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,
3,422 topics in this forum
-
- 0 replies
- 136 views
I’ve long wanted to understand how family members can love and hurt one another at the same time. It was this idea that I held onto when I sat down to write my second novel, Half Outlaw. My goal was to write a story about a family with problematic views relating to race, ethnicity, gender, and identity because it was something that I, as a Mixed (half-Mexican, half-white) woman, was trying to understand within my own family. Somewhere along the way, I turned the fictional family into an all-white outlaw motorcycle club called the Lawless and gave the main character, Raqi, the same racial and ethnic identity as me. They say write what you know, but it was only through Ra…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 156 views
By early 1776, the upstart Americans had made considerable progress in taking the fight to sea. Between state navies, Washington’s navy, privateers from some individual colonies, and the nascent Continental navy, the colonies were demonstrating their maritime creativity and potency. But one major feature of their maritime strategy was conspicuous in its absence: privateers commissioned by Congress. Delegates had received many entreaties urging them to pursue this course. In late November 1775, for example, Simeon Deane, a Connecticut merchant, wrote to Silas, his brother and a congressional delegate, “I am desired by a number of gentlemen here, to ask, through your influ…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 160 views
A few weeks ago, I directed the television clicker to a Dateline NBC program. Of course, it was about crime! My spouse wasn’t in the mood for a crime show and complained that there was entirely too much crime genre coverage on TV in general. I responded that there was, in fact, a good reason for its frequency. Television has adopted the old newspaper adage—if it bleeds, it leads—as a programing directive. The plain and simple reality is that Americans have a penchant for crime shows and have for a long time. Dateline NBC began in 1992, while Cold Case Files goes back to 1999. My personal favorite, Forensic Files, debuted in 1996. It is still going strong! The Menendez br…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 152 views
Twenty minutes into Michael Mann’s theatrical debut feature, Thief (1981), James Caan storms into an office and aims a gun—expertly wielded—at the head of a sleazy Chicago schmuck who refuses to give him the time of day and confess to stealing the payoff money owed Caan from his jewelry fence. “I am the last guy in the world that you want to fuck with.” Caan delivers these lines slowly, quietly, precisely. His speech is oddly formal with no contractions—a Windy City dialectical eccentricity—that he delivers seamlessly. He’s ice cold—and he’s terrifying. James Caan was a brute force. In a career that spanned seven decades in film and television, he brought an air of charg…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 156 views
Why Godot Wouldn’t Come With a clear head, I turned my attention to Beckett’s interviews and memoirs, and tried to clarify his dry and mysterious answers, word by word. By ‘memoirs’, I mean anecdotes related by people who knew him. When Waiting for Godot was first performed in London in 1953 and Peter Woodthorpe was cast as Estragon, he was twenty-two and studying chemistry at Cambridge University. He impressed even Beckett with his performance. During rehearsals, they attended a party and left it at the same time. They were both going in the same direction, so they shared a cab. Woodthorpe said to Beckett, ‘Everyone’s marching to a different drummer. What’s Waiting for …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 162 views
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Helen Cooper, The Other Guest (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) “Difficult-to-put down thriller… Brilliantly characterized, boldly plotted, and boasting an ending that readers will think they have figured out only to have everything turned around. The perfect vacation thriller.” –Booklist, starred review Dwyer Murphy, An Honest Living (Viking) “Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite . . . For anyone who wants a portrait of this New York, few recent books have conjured it so vividly.” –The New York Times Book Review Matt Query and Harrison Query, Old Count…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 145 views
At this point, after reading every one of Ruth Ware’s books as soon as I could get my greedy little hands on them, I would call myself a Ruth Ware fan. Nay, a Ruth Ware stan! Ware has been writing some of the most intelligent, incisive, well-paced psychological thrillers around since 2014, and her latest continues to uphold her impeccable standards. In The It Girl, a new student to Oxford becomes obsessed with her glamorous roommate, who never misses a party and always gets good grades. When her roommate is murdered, a porter takes the blame, but 10 years later, the question of true guilt is once again wide open. Who killed the It Girl? Did they want her or want to be her…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 128 views
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jennifer Hillier, Things We Do In the Dark (Minotaur) “Jennifer Hillier writes the kind of propulsive, no-holds-barred crime fiction that keeps you up at night, with a style and verve that is unmatched. Things We Do in the Dark is a timely, engrossing thriller that will keep you turning the pages until dawn’s light starts to creep through your bedroom window. Hillier is a master.” –Alex Segura Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Daughters of Doctor Moreau (Del Rey) “The imagination of Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a thing of wonder, restless and romantic, fearless in the face of genre, embracing…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 150 views
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ordinary people being put in extraordinary situations. I’m ordinary, after all. I find it relatable. Could I land a plane? Fight off a shark? Stop a country-crippling cyber attack? (Spoiler: No, probably not.) But I like thinking about people who have, or who could, or who, quite unexpectedly, might. But these scenarios aren’t always heroic. What about ordinary people who find themselves in difficult situations who choose extraordinary (maybe not “good” extraordinary) solutions to those perceived problems? What do they do when they’re backed into a corner? What do they do when they decide enough is enough? Too many true crime s…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 144 views
As a road musician and entertainer many years ago, I stayed in a lot of hotels. Seven nights a week, I observed the tourists, the business class, the gamblers who came to play the ponies and the hustlers, swindlers, drunks and pick-up artists. I wrote songs about them, told jokes and now, along with seven other talented authors, we’re writing stories about them. Hotel California includes an original Jack Reacher story by Andrew Child (New Kid in Town), a story by Reed Farrel Coleman who has written the Robert Parker Jesse Stone series, a story by Heather Graham, John Gilstrap, Rick Bleiweiss, Jennifer Graeser Dornbush and Amanda Flower. The plots are wonderful, and the d…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 143 views
I have a recurring dream of dark spaces. I’m in a large house, always with a different layout. My journey through the rooms invariably brings me to a cave-like basement that seems never to end—a warren of small chambers full of jumbled objects, each space more sinister than the last. I don’t need a psychoanalyst to tell me that caves, basements, and crawl spaces are our ways of visualizing the dark places within our own minds. That’s why they’re perennially popular settings for fiction genres in which everything hinges on the revelation of terrible secrets. Basement dungeons are, of course, a mainstay of serial killer tales. But even when nobody gets locked up in the da…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 141 views
Lately I have needed novels that not only keep but wholly command my attention, which means most books are out. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for a tender friendship or the patience to follow a trail to a dead body. I can’t bear to hope for an alternate universe—and I don’t want to read about the one I’m currently in, either. None of the usual formats are even remotely sufficient. I need to be captured, made into an active reader, solve a puzzle from the get-go in a world that looks like one thing but is gradually revealed to be another. I want tricks of the light, sleight of hand—anything that keeps my eyes on the ball. I want to follow a primary narrative underwr…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 141 views
Just Like Home is dedicated “to everyone who ever loved a monster.” It is the easiest thing in the world to love a monster. It’s easy to love a monster because love isn’t a decision. It’s no one’s fault that love happens. Emotions, urges, and impulses are themselves beyond our ability to control. Love in its many forms wells up out of the human spirit irrepressibly. Like anger or sadness or the desire to kill, it arrives without invitation or intention. Action might spring from emotion—love might lead to an expression of affection, anger might lead to violence, a powerful impulse might lead to a monstrous act. But on its own, love is no different from any other feeling. …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 157 views
This article is part of an ongoing series in which we ask contributors to anthologies to weigh in on the collection’s theme. The new anthology Other Terrors sets out to examine the fear of the other in society and turn that fear into understanding. What does “other” mean to you? Holly Lyn Walrath: My story “The Asylum” is about women living in an 1800s asylum and the horrors they endure. Every detail in the story is drawn from real events. I think society has long “othered” people who are “different” and categorized them as “insane”. Others are those who are “other than”—often people normative society has failed. This reality has been particularly horrific for wome…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 130 views
“For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination’s caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.” ― Joyce Carol Oates This well-known, incisive quote serves as a fitting introduction to the work of Nadine Matheson, a defense attorney in London who has just published her second Anjelica Henley thriller, The Binding Room. A sequel to her debut crime novel, The Jigsaw Man, a truly – and suitably – macabre exploration into the mind and actions of an unrelentingly evil serial killer who’s terror…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 172 views
Hanging on a rack in a local department store, a sweater can be seen as nothing more than an innocuous piece of everyday clothing. But a sweater worn by Aileen Wuornos gives an insight into the psychological and physical torture she put herself through while on death row. As well as believing the guards were going to steal her eyeballs postmortem, Wuornos was convinced that they were perpetually trying to make her sick by keeping her cell exceptionally cold (an accusation the guards always denied). She wore the same sweater almost every day to try and stay warm. Male inmate clothing, female inmate clothing, and female clothing worn by male inmates. The collection of Bran…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 144 views
I know, I know, this is a monthly column, but sometimes your whole team gets Covid and you get a little behind on monthly columns, okay? Rather than just skip the June releases, I thought I’d combine June and July’s excellent releases for a double dose of fiction in translation. These books are fresh, fascinating, and Noir AF. Javier Cercas, Even the Darkest Night Translated by Anne McLean (Knopf) Javier Cercas is one of the most brilliant and creative writers living today, and Even the Darkest Night is one of his best yet. A Barcelona detective heads into the countryside to solve a double murder; both the murders and the detective are not what they seem to be, as s…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 148 views
Private schools—with their old-money elitism, ivy-covered buildings, and bucolic grounds that look more like country clubs than educational institutions—are ripe settings for mysteries and thrillers. Behind the stone gates, secrets are closely guarded, longstanding traditions can take on the air of cultic rituals, and justice is often meted out in a clandestine manner. I create just such a world of cloistered power in my upcoming novel, All the Dirty Secrets, where my main character, Liza, a graduate of a Washington D.C. private school, must face the dark side of such privilege. For research, I drew on my own last two years of high school at a New England boarding school,…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 169 views
My latest novel, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, takes The Island of Doctor Moreau as a launching pad, probing the connections with race and colonialism inherent in H.G. Wells’ fiction, as well as its literary and film cousins. It is, as you’ll see, a long and distinguished lineage. The Island of Doctor Moreau focuses on a shipwrecked man’s discovery of a distant facility in which a reclusive researcher vivisects animals in an effort to turn them into humans—a hobby that makes him one of the grand mad scientists of literature. By the end of the short novel, Dr. Moreau’s carefully cultivated animal-human society has descended into chaos and murder. But H.G. Wells was not t…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 157 views
“I think it’s time for me to tell you about my sister.” I didn’t know where to begin and surprised myself by starting on the day when Vera was eleven and went missing. Everyone in our apartment house on Arbat Street in Moscow looked for her, in every flat on every floor, in the yard, in the alley, in the square. I was six and wasn’t supposed to help; our mother took me to bed, tears in her eyes behind her thick glasses. My brother, Yuri, was eight, and as we lay together in our bed listening to our neighbors call “Vera! Vera!” he patted my hair and told me not to worry. If somebody tried to snatch Vera away, she’d kick and bite them, and they’d regret picking on her. I …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 194 views
If you think you don’t know Quinn Martin … believe me, you really do know Quinn Martin. Martin produced hundreds of television series, for the most part cop-and-crime oriented dramas, for decades. His best-known work probably came in the 1960s and 1970s, with shows like “The Fugitive,” “Streets of San Francisco,” “Cannon,” “Barnaby Jones” … the list goes on and on. And no, it wasn’t really hundreds of shows. It just seemed like it. (I mean that in a good way.) Unlike a lot of producers who had relative anonymity, Martin guaranteed he would be a household name – at least in some households – because of the formula of the credits of his series. One of the most recogniz…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 143 views
Say cheese—and if murder and mayhem don’t come to mind, say it again, this time with murderous intent. Because as every true turophile knows, cheese plays a lethal if unheralded role in crime fiction. Cheese has been around nearly as long as murder. A 3,200-year-old cheese was found in the tomb of Ptahmes in Egypt. Ptahmes served as the mayor of Memphis back in the 13th century BCE. But the real mystery is why people are clamoring up to sample the poisonous dairy product, which contains bacteria that could cause brucellosis. I myself discovered the dark side of fromage while researching my newest Mercy Carr mystery, THE WEDDING PLOT, which opens on a Vermont goat farm k…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 142 views
There was a time when women in thrillers were the body in the ditch or the killer’s terrified girlfriend. Ladies, we have come a long way… More and more female characters are driving the action—from nosey spinsters meddling in cosy crime villages to hard-nosed murder detectives leading the hunt and rustling up dinner at the end of the day. And I say amen to that. I chose women investigators when I started writing thrillers. First, with journalist Kate Waters and now DI Elise King in my new book, Local Gone Missing—because they bring an edge, an interior life and a different perspective to the challenges of solving crime. And because I have been inspired by authors past a…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 165 views
Death of a Mystery Writer Six decades ago, on March 7, 1962, the body of fifty-five-year-old Milton Morris Propper was discovered slumped over in his automobile outside his apartment residence at 1841 West Tioga Street in the Nicetown-Tioga section of northern Philadelphia. Authorities concluded that the dead man had expired in his car three days earlier from “acute barbiturate poisoning”—or, in other words, a fatal overdose of sleeping pills, taken deliberately. This is the sort of death scenario that Golden Age mystery writers are known to have concocted, although in those fictional cases the dead man invariably turns out to have been a victim not of suicide but of can…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 164 views
Seeing Nope before all the knowing hype is the closest thing I will probably ever experience to seeing Jaws in theaters in the summer of 1975. Of all the films I’ve been fortunate to critique, few have been as difficult to review as Jordan Peele’s new movie—not because I don’t have much to say about it, but because I’m very afraid of saying too much. Nope’s clever advertising campaign has shrouded much of the film’s narrative and themes (which for Peele are always the same thing anyway) and my anxiety about diving in too deeply is not a reflection that the film is only interesting for the revelation of its heavily-guarded happenings, as much as an acknowledgement that th…
Last reply by Admin_99,