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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Hello, movie fans. The 93rd Academy Awards will take place this Sunday, April 25th, at 6:30 EST (and you can watch them on ABC, if you, like most of us, will not be at the literal ceremony). Going to the movies is still pretty iffy, but luckily, all of the Oscar noms are streaming via one service or another. We’ve assembled a handy roundup of all the crimey movies nominated for Academy Awards, for your viewing pleasure, this weekend and beyond! Promising Young Woman, dir. Emerald Fennell Nominations: Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Writing (Original Screenplay), Best Actress, Best Editing Summary: We missed including Promising Young Woman on our roundup of the …
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Last November, when it was revealed that Harvard’s fencing coach had allegedly accepted $1.5 million in payments from a wealthy, Maryland businessman in exchange for admitting his two sons into Harvard through its fencing program, the story generated shock, but not awe. After all, it was all so familiar. The thirty plus crazy-rich parents that made audacious headlines in March of 2019—including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin—were charged with paying as much as $1.2 million to get their kids into top institutions like Yale, Stanford and the University of Southern California. Their gateway conspirator was William “Rick” Singer, an independent college counselo…
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Hello chums. This is a very short post whose sole intention is to provide you with access to the following hysterical sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look, the British sketch show featuring the comedy duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb. In this skit, Mitchell and Webb play two famous actors (Michael and Alec) whose egos get the better of them while acting as Holmes and Watson. And then there’s some bonus footage where Mitchell and Webb play themselves, off-camera, while waiting to film the Holmes and Watson sketch. (Mitchell and Webb have other, sadder, Holmes/Watson content, but that is for another post on another day.) For what it’s worth, I laughed so long and ha…
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I was in seventh grade when I picked up The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, and my strongest memory of the book is showing my classmate some inventive swear words in the dialog and giggling about it. I’d been reading science fiction for over two years at that point, but Crichton was my introduction to the sci-fi thriller subgenre. I discovered a love for stories with suspense and high action. Fast forward about three decades, and my first novel fits that same profile. While looking for comp titles (i.e. books with a similar style and theme), I noticed something that’s followed me for much of my life: the best known authors of science fiction thrillers are white men.…
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I grew up near three hundred wild acres that contained woodland, marshland, rocky coves, granite ledge, and a mysterious grave. My sisters and I spent countless hours exploring when we were young—fishing for snapper blues and blue crabs, searching for owl pellets, collecting bouquets of wildflowers and marsh grass—so when the time came for me to set The Shadow Box in a wild landscape, that was the one I knew I had to write about. In the novel, Claire Beaudry Chase has been attacked and left for dead. She has to hide out and stay alive, and she uses her own instincts, her knowledge of the woods and shore, and skills taught to her by her father. Her husband is a state pro…
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“He hadn’t wanted to come here. He’d wanted it less and less as the bus traveled further across the wasteland; miles of nothing, just land, empty land. Land that didn’t get anywhere except into more land, and always against the sky the unmoving barrier of mountains. It was like moving into a trap.” The man we know only as Sailor has arrived in Santa Fe at an inauspicious moment: it’s Fiesta weekend. Sailor is a Chicago gangster, single-mindedly hunting his former patron, a U.S. Senator named Douglass: he believes Douglass has cheated him out of a substantial amount of money. So single-minded is Sailor’s pursuit that he didn’t learn about Fiesta before he got on the bus i…
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Juan Pablo Granda stepped into a small office in a middle-class neighborhood in the permanently foggy city of Lima, Perú, on February 18, 2013. The lights were off. He couldn’t see. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Granda began to make out menacing shapes: two men, short and squat, with handguns strapped to their hips. Behind them, their boss sat at a desk. A single-barreled shotgun leaned against the wall. Granda, a thirty-one-year-old Florida State University graduate with degrees in international business and management, wasn’t there to buy cocaine or weapons, as the room’s bristling tension might suggest. He was there to buy gold, the metal that has mystif…
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Picture the most murderous mammal in the world. Not the best predator, taking down prey with a single swipe of a great talon or claw, but the one that excels in slaying its own kind. Are you picturing a human being? Well, you would be wrong. But you might be surprised to know Homo sapiens actually falls at number 30 out of more than a thousand species on the list of animals that most often kill members of their own kind. Humans, it turns out, are just average members of a particularly violent lot, the primates. And the most prolific murderers* in the animal world are a different species altogether. Which, you might ask? Believe it or not, it’s the meerkat, a cute litt…
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It is a truth universally known that if there’s a dead body found with a knife in their back in the middle of library, the police must be called. Or must they? If there is a list of stock characters you must have in a mystery, the police is on that list. From classic mysteries to modern procedurals, police are generally called in when murder is afoot. The roles police play shrink and grow depending on who’s the main character, but they always come in the end. They are the voice of reason that clears confusion after a locked room mystery at a dinner party gone wrong. They are there to capture a murderer who outsmarted the amateur detective. They might be the anonymous gr…
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A wave of discontent settled over the dusty, low-lit room. The momentary stunned silence crumbled by a low growling hiss. “Booo.” The jeer lingered as all eyes fell on the speaker. Reverberating from a back corner of the room, the sneer seemed surprisingly appreciated. It was obvious he’d felt the disaffection his words brought. He ran his fingers through his summer bleached blond hair, pushing the stray strands back in place. The cheeky smile that had curled at the end of the lips when he first began to speak was put on pause as his eyes drifted to the place the word of scorn had emanated from. “We’re going to, uhm . . . to erect a mall.” He swallowed hard. “A mini ma…
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So, this weekend, every one of us on the CrimeReads staff received texts and emails and notifications from those who know us (people and the internet) to inform us about a new musical sketch that premiered on Saturday Night Live, in which several women, played by Kate McKinnon, Melissa Villaseñor, Ego Nwodim, and Chloe Fineman, reveal their secret loves of murdery true crime shows. So we’re posting it here, in case you missed it, because it is not to be missed. You’re going to laugh, trust us. View the full article
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The headline pretty much says it all—after three decades of reviewing an incredibly wide variety of crime novels, Marilyn Stasio has retired from writing the New York Times Book Review’s crime column, although she will still contribute occasional reviews to the newspaper. Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita and frequent contributor to national publications as well as editor of a number of landmark anthologies, is the natural choice to succeed Stasio—Pamela Paul of the NYT calls her the “the most obvious suspect” and we couldn’t agree more. We won’t be seeing her Crime Lady newsletter as much anymore, but we’re looking forward to reading her column—the first one’s up…
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Okay, everyone, it’s time to rank Prison Escape Movies. What are the parameters? The criteria for this category seem straightforward, but might involve even more hair-splitting than usual, so please read the guidelines, or what we’ll have here is… failure to communicate. First of all, not every movie that features a prison escape or escaped prisoners is a Prison Escape Movie. To be on this list, a movie must centrally feature the escape, both tonally and practically, emphasizing the conditions that create the need for the escape, the process of planning and strategizing the escape, the actual escape, being on the run or pursued or recaptured, and/or a general atmosphere…
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It’s a difficult time to write police procedurals. Or at least it should be. The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests against police racism and the acquiescence or outright participation by some cops in the attack on the Capitol (and elsewhere turning a blind eye to neo-Nazi extremists) should be a wakeup call: the comforting world of police procedurals, a world that so many of us absolutely love and that some of us enjoy writing within, has been built on a shaky foundation. Add other realities that have too long been with us and have tended to be invisible in many books: individual and systemic sexism and homophobia that has led to far too much sexual harassment and, in s…
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I was born an only child, and to my sorrow remained so. Growing up I longed for a brother or sister, someone I could connect with in a special way. All my life I’ve been searching, but that connection remains a mystery to me, a fascinating puzzle I’ve yet to resolve. Which is why in my novels I try to peel back the layers of the particular closeness between siblings. And yet, as I’ve discovered to my great surprise, many siblings are not close. In fact, a bitter enmity has arisen between them, something that, again, I cannot understand. To me, having a sibling is so precious I can’t fathom how people could throw it away as if it was yesterday’s paper. And, like yesterday…
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Vienna was giving Norah the cold shoulder. When she’d visited with Alex in the summer, she’d been enchanted; it had seemed to her a city with a mind of its own, unlike anywhere she’d been before. That felt like light years ago. Everything seemed so bleak—a Munchian vision of a city; a dark, urban forest, warped and menacing. The gloom pervaded Norah’s empty at and the dingy streets. Passers-by stared grimly at their phones; melancholy coated everything like a film of grease. And it was fucking freezing. Norah bought an Austrian paper, a German paper and a packet of cigarettes in the newsagent’s across the road, and sat down with them in the corner bistro. By the time sh…
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The SHOT Show held annually in Las Vegas is a multicolored, multifaceted, overwhelming, ballistic, gargantuan, flamboyant, and slightly surreal look at the U.S. firearms industry. The biggest gun trade show on the planet fills the sprawling Sands Expo and Convention Center, boasting more than 700,000 square feet of exhibition space. Closed to the public, it attracts over sixty thousand people from the industry, including gun makers, gun importers, gun dealers, gun repairers, gun specialist lawyers, gun trainers, gun lobbyists, and gun anything else you can think of. Representatives from armies and police forces around the world attend, sealing bulk orders in meetings in g…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Sarah Pearse, The Sanatorium (Pamela Dorman Books) Sarah Pearse’s atmospheric thriller involves a naive hotelier destroyed by his own hubris when he attempts to turn the ruins of a sanatorium into a swanky new destination for travelers. First, his architect vanishes. Then, the staff start disappearing. And then, an avalanche traps the rest of the staff, to be picked off one by one. Lucky for the rest of the hotel’s trapped denizens, there’s a British cop visiting, and she’s determined to hunt down the attacker, even as the weather rages outside and threatens to obliterate the entir…
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I’ve been a huge fan of Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction since his noir fantasy novel Finch. In the years since, I’ve grown to admire—and envy—his range as an author, along with the depth of his imagination and his ability to send chills down my spine while enthralling me with his prose. His work includes The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation), Borne, and Dead Astronauts. I first met him in London with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, a Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winner and his co-editor of the anthologies The Big Book of Science Fiction and The Big Book of Classic Fantasy. Since then, we’ve reconnected at the Texas Book Festival and over tacos in Austin. VanderMeer is an author I…
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“Mr. Rai.” Constable Neri at my elbow, her gaze incisive in a softly rounded face, and her skin a midbrown shade made dull by the lack of sunlight. “Would you like me to drive you home?” “That’s my father,” I said. “Call me Aarav.” Not Ari. Never that. It’s what my mother called me, and I couldn’t bear to hear it from any other lips. The last girlfriend who’d tried had been so frightened by my reaction that she’d packed up and left the same day. “You looked like you wanted to strangle me,” she’d said on the phone the next day. “That much rage, your face all twisted up until I didn’t know you anymore . . .” Her voice had broken. “Aarav, you need to see a shrink or you’ll…
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In 1977, the New York Daily News published an article about a beautiful young con woman named Barbara St. James. (At least, that was one of her names.) “If you meet her, you will like her,” ran the article. “She will draw out your life story, your troubles and triumphs. She appears wealthy, a woman of substance and class. She drips with sincerity.” Appears was the second-most important word in the paragraph, but the first was like. You will like her. Beautiful Barbara’s life story has long been forgotten, but that line could be used to describe almost every con woman before and after her. If you meet her, you will like her. The con woman’s likability is the single most…
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Earlier this month, we were excited to learn that Sisters in Crime has launched a new program to support emerging LGBTQIA+ authors! Submissions are now open for the inaugural Pride Award for Emerging LGBTQIA+ Crime Writers, which will provide a $2,000 grant to an emerging crime fiction writer at the beginning of their career who identifies as LGBTQIA+. There is no cost to submit. This is the first year for the Pride Award, which has been created as the legacy project from past Sisters in Crime president Sherry Harris. We caught up with this year’s judges, John Copenhaver, Cheryl Head, and Kristen Lepionka, to find out more about the new program, and to discuss the state…
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It may be two months past the winter solstice, but show’s still falling in NYC and there’s plenty of winter weather left to motivate us to stay in and read. These new-in-paperback titles are some of the most exciting mysteries and crime novels around—plus, they won’t break the bank! Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa (William Morrow) (2/2) “[An] exceedingly complex, inventive, resourceful examination of harm and power.” –The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice Kathy Reichs, A Conspiracy of Bones (Scribner) (2/2) “Reichs roars back with a Temperance Brennan mystery unlike any that have come before it…” –Booklist Michael Connelly, Fair Warning (Grand…
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Humankind is predisposed to the hyperbolic. It was a true in the Titanic’s day as it is today. We love anything that smells of success. We want it huge, we crave it grand: the biggest, the fastest, the most opulent, the richest. We are drawn to such claims like moths to flame. As much as we love hyperbole, however, it invariably leads to disappointment. This world is not meant for absolutes. Every title has an asterisk or footnote, explaining why any claims must be qualified. The problem is that we love our absolutes and have no patience for the fine print. It is no mystery why we’re drawn to the Titanic. In writing my novel The Deep, a reimagining of the sinking of RM…
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He walked, feeling his body fill with blessed tiredness. Vyrin knew every root, every hole on this path, and he looked forward to seeing the pasture on the left, fenced by rowan trees—the berries would be ripe in color by now—and then he would encounter the sweet, gentle chimney smoke from the farm. The walk both tired and invigorated him; his recent fears seemed silly. I guess I really am old, he thought. I’ve become neurotically fearful. He could see the cathedral from the last turn. It stood on a stone outcropping that divided the top of the valley. The yellow façade, framed by two bell towers, continued upward from the vertical plane of the cliff. This church was mu…
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