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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Eight thousand meters (over twenty six thousand feet) is the place known as the “Death Zone”. Every moment a person spends up there their body is dying, the lack of oxygen causing hallucinations, swelling of the brain and fluid leaking into the lungs. It is so dangerous that death is an accepted risk in the extreme high altitude peaks—even before you add in the risk of avalanches, serac falls and crevasses. In 2019, I became the youngest Canadian woman to summit one of these 8,000m peaks, Mt Manaslu, and I experienced life in this extreme place for myself. And as a writer, I couldn’t help but wonder— where better for a serial killer to hide, than a place already known as …
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The day after spring break my son was sent home early from kindergarten. His school has been rigorous about enforcing stringent health guidelines during the pandemic. Any sign of a symptom means a parent is called for early pick-up. Since September, I’ve been called to retrieve him over a dozen times. When I arrived, my son bounced out of the building in a state of barely restrained joy. “HI MOM” he cried. “Hi,” I said. “What’s going on, buddy? You not feeling good?” My tone made his smile fade which is a terrible and tremendous parenting power. “Ummmmmm. My stomach kind of hurts,” he said without meeting my eyes. “Like you’re going to throw up?” He paused. “Yeah…
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Some of the very best limited series on TV over the past ten years have been adaptations of stand-alone crime novels. As I write this, Anatomy of a Scandal, based on a novel of the same name by Sarah Vaughan, is the number one show streaming on Netflix. Before Anatomy of a Scandal we had Pieces of Her, from the brilliant Karin Slaughter novel, also a number one show. And before that we had The Secrets She Keeps (Michael Robotham), Big Little Lies (Lianne Moriarty) and The Stranger (Harlan Coben). The list goes on. There’s more than one reason these stories so successfully translate to television. The novels they are based on were written by some of our best writers. Writ…
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Tucked under the autumn foliage and blended into spring’s vibrant colors, floating unseen in the stagnant air of a summer heatwave and drifting quietly under a winter blizzard, New England’s romantic landscapes conceal the mystical creatures, myths, and legends they harbor, affording a dreamlike setting with unsettling undercurrents. Seeded with independent spirit and rooted in puritanical values, New England’s path has been the story of America. For its climate, mythology, and history, New England continues to provide an excellent backdrop for mysteries, chillers, dark romances, and psychological thrillers. There’s no denying the suspenseful tone set by the sinister sto…
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I wasn’t a Nancy Drew fan as a child. Nancy’s life was so remote from mine that I couldn’t connect to it. She was wealthy, her widowed father respected her ideas, she went off on her own with her friends to solve crimes and came home to parental praise. I grew up with parents who were widely and deeply read. When they were calm and sober their conversation was witty and erudite. Those days were infrequent: they were prone to rages that were frightening in their violence. My four brothers and I both endured such scathing criticism when we offered opinions that we retreated into silence, and when we spoke, it was in whispers. Also unlike Nancy’s, mine was a circumscribed …
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Since I was a young child I’ve been fascinated by the identity people get from their families, good and bad, being part of a ‘gang’. The idea that for some people being in a large family gives them protection from the real world. I remember an interview with one of my favorite novelists, Kate Atkinson, who was frequently bemused at being told by adults: you’re an only child, you must be spoilt. She’d think about the houses she’d go to where the children fought and smashed each other’s toys, the constant, multi-layered land wars of siblings and she’d go home and calmly play with her unbroken toys and think: but none of this is spoilt—I’m not the spoilt one. I was once wi…
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A supertanker in trouble is a singular event. It requires the attention of naval fleets, coast guards, international marine agencies, and governments across the immediate region, as well as in the homelands of its crew. That’s not to mention those with a financial interest: the shipowners, cargo owners, bankers, and insurers backing the voyage, and a diffuse crowd of brokers, lawyers, traders, agents, and investors from London to New York, Dubai, and Singapore. If the Brillante Virtuoso sank to the sandy bottom of the Gulf of Aden, the financial blow would be substantial. Most obviously, a vessel with a nominal value of $55 million would be lost. The $100 million of oil …
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In writing my recent thriller, Hooker Avenue (2022, Level Best Books), I was inspired by a true crime involving sex workers, which occurred in the Hudson Valley of New York, and by my personal connection to those crimes. During the late 1990s, eight sex workers disappeared from the mean streets of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and for two years, the police took little action to locate them. Finally, in September 1998, after one woman escaped from the attacker’s clutches, the john, Kendall Francois, admitted killing the women whom he buried in his home. What was my connection to the gruesome crimes? Francois solicited the women on the steps of my law office. Naturally, these heinou…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Dervla McTiernan, The Murder Rule (William Morrow) “Dervla McTiernan has become one of my favorite writers, and if you read The Murder Rule, she will quickly become one of yours. This book is diabolically clever, highly compelling, and deeply moving. I loved The Murder Rule and did not want it to end.” Don Winslow Connie Berry, The Shadow of Memory (Crooked Lane) “A seamlessly plotted mystery for fans of English puzzles.” Library Journal, starred review Jason Rekulek, Hidden Pictures (Flatiron) “The explosive third act gives this story a nail-biting ending sure to thrill. Pa…
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The pandemic that started in 2020 affected a lot of people in a lot of ways—including writers. Like me. I write mysteries and romantic suspense. I’m used to sitting at my computer and writing. Copiously. Continuously. That didn’t change. However, I was also used to attending conferences, several a year, to meet with writer friends and participate on panels and promote my books. To meet more people, including readers who enjoy the kinds of things I write. Not during the pandemic. Most conferences were canceled anyway. Same thing regarding local book signings and in-person chapter meetings of writers’ organizations. I missed them all. I did, however, attend quite a few of…
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Let’s start with a little story about rejection. Because, who doesn’t love a good rejection story? A few years ago, I was out on submission trying to sell my newest manuscript. Submission means your agent pitches your book to publishers, while you, the author, chew your nails right down to the bone while doom-checking your email. People call this “submission hell” for good reason. Unless you’re extremely lucky to get an offer right away (or offers, or even OMG an auction!), you wait. And wait. And if you’re not a patient person by nature, this is not easy. Then the rejections, or more politely-termed “passes,” start rolling in. Editors will send an email extolling your …
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When Prime Video’s moody, Los Angeles-set detective drama Bosch took its final bow last June, it did so as the Amazon streamer’s longest running original series. Seven seasons! A feat in any television context, never mind in the world of streaming. Still, novelist Michael Connelly has been writing the books that Bosch was adapted from since 1992, with this November’s forthcoming Desert Star marking Bosch’s twenty-fourth literary outing. So while seven critically acclaimed seasons may be nothing to sneeze at, the Prime Original’s 2021 exit still left dozens of storylines on the cutting room floor. Of these, perhaps the most interesting—in terms, at least, of potentially …
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Back when I was a thirteen-year-old regular at my local used bookstore I discovered the novels of John D. MacDonald, those beat-up little paperbacks with lurid covers and great titles. Over the years I’ve grown to love MacDonald’s standalone thrillers, some of which are true pulp classics, but as a young bookworm I was obsessed with the Travis McGee series, easily identifiable because the titles all included a color. Finding one of those meant you were set for a great afternoon of reading, plunked down into seamy, seedy Florida in the 1960s with one of the best detective heroes ever written. Travis (Trav to his friends) McGee is a wiry, knuckly, very tan, very tall boat …
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Since the dawn of humanity, since the moment we’ve been able to think, games have been part of our interactions with others. From the imagination games of children to interactive video games of teens, and even the sudoku puzzles and crosswords of adults – as social creatures, there’s a reason why our brains delight in games. The rules give us enough structure to keep us from going off the rails but enough wiggle room to keep our attention. I would even argue that it is what make the game worth playing–especially when some rules are more flexible than others. Horror movies are their own game of survival. There is a formula, a set of rules that are meant to be followed. Y…
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Ever since Medea took her revenge on her two-timing husband by icing her own kids, examinations of the darker aspects of motherhood have proven a regular fixture in the literature of crime and punishment. The following books range across a wide variety of subgenres—from hardboiled noir, to straight horror, to conspiracy thriller, to the uncategorizable—but at the heart of each is an exploration of the depths a mother is willing to go to either save or damn their offspring. For Mother’s Day, here are 7 dark novels about motherhood. Mildred Pierce, James M. Cain The American roman noir as we know it was practically invented by James M. Cain by way of his first two …
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Military thrillers often feature strangers who become brothers after enduring combat’s fiery furnace. In Hostile Intent, the latest book in my Matt Drake series, the relationship between Matt and his best friend, Frodo, forms the novel’s centerpiece. At first glance, these two men have very little in common. Matt is white, college educated, and grew up on a Utah ranch. Frodo is an African American native of Philadelphia who enlisted in the Army straight out of high school. But their shared combat experience transforms what would otherwise be a surface level relationship into a brotherhood of arms. To accurately portray Matt and Frodo’s friendship, I drew upon my own deplo…
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Fifty years ago, Milano Calibro 9, or Calibre 9 as it was released in the United States, hit Italian cinema screens. A small time mafia foot soldier, Ugo Piazzo (Gastone Moschin, a famous Italian comic actor at the time), leaves prison only to be caught up in a conspiracy around the disappearance three years earlier of $300,000 from a Milanese crime boss known as the Americano. Believing that Ugo took the money and stashed it while he was in jail, the Americano sends Rocco (German Italian actor Mario Adorf), a clownish but lethal mob enforcer, to retrieve it. Ugo denies he had anything to do with the missing cash, but no one, including the police and his ambitious strippe…
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The cliché rings true. David Baldacci was an overnight success. It just took him 15 years to get there. His first novel, Absolute Power, took three years to write, two weeks to find an agent and two days to sell. But it was what Baldacci did in the run-up to his instant fame and fortune, which made the difference. The New York Times bestselling author first wrote short stories, failed at writing screenplays and then thought he was through as a writer before he had ever tried writing a novel. Baldacci always had a fascination with storytelling. “I loved mysteries,” he says. He always wanted to tell so many stories, and never really stopped talking, so his exasperate…
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What happens when a person calls into question the very thing closest to their heart—self? I’d recently overheard a conversation at Rose Elementary School in Escondido, California, where one of the older kids—he must have been a sixth-grader—thumped himself on the chest and proclaimed, “I can hardly wait until I’m twenty-one.” Sitting on the fire hydrant by our driveway hours later, I looked up at an outrageously blue sky and wondered what it would be like to be all of twenty-one—ancient. At seven, it seemed too vast, too long, too big of a chasm for that much time to span. It’d be like waiting for Christmas. Waiting for one was hard enough. Waiting for fourteen? Imposs…
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The CrimeReads editors select their favorite new fiction this month. * Deon Meyer (Transl. K.L. Seegers), The Dark Flood (Atlantic) Meyer brings readers another tense thriller with meticulous plotting, delving into corruption in South Africa’s power structures, police abuses, and land schemes. Detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido, facing exile, go on the search for a missing university student and computer programer, a case that will once again send them down the mean streets of a broken system. Meyer is one of today’s most skilled crime craftsmen. –DM Isabel Cañas, The Hacienda (Berkley) Isabel Canas takes the gothic novel to the haciendas, just as Sy…
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In 1979, the gruesome slaying of a thirteen-year-old boy riveted the suburbs of Suffolk County, New York. As the county hustled to bring the case to a dubious resolution, a wayward local teenager emerged with a convenient story to tell. For his cooperation, Jimmy Burke was rewarded with a job as a cop. Thus began Burke’s unlikely ascent to the top of one of the country’s largest law enforcement jurisdictions. He and a crew of likeminded allies utilized vengeance, gangster tactics, and political leverage to become the most powerful and feared figures in their suburban empire. Until a pilfered bag of sex toys brought it all crashing down. Jimmy the King is the story of…
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No one wrote more mysteries, nor more popular ones, nor better ones, set on Cape Cod than Phoebe Atwood Taylor (1909-1976), best-known for her series of twenty-four novels featuring Asey Mayo, the amateur detective known locally and to readers as “the Codfish Sherlock.” Mayo’s first appearance was in The Cape Cod Mystery (1931), which sold out its first printing of 5,000 copies, an exceptionally strong sale for a first novel during the Great Depression (and not too bad in the present day). In the words of the English novelist Nicholas Blake (the pseudonym of C. Day Lewis), Mayo is “an eccentric individual” who Taylor describes as “a typical New Englander . . . the kind …
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Tension is the jet fuel that propels a thriller. From the slow burn to the shocking reveal, I strive to pack as much of it as possible into my stories. I am often labeled as a medical thriller writer, but I don’t view myself as such, because I also write psychological thrillers and historical suspense. Besides, it’s a deep rabbit hole to fall down to try categorizing suspenseful novels into specific genres and sub-genres of mystery, thriller, or crime fiction. For the sake of this article, and my sanity, can we lump them all into one giant category of suspense fiction? Because, regardless of which of those sub-genres you put a novel into, I guarantee you’re not going to …
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One morning in early October, when I was alone in my office, reworking the trial outline yet again, Bruce Muow called. Are you sitting down?” he asked. “That’s all I do these days. What’s up?” “Sammy Gravano wants to cooperate.” My heart stopped. Of all the possible turns the case could have taken, this was the one nobody had even speculated about. Six weeks later, when Gravano’s cooperation became public, dozens of smart-alecks all of a sudden had known he’d flip. He was too Machiavellian not to, they said. He’d never done a long prison term. He’d never forgiven Gotti for killing Paul, some said, overlooking the fact that Gravano was part of the murder team. There w…
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Even before I sat down to write Magpie, I knew I wanted there to be a stomach-flipping twist in the middle of the book. If writing is the great vocational love of my life, the longer relationship is the one I’ve had with reading. And as an inveterate reader, there is nothing I enjoy more than being swept up in a plot and then—suddenly—having all my preconceptions pulled out from under me with a deft authorial sleight of hand. It’s the literary equivalent of swimming in the sea and being lifted up by a large wave. There’s a thrilling sense of not quite knowing what will happen next, a moment of terror…and then you’re deposited safely back, feet once again grazing the sand…
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