrassingly, I have forgotten exactly who led this discussion (if you’ve attended something similar, please tell me!), but the idea has never left me—that, in the same way some people wind up looking exactly like their dogs, the place where you live can infect you to a deeper degree than you might have realized. It’s by turns a co…
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I’ve always liked my women a little bad. Give me the imperfect, the wrathful, the vindictive. In my opinion, those are the women who have the most fun. In my debut, Women of Good Fortune, three women decide to dismiss societal expectations and make their own fortunes. Reluctant bride Lulu cannot imagine herself marrying her bland, rich fiancé, and so she devises a heist with her best friends, luxury-chasing Jane and career-oriented Rina. If they can steal away the red envelopes that their well-to-do guests gift at Lulu’s wedding, then each of these women will get closer to the life she so desperately desires. As they get closer and closer to the wedding day, though, unfo…
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If your last name was Farto, would you want people nicknaming you Bum? Evidently Joseph “Bum” Farto didn’t mind it a bit, and that alone probably hints at his being a person of interest. Born in 1919 across the street from the Key West Fire Department, Bum Farto hired on as a fireman in the 1940s and worked his way through the ranks until becoming the fire chief in 1964. Fate handed him that job thanks to a long tenure and an FBI investigation into corruption in both the island’s fire and police departments, the result of which entailed the resignation of then Fire Chief Charles Cremata and Police Chief George Gomez. Combined with a new police chief, Farto gave rise …
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A town of seemingly perfect housewives. A severed ear in a patch of green grass. The last man alive hiding from his monstrous neighbors. A family ostracized from the community after their sugar bowl is poisoned. From Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet to Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and most of Shirley Jackson’s body of work, there’s something about the suburban gothic that keeps us coming back for more. It’s creepy, it’s familiar, and it’s omnipresent. A broad and rather elusive subcategory, the suburban gothic focuses on the existential horror that lurks in small towns, close-knit communities, and suburban neighborhoods. These locales mi…
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My latest novel Finding Sophie is a crime novel about a teenager (Sophie) who goes missing one seemingly uneventful day. That simple but monumental event rips open the lives of her parents, Harry and Zara and sends them spiraling in opposite directions. Where one lives in hope, the other clings to despair. When one finds strength to commit to a search, the other seeks answers internally—in a search of the soul. They each want to find truth but to do that they have to learn to understand and navigate a path between hope and grief. Missing persons stories are usually told from the lens of the police or a private detective—a dispassionate investigator who can leave emotions…
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Clothes are a storyteller’s dream when it comes to showing, not telling. In Patricia Highsmith’s 1950s novel, The Price of Salt, Therese Belivet describes what Carol is wearing even before she mentions her future lover’s eyes, or mouth, or languorous walk. (“She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with her hand on her waist.”) Carol’s appearance as a centre of stillness within the frantic atmosphere of a Manhattan department store has a lot to do with her fabulous coat, and the way she models it, and yet her poise, though striking, is not durable. That’s how it goes with coats: they are easily removed, lost, stolen or damag…
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“The trial of Polly Bodine will take place at Richmond, on Monday next, and will, no doubt, excite much interest,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe on June 18, 1844, for the Columbia Spy. Poe had recently moved to New York where, he declared, “I intend living for the future.” He got a temporary lift when he sold “The Balloon Hoax” story, a fictional account of the first transatlantic balloon crossing to Moses Yale Beach of the Sun. THE ATLANTIC OCEAN CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!! screamed the Sun in April 1844. James Gordon Bennett exposed Poe’s story as a hoax and Beach issued a retraction. Not even the Sun could hold its readers entirely on hoaxes. Soon, Poe was broke again. He foun…
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One time my brother almost saw a ghost. He was in New Orleans, in an ancient bar, during a bachelor party weekend, I think. To be honest, I can’t quite remember all the details because this story was very long and he clearly didn’t have an ending in mind when he began telling a room full of people about this spooky situation that culminated in a bathroom where he almost saw something. Something invisible, it turned out, almost became visible by the urinal. But in the end, he didn’t see it after all. The ghost. This payoff was met with derisive laughter, which is the normal response in my family if someone squanders your time with a bad story. I have three middle-aged br…
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I started writing my second novel, Like It Never Happened, at the beginning of 2020. It started, as all stories do, with a handful of characters and an inciting incident. In this case, four eighteen-year-old boys get in a fight with two strangers in a parking lot. They kill one boy and incapacitate another. They get away with it, but they argue about what to do next. Their friendship shatters, and they lose touch. It usually takes a fair distance into a story—after I learn what happens—before I start to get a sense of what it’s about. As I churned out words and pages and chapters, Covid crept toward us and then engulfed us, and my story that began with violence drifted to…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Tana French, The Hunter (Viking) “Tana French has become her own reliable industry of top-shelf crime thrillers.” –The Washington Post Elizabeth Brooks, The Woman in the Sable Coat (Tin House) “Secrets, betrayals, and compromises abound as these very different women navigate treacherous relationships to find safe harbor in Brooks’ taut novel.” –Booklist Brendan Flaherty, The Dredge (Atlantic Monthly Press) “In this accomplished debut mystery, Flaherty revitalizes the familiar trope of old secrets threatening to resurface with sinewy prose and well-tooled suspense . . . The…
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The early 1980s were a crazy time for adventure movies. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” had come out in the summer of 1981 and was a huge box-office success, spawning sequels that would continue more than 40 years later and imitators that adapted old adventure tropes like “King Solomon’s Mines” in 1985 and “High Road to China” in 1983, the latter starring the man who might have been Indiana Jones if not for prior commitments, Tom Selleck. So it’s interesting that the best of the Indiana Jones follow-ups spun the story in a direction that was infrequently explored: what better plot than one revolving around a writer, and what better way to thrust a writer into action than thrus…
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The amnesia trope is a popular one in mysteries and thrillers, and for good reason. It’s a terrifying thought, having a secret locked away in your own head. Often times, the suppressed memory is of a violent event, so not only is the reader unsure if they can trust the character, the character also doesn’t know if they can be trusted! This is what happens in my novel, Listen for the Lie. Due to a head injury, my main character, Lucy, has no memory of the night her best friend died. The evidence seems to point to her being the murderer, and everyone in her small town sure believes that, but she has no idea. I loved writing the amnesia trope, because it means that the rea…
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Funky Nassau – capital of the Bahamas, beauty spot of the Caribbean, a British colony until 1973. Officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, it is comprised of around 700 islands (though only 30 are inhabited) with the capital, Nassau, located on the island of New Providence. Sun, sea, cocktails, hedonism, tourism, off-shore banking, tax dodging and a real life murder scandal plus plenty of crime fiction… Let’s ease ourselves in gently to the Bahamas with a few cozies, as if into the beautiful warm waters of the Caribbean or a bubbling luxury hotel hot tub… Dorothy Dunnett’s Operation Nassau is the fourth in the Dolly mystery series – the Dolly being a yacht owned by p…
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After his five decades in show business, the late Richard Lewis is rightly being remembered for many career highlights: his peerless stand-up routines and late-night comedy appearances, his neurotic and oddly soulful portrayal of a fictionalized version of himself in 12 seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm. However, if you were a lover of mystery stories and a budding comedy nerd in the 90s, you might first have seen him chasing a dachshund across Monte Carlo. Lewis’ role in the 1992 crime caper Once Upon a Crime will not make any list of his achievements. But, briefly, he is oddly winning and wonderful in a lovable little flop of a film. It’s an improbable performance that …
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THE ALL-AMERICAN RALSTON FAMILY AND THEIR IDEAL SUMMER HOME Photo essay in Life magazine, July 1932 Dr. Phillip Ralston of New York City and his wife, theater star Faye Ralston, have certainly mastered the art of good living. And they have quite a lot of lives in their care! The doctor adopted six of his children in 1915 while working in England during the war. They welcomed their seventh child, Max, four years ago. The doctor and his wife spend most of the year in New York City and the older children board at school. In the summer, they come together in their private paradise in the Thousand Islands region. It is called Ralston Island now, though it was formerly known…
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Yes, you read that right. Mark Twain consistently reinvented his original 1876 novel Tom Sawyer, adding sequels of different genres to it (for different reasons) for the next twenty years. Tom Sawyer was Twain’s bestselling book, though not initially. According to scholar Peter Messent, Tom Sawyer received lackluster commercial sales during its first year in print, selling only 23,638 copies. Compare these numbers to those from the sales of from Twain’s 1869 humorous travelogue The Innocents Abroad: 69,156 copies sold during its first year. This was partially because, until Tom Sawyer, Twain was known better as a travel writer; but Tom Sawyer‘s imminent popularity was …
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