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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From the other, all terrors flow. Since the advent of horror as a genre, fear of the unknown—and fear of what we think we know—has largely driven the narrative. Likewise, there is little more frighteningly unknown to us than that generalized monster commonly referred to as the other. You know the one—the monster with green skin and a flat head, the alien from a distant planet, the beast that drinks blood instead of red wine, the necromancer that conjures spirits in a foreign tongue. The one that doesn’t fit neatly into the small boxes in which our rigid frames of reference so comfortably exist is the one we’ve been conditioned to fear the most. As the film and genre exp…
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In this series, our editor Olivia Rutigliano rereads every Sherlock Holmes story, and puts together a small close-reading. This week: “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). ___________________________________ I reread “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” the ninth of the twelve stories that comprise The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), so that I might deliver a toast at a recent meeting of The Three Garridebs, the Sherlock Holmes society and scion group of the Baker Street Irregulars, where I was a guest. The toast was way too long, perhaps because the story is so strange and fascinating. It goes like this: Wat…
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When I set out to write Frightmares, my upcoming Young Adult horror novel, I wanted to channel the fun, freaky feel of a 90s slasher movie. I wanted my readers to find their favorite elements of those movies in its pages, while still delivering surprises, jump scares, and satisfying twists. I was not, however, writing an actual slasher movie; I was writing a book, and deploying tropes in written fiction means using a different set of tools to satisfy that slasher movie craving. Apart from the cover, various design elements, and the occasional sketch or illustration, authors rely on words instead of visuals. Enter an element any horror story would arguably be lost without—…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Rachel Howzell Hall, We Lie Here (Thomas and Mercer) “What’s most special about the book is the array of complex characters…The dialogue is sharp, observant, and emotional without ever straying into sentimentality, and the mystery of who is targeting the Gibson family manages to stay compelling despite many twists and turns…This captivating domestic thriller will keep you on your toes.” –Kirkus Reviews Aggie Blum Thompson, All The Dirty Secrets (Forge Books) “In a rarefied world of wealth and privilege, simmering secrets hide in plain sight. Heart-stopping danger will make you ra…
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According to Scottish crime fiction author Denise Mina, Glasgow— her hometown where she lives and works and gets around as a pedestrian and a bicyclist—is a city of brutal frankness where a thick skin is a necessity of life and it’s very hard to feel special. “Glasgow,” Denise says, “is a place where people come up and talk to you, … my whole career has been people walking up to me in the street and saying, ‘I read your last book. And I thought it was shit. And this is what you did wrong.’” And, at least according to Denise, that’s okay because “everyone is a central character in Glasgow.” A perfect example of this Glaswegian-as-central-character occurred during a recen…
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Munich – capital of Bavaria with over a million and a half people and where the annual festival sees about three times as many steins of beer consumed at Oktoberfest. One of the world’s most livable cities according to some indicators but, of course, not without its crime writing…. Let’s jump straight in with Hans Hellmut Kirst’s Konstantin Keller series of detective novels set in Munich in the 1960s and featuring a retiring detective inspector. The trilogy was published in English translations as Damned to Success (also as A Time for Scandal, 1973) subtitled A Novel of Modern Munich, A Time for Truth (1974) and Everything has a Price (1976). Kirst is still best known fo…
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Crime novelist Laura Lippman never stood a fair chance of becoming anything but a writer. Her mother was a librarian. Her dad was a newspaper editorial writer. Her sister worked in bookstores. How could she possibly do anything else? But then there was that editor at the Baltimore Sun who told the young reporter after she’d worked at the newspaper for some time, she “just wasn’t a good writer.” Lippman’s older now, he’s dead and she’s taught writing at Johns Hopkins University, Goucher College and Eckerd College’s “Writer’s in Paradise” annual conference. Couldn’t write, huh? Yep. She never stood a chance to do anything but. And you must wonder about her crotchety edit…
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It’s a great year for noir, which this list will showcase; there’s also an elegant classical mystery, a speculative mapmaking adventure, and several works that straddle the line between psychological thriller and literary fiction. I won’t say that any of these works transcend the genre—rather, they are a perfect expression of it, both embracing and exploding tropes, playing with our expectations and fulfilling our needs. It’s a tough year so far, and perhaps a clear-eyed vision of our struggles and strengths is something crime fiction can best provide. I’ve always hated feeling lied to, and crime novels have all the honesty you can take about this world (plus a little mor…
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Y’all. I’m tired. My tank is nearing ‘E.’ As for many of you, too much is going on, and it’s exacerbating a co-existing condition of always being tired. It’s hard to be creative when you’re exhausted, when your gears are grinding, when all you want to do is binge cookies, fries and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Amirite? Lately, I’ve been saying ‘no’ to things that take too much effort. Writing essays takes a lot of effort, even for prolific writers. Especially for prolific writers. We are trained monkeys, private dancers, wizards with tricks up our sleeves. But I have no more tricks. My feet hurt and I don’t wanna dance. But then, again: I’ve written 100,000-word drafts. What…
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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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It’s a familiar scene. Aglow with a post-coital sheen, the girl tucks a sheet delicately (modestly) over her chest as she smokes a cigarette, her disheveled, masculine partner hiking up his too-tight jeans just in front of the partially closed door. Her name is Tammy or Tonya or Trisha, something cute, but by this point you’ve already forgotten it because what matters is that she’s done The Thing, which means sometime in the next few minutes, or the next few pages, she’s going to die. Or how about this one— She’s a good girl, kind and obedient and virginal, which is why she’s found herself ensconced in a courtship with an older, mysterious man. After a small wedding ce…
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Secrets are fascinating, especially when they simmer in the pages of a file that only the privileged few ever get to see. A confidential file can decide the fates of people or overthrow nations. It can catch a killer or a spy. Government agents have risked all to protect or retrieve these files—especially in fiction. Intelligence services and secret police agencies around the world, especially in authoritarian countries like the USSR and East Germany, made ordinary citizens the subjects of secret files, proof the government was watching them. My fascination with secret files came early. I was 20 years old, an intern at the State Department in Washington, assigned to the …
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On a balmy July morning in 2018, a neighbor noticed the Bhatia family’s shops still shuttered, their morning’s milk delivery unattended to, and the door to their house unlocked. Panicked, he walked up the stairs to their home. The image that followed was chilling: eleven family members were dead. Nine bodies were hanged from a grate below the skylight in their living room, the tenth opposite them, and the eleventh was found strangled in a nearby bedroom. Blindfolded, mouths taped, hands and feet tied. The head constable on the scene said their bodies were vertically slumped and “the formation in which they were hanging reminded [him] of a banyan tree, like branches of the…
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Ah, the Coming-of-Age horror story. Who doesn’t love a good depiction of the clash between innocence and experience, of the crucible that is early adolescence, of the bittersweet, nostalgic pain that marks the beginning of maturity? The stakes are high, the characters recognizable, the lessons painful and relatable, and more often than not, the soundtrack banging. But why is it when we say Coming-of-Age, we automatically think of stories like It, Something Wicked This Way Comes, or Stranger Things? What about the other ages we go through/come to? Where are those coming-of-age tales? If you read the Foreword of my upcoming novel, Mary: An Awakening of Terror (and I sure …
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When I was in my twenties, I traveled the world as if nothing could ever go wrong. I slept in an African beach hut for six months with twenty total strangers, took a crew job in Australia on some boat with a dad and two random male backpackers. I don’t say this proudly; it’s astonishing I even survived. What I will say, though, is that it’s given me a sharp eye into the world of travel thrillers. I’m now basing my writing career on my lifetime’s disastrous choices, and there’s limitless material to be had. It’s a glorious primetime, too, for stories of adventure. We’re all craving a little travel as we emerge from the dark, tight enclosure of the pandemic. We’re renewing…
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If you were to read my biography on my website or the jacket of my latest novel, The Binding Room, you would learn that I am a Criminal Defence lawyer who lives in London. For almost twenty years, I’ve been defending people who have been accused of crimes that even the darkest corners of most people’s minds would reject as pure fiction. The majority of people assume, rightly or wrongly, that my legal experience would place me in the best position to put me in the mind of a criminal. I wouldn’t say that they were right, but my legal career has placed me in a unique position. One of the first things I learnt as a young criminal lawyer was to make sure that I always was th…
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Real life criminals might frighten us, anger us, even disgust us, but one thing they rarely if ever do is bore us. Sometimes they even play out our fantasies: who hasn’t daydreamed of quietly putting a shiv into the pain-in-the-ass boss or pulling off a successful heist and retiring to a life free of financial burden? Real life criminals also pick at the scab of our terrors: torture, murder, kidnapping, and other violent invasions of our lives. The bravado of crime is pretty heady stuff, grab-you-in-the-chest-and-rip-out-your-heart stuff. And yet, as every journalist knows―and lives by the famous dictum: If it bleeds, it leads―we can’t get enough of it. Why? Here’s one…
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What would it be like to travel back in time? That depends on whether you’re ready for it. If you’re hopping into a time machine, you’d likely have a chance to prepare yourself, and that’s certainly the comfortable way to go. But imagine being flung back in the blink of an eye. One minute you’re in our world, and the next, you’re in another time period. It would be terrifying and overwhelming. In fiction, though, the narrator is the one tossed into the chaos. We don’t need to worry about how to find food and shelter, how to survive and thrive, how to avoid being thrown into a jail cell or a mental institution. We don’t need to figure out how to lace a corset, how to fin…
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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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Let’s get something out of the way: what exactly do we mean by the term “locked-room mystery”? It’s a phrase I’ve seen used incorrectly in the past to refer to works in the similar but distinct “closed circle mystery” subgenre. What sets locked-room mysteries apart from the rest is an element of impossibility. As a matter of fact, I tend to use the term synonymously with “impossible crime,” meaning a story in which a crime (usually murder) is committed under seemingly impossible circumstances. Often these stories have an ambiance of the eerie and macabre, with apparently supernatural occurrences and foreboding atmosphere. However (and this is crucial) the whole thing is u…
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Earlier this year, when my second novel was published, an interviewer asked me which writer, alive or dead, I’d like to meet and under what circumstances. I wanted to say Susie Steiner in a pub somewhere in Cambridge, England, where Steiner’s novels are set. In my mind, I imagined it would be an opportunity to be in the presence, even for a short time, of the author who created detective Manon Bradshaw. I knew I’d need to be on my toes. From her social media and interviews, she came across as smart, brutally honest, and unlikely to suffer fools. In the end, though, knowing of her grave illness at the time, I decided the choice was inappropriate and named someone else. No…
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As someone who stormed through Succession, White Lotus and Big Little Lies with their jaw permanently attached to the floor, I will quite happily confess that I am a sucker for portrayals of ‘how the other half lives.’ Gossip magazines, documentaries, reality tv shows, and, of course, dark fiction: we as a society have an unquenchable thirst for lifting the lid on the lifestyles of the super wealthy, and we tend to have a particular vigour for when those super wealthy behave super appallingly. This is exactly the theme I touch upon in my novel, Out of her Depth, in which Rachel, an unassuming girl from a nondescript London suburb, lands a Summer job in the hills of Flo…
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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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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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I don’t know about you, but I am grateful for everything that makes me laugh these days. I am also seeking and finding humor wherever I can: my dog’s inability to understand the rules of fetch; reruns of The Good Place; reader reviews of Chelsea G. Summers’ A Certain Hunger. I’m also wondering why there aren’t more funny crime writers. Some of the greats were very funny: Elmore Leonard immediately comes to mind, and there is humor in classic noir of the mordant wit variety. Lisa Lutz’s Spellman books, Timothy Halloran’s Junior Bender series, Amy Gentry’s Last Woman Standing, Caroline Kepnes’s You books all have laughs along with the scary. Crime writers hear my plea: mor…
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