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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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Gary Phillips, One-Shot Harry (Soho) “Phillips’ knack for making the past feel immediate is on point in the well-plotted One-Shot Harry, his first novel about Harry Ingram … Phillips vividly depicts 1963 L.A … Phillips’ insight into racism, attitudes toward Black veterans, the Civil Rights movement, Black press and politics of the 1960s elevates One-Shot Harry. Readers will look forward to more camera work from Harry, and Phillips.” –Oline H. Cogdill (Sun Sentinel) Don Winslow, City on Fire (William Morrow) “Combustible … City of Fire, with its large cast of memorable characters and…
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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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It is the light. The way it plays across the city, glimmering at the ocean’s edge, slivering its way into canyons, beating down on skid row and warming the hustlers in Hollywood. The light in Los Angeles is at once scouring, soft and cruel, a tease of refuge and absolution at the edge of the continent. It tempts you with its make-believe dusks and the way it succumbs to the shadows in the San Gabriels. The trick, though, as any good noir detective knows, is navigating the illicit urges that come with the night. Crimes in the arroyos. Frantic murmurs in tent cities. Whispered deals in Brentwood mansions. All of it unfolding as police helicopters circle city hall—a pale gra…
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This week we’re highlighting the recently 50 years-old crime movies of 1973, and if you haven’t gleaned this already, it was a hell of a good year for robbery on film. Heisters, hustlers, scammers, confidence artists and thieves of all stripes were all the rage on the silver screen, so much so that some have practically been forgotten to today’s viewers. (Seriously, consider the Gene Hackman picture below.) Fortunately, you’ve got a weekend to get caught up on the action. Maybe you’re in the mood for a little robbery-implicated gun-running in the Boston area? Or a classic vengeance tale? How about a road trip? 1973 has got you covered, it all just depends on your mood. D…
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Christian Fletcher was the ringleader of a band of nine infamous mutineers who, in April 1789, commandeered His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty and, along with their Tahitian brides, launched a quest to find an idyllic island that had been incorrectly plotted in the British Navy’s nautical logs. Dubbed Pitcairn, after the fifteen-year-old deckhand who had first spotted it, the green dot was scribbled on a big blue chart of the Pacific some two hundred miles west of its actual location due to an error in longitudinal reading. After many months at sea, Christian and his men finally found their promised paradise—by the end of their third year, almost all of the mutineers would…
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The woman with whom I’d spent most of my morning is the third story on the evening news. She’s behind the black smoke of a big rig explosion shutting down all northbound lanes of the 101 Freeway and a water main break on Sunset Boulevard. She is my new client, an old childhood friend, and she is missing. Things don’t quite add up. How does one make it on the local news if gone for only a few short hours? She could’ve run out of gas and found her cell phone had lost its charge or signal for that matter. She could’ve just gone for a drive to clear her head and forgotten about the time. Elise is not someone people would recognize, a losable face in the crowd, hard to spot…
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Earlier this year, I rounded up 16 horror novels coming out this year, and now I’m back, this time with more intestines, more fungi, and most importantly, more books. Here are 23 new and upcoming nightmarish reads that will keep you awake long into the night, even as they dissect and reinvent the very elements of fear itself. Whether you’re looking for eerie folk horror, atmospheric gothics, gruesome thrillers, twisted noirs, or mind-blowing metafiction, there’s sure to be a title below to please. Or terrify. Andrew Joseph White, Hell Followed With Us (Peachtree Teen, June 7) Body horror meets apocalypse noir meets queer love story in Andrew Joseph White’s viscera-fi…
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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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Prologue “Do you hear that?” her uncle whispered. “Hear what?” she said, refraining from taking a big bite of the caramel apple she’d made. “The rustling. Over there. In the bushes.” Her ears strained. The fire burning in the pit between their lawn chairs popped, sending up orange embers that failed to alleviate the encompassing darkness. She shook her head and lifted the apple to the corner of her mouth where she still had teeth capable of piercing the hard flesh; adult incisors had yet to fill the holes in her smile. “Listen,” he hissed, once more stopping her from taking a bite. “I don’t hear any—” The rustle of leaves sounded from far off in the yard, back where…
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Hello to my fellow empaths (a term defined by researchers as ‘the opposite of psychopaths’). As a group, we’re benefited and handicapped by our sensitivity to other people’s feelings. It’s what keeps us from torturing and killing humans and other animals—it’s also what might stop us from becoming CEOs, surgeons, and military generals, professions that require their practitioners to do things like sabotage colleagues, cut open brains with steady hands, and easily weigh the cost-benefit analysis of murdering x-number of civilians to wipe out one prolific terrorist cell. As Paul Frick, a psychologist at Louisiana State University, puts it, “They don’t care if someone is mad …
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Why do some murder mysteries sell more copies than others? There are countless possible explanations. I’d like to focus on one: the impossibility of the murder. Perhaps the most recognizable example of an impossible murder is the locked-room mystery. But there are infinite possibilities. At the heart is a murder that, based on what the reader knows coming into the novel and at least in the early pages, seems utterly impossible based on the known laws of science and first impressions of the characters. So why do impossible murders sell? I have a few theories. #1: They blend genres Stories featuring impossible murders go beyond the well-worn paths of police procedurals. T…
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I’m not a historian, just a novelist who happens to be a history fanatic. So when I write a spy novel set during World War II, fake history is unacceptable. Even though my protagonist Alexsi and the situations he finds himself in may be fictional, the story has to be set within the context of real locations, real historical characters portrayed accurately, and an actual historical timeline. As a history fanatic I feel obligated to offer my readers history that they may not necessarily be familiar with. My previous novel, A Single Spy, was set among the German exile colonies of Azerbaijan, Stalin’s Russia, Nazi Germany, Iran, and a German plot to assassinate Roosevelt, Ch…
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When Elzabeth Fenwick’s psychological crime thriller The Make-Believe Man was published in 1963, one of the novel’s many laudatory reviewers, a young North Carolina newspaper columnist named James Alexander Dunn, in the Chapel Hill News perceptively placed his finger on the signal quality of the author’s crime fiction. “Elizabeth Fenwick has successfully combined a believable situation with people who matter—not that they are important people,” he observed. “On the contrary, there is not an entity in the lot. But they are familiar people whom you would not like to be in the situation Miss Fenwick places them in.” In reviewing the same novel that year, Robert R. Kirsch…
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Setting is a character. This nugget of literary wisdom was written in a text by a writer whose name I no longer remember, but whose words resonated long after they were delivered. Travel, particularly as it pertains to research, all but confirmed this maxim. Atmosphere encompasses a few elements: mood, tone, a personality of sorts. I’ve discovered that whether here at home or abroad, each city, moreover each neighborhood, has its own atmospheric pulse. Each exudes an aura that takes considerable practice to be able to successfully translate onto the page. When done well, the effect is palatable. And it’s not just the obvious things. It’s whether the locals are outgoing …
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As soon as Agneta’s daughters had left, everything became urgent. She grabbed a rucksack from the hall and hurried upstairs. Way back when, the bathroom had felt like the safest place—for three reasons. You could lock yourself in, there was no way to see in, and no one would ask what you were up to inside. And the many visi- tors to the house always used the toilets downstairs. Burying things in the garden or heading off into the woods might seem smart in the heat of the moment, but when the equip- ment came to be needed, it might not be possible to retrieve it at once. She’d got that far in her thoughts, even back then. Now she didn’t have much time. Naturally, there …
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I know this veers perilously close to ‘what are you wearing?’ territory, but please, bear with me—What do you wear to sleep at night? Flannel pjs? Pyjama shorts set? Night gown? Adult onesie? Growing up in Canada within a lower-class immigrant family, the only pyjama sets I ever got were gifts. I mean, I knew what they were, of course I did. I watched TV. I’d even worn at least one set, when I was maybe two years old. I’ve seen the photo. The before times, when I lived in Hong Kong. Maybe, if my family had stayed, I’d have grown up with sets upon sets of coordinated tops and bottoms, all properly matched together for the sole innocuous purpose of being slept in. As it …
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As the title of our new historical thriller The Lawless Land suggests, plenty of crimes are committed in the story. Since our book takes place in 1351—not long after the worst of the Black Plague and during the Hundred Years’ War between France and England—lawlessness reigned over wide swaths of Europe where civilization had been pushed to the brink, so the title is well-earned. It’s fascinating (and rather appalling in some cases) that human nature never really changes. Even though our book takes place more than 670 years ago, many of the crimes we featured in the plot are just as relevant today: murder, kidnapping, embezzlement, bribery, price-gouging, and theft by cut…
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Have you ever thought about what you’d eat for your death row meal? I have, and let me tell you, it’s not a kale salad. In no way am I dissing healthy food. My daughter works on an organic vegetable farm, and our family eats baked tofu cubes the way other people eat Pringles. But when it comes to food that fills your heart as well as your stomach, most of us want to indulge. Food is a way to connect with what makes us alive—the pleasure of a profound sensory experience that is available only to the living. Sure, there are other ways to animate the human spirit. Dancing with your toddler in the living room. Sniffing the sweet scent of a rose petal. Watching Idris Elba pu…
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Both readers and authors of crime fiction are likely to be drawn towards “bibliomysteries,” a word which is unlikely to be found in a dictionary, despite supplying the title for a fascinating monograph by the legendary American editor, publisher, bookseller, and bibliophile Otto Penzler. Penzler readily accepted that the term is apt to be defined in a subjective way, and said: “If much of the action is set in a bookshop or a library, it is a bibliomystery, just as it is if a major character is a bookseller or a librarian. A collector of rare books…may be included. Publishers? Yes, if their jobs are integral to the plot. Authors? Tricky… If the nature of their work brings…
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In a novel, an effective setting transports the reader, immersing them in the narrative and creating a believable physical environment where plot can flourish. Like the Carolina marshes in Where the Crawdads Sing, the drought-stricken Australian outback of Jane Harper’s The Dry, or the archaic Parisian building in Lucy Foley’s The Paris Apartment, a richly drawn, distinctive setting not only anchors the story, but also has a pervasive influence on the mood, themes, and tone of a novel. The setting of a novel, whether in the context of place but also time, or more usually both, is not merely background. In the most compelling novels, setting, character and plot are inextr…
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Noir stories deal with doom. In such stories, as the great Cornell Woolrich succinctly put it, “first you dream, then you die.” So, if that is the case, how does It’s a Wonderful Life, the tear-jerking family friendly Christmas classic have anything to do with noir? It is because It’s a Wonderful Life is a reverse noir. Or to put it another way it is a kind of film blanc. As Aristotle pointed out, all dramatic stories have to do with two things: fear and pity. Fear is the motivational power behind most human action. Why do we want more money? Because we fear not having shelter or food i.e. dying. Why do we want fancy cars and jobs and more status? So that we …
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Like little wreaths of funeral flowers, death crowns mark the passing of a loved one. But death crowns – seen as comforting to some, ominous and otherworldly to others – are not ordered up from a florist shop. Just where death crowns do come from is a mystery, and an unsettling one at that. If you’ve never seen a death crown, or angel crown for the more religiously inclined … well, that tracks. I’ve only ever seen a few and those were behind glass in an exhibit of death and funeral folklore at the Museum of Appalachia north of Knoxville. There’s no entry for death crowns in the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, which at 1,864 pages is the most authoritative source on Appalac…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephen Spotswood, Murder Under Her Skin (Doubleday) “Just like his mystery-writing ancestor [Rex Stout], Spotswood understands that the detective story should be sound, but spending time with unforgettable characters is paramount.” The New York Times Book Review Elly Griffiths, The Midnight Hour (HMH) “Halloween provides the perfect setting for another triumph of misdirection from Griffiths in this sixth Brighton Mystery.” Booklist, Starred review RV Raman, A Dire Isle (Agora) “Raman continues to channel Agatha Christie in book two of his India-based Harith Athreya series…
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Perhaps predictably, the most famous movie about electronic eavesdropping ever made, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), ends with a telephone call. After discovering that he has facilitated the murder of a high-powered corporate executive, professional wiretapper Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) sits alone in his apartment, playing his saxophone along with the jazz recording that blares from his stereo. Harry’s number is unlisted, so when the sound of a telephone interrupts his performance he hesitates to pick up the receiver. At first no one responds on the other end of the line. But the phone rings a second time a few moments later, and the high-pitched sound o…
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To say John Glatt is prolific is an understatement. Glatt, an investigative journalist with more than three decades of experience, has researched, written, and published 19 true crime books and 4 biographies in the last fourteen years. His latest, The Doomsday Mother: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and the End of an American Family, is a gripping, enraging narrative that chronicles the lives of Vallow and Daybell and then everything that happened after they met. The book, which Glatt wrote using everything from court documents and police reports to Vallow’s own text messages and interviews with many of the people involved, is the kind of creepy true crime narrative that gets …
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