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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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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Living in Harlem in the early 1970s, my father’s third floor apartment on 123rd and Seventh Avenue was upstairs from infamous barbershop and bar The Shalimar. Glancing out of the window on a Friday or Saturday nights, it wasn’t uncommon to see rows of brightly hued Cadillac’s lined-up from corner to corner and equally flashy men with their dolls hanging in front of their rides before parading inside the lounge. As I wrote decades later in the essay “Cashmere Thoughts” published in the 2007 book Beats Rhymes & Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip-Hop: “Every kid on the block wanted to be down with the loud suits, feathered hats and candy colored platform shoes that de…
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In my current release, The Deepest Kill, the central murder may possibly relate to a lucrative missile defense contract. One character compares it to a series of real-life deaths, prompting my agent to ask, “Did that really happen?” Yes. Yes it did. The late 1980s really did witness a series of deaths involving scientists who worked on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also famously known as “Star Wars.” This ambitious space-based missile defense program, proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, would intercept missiles while they were still in the air. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. The concept turned out to have a few reality checks that couldn’t be gotten aroun…
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Minnesotans of a certain age remember when 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling went missing the night of October 22, 1989. Jacob, his brother, and a friend were riding their bikes near the Wetterling home in St. Joseph, Minnesota, when a man with a gun took Jacob. No one saw Jacob alive again. (His killer finally confessed in 2016.) Whenever my friends and I would play in the woods, we kept an eye out for Jacob. I remember scouring the trees, thinking maybe he’d gotten lost, and I could help find him. We didn’t understand that monsters walked among us. I wonder if Jacob’s abduction explains, at least in part, my lifelong fascination with true crime. I have this need to underst…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed books in crime fiction, nonfiction, mystery, and thrillers, from Bookmarks. * Michael Wolraich, The Bishop and the Butterfly (Union Square & Co.) “Wolraich’s account of the murder and the ensuing investigations, helmed by the former judge Samuel Seabury…is brick-dense yet propulsive. Unlike the sensationalist reporters of the era, Wolraich manages to handle even the seediest of underworlds with reportorial spareness and elegance, treating his material more as a nonfiction political thriller than a true-crime whodunit … The book also provides a fascinating portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then New York’s governor, as he n…
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Tisanes, hot chocolate, a pint, gin and gingerbeer, a strong cup of tea: it’s simply not a Christie mystery without an array of beverages at the ready. As a longterm Christie devotee, during re-reads, certain aspects of her usage of beverages kept asserting themselves. Whether it’s head honcho Poirot or a minor character murdered in the second chapter, what each character chooses to drink says something discernible about personality, class and historical context. Christie’s most famed detectives, Poirot and Miss Marple, certainly had their liquid preferences. “Hercule Poirot sat at breakfast in his small but agreeably cosy flat in Whitehall Mansions. He had enjoyed his …
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A look at the month’s best reviewed books in crime fiction, nonfiction, mystery, and thrillers, from Bookmarks. * Michael Wolraich, The Bishop and the Butterfly (Union Square & Co.) “Wolraich’s account of the murder and the ensuing investigations, helmed by the former judge Samuel Seabury…is brick-dense yet propulsive. Unlike the sensationalist reporters of the era, Wolraich manages to handle even the seediest of underworlds with reportorial spareness and elegance, treating his material more as a nonfiction political thriller than a true-crime whodunit … The book also provides a fascinating portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then New York’s governor, as he n…
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You’re reading a mystery. You want to know whodunnit. You follow the detective—maybe it’s a cop or a PI, maybe it’s an amateur sleuth forced into circumstances to play that role—as they unearth clue after clue. Eventually, they identify the villain. How? By marshalling evidence. Maybe there are fingerprints. A witness. DNA. A confession in the penultimate chapter. You as the reader finally arrive at that elusive thing, The Truth. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? All mysteries are, in a way, a search for truth. Hell, fiction in general is such a search—mysteries are just a tad more bold about it. We read to learn something about ourselves, the people around us, t…
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I often wonder when reading mysteries such as the first of its kind The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins or the groundbreaking Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, what would I do if I was wrongly accused of a crime like certain protagonists in these novels? Would I vigorously proclaim my innocence or would I be so shocked that I’d be incapable of speaking up at all? Knowing myself and my inability to remain quiet in general never mind while being accused of a heinous crime I didn’t commit, I’m betting on the former. However, I can’t really know, can I? Unless it happens, and I really don’t want it to. Still it fascinates me, wondering how I’d handle such a fraught situation, which le…
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Mary Kubica is a very private person. So private, in fact, no one but her husband knew she’d started writing a novel, The Good Girl. And even then, she didn’t let him read her manuscript. She fell in love with writing when she was almost a teenager, she says. “It was one of those things that when I discovered it, I never stopped…It was very much a hobby for me. I never thought it was something I would pursue.” She studied history and English in college and took one creative writing class where she wouldn’t even share her written musings with classmates. After college she taught history in the Chicago suburbs to high school freshmen and juniors. Standing in front of a c…
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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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