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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Imagine a walled garden buried deep in the English countryside where every flower or plant has been chosen to send you a message. Now imagine that the person who sent you the message is dead and that the key to deciphering the message has been lost. Loosely speaking, that’s the idea behind my debut novel, The Walled Garden. Halfway into my novel, I realized I needed a code that two gardeners writing to one another in the 1950s might use. Elizabeth Blackspear, a deeply reserved English poet who’s dealing with a potentially scandalous personal crisis, needs a way to express her feelings to her friend and only confidant, Amanda Silver, in California. I’ve always been fasci…
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How difficult it seems, gazing back just seventy years to the late 1940s and 50s, to truly appreciate what a confusing and fraught era it was for our grandparents. The Soviet Union, recently an ally in the Second World War, was increasingly viewed as a threat with Stalin’s imposition of the Iron Curtain and acquisition of an atomic bomb. While on the home front, and quite suddenly—or so it seemed at the time—congressional inquiries and headline grabbing confessions of ex-Soviet spies were turning up KGB agents everywhere. Spy fever, it was called, especially after the “Red Spy Queen” Elizabeth Bentley went to the FBI in 1945 and named nearly 150 agents working for the Sov…
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In honor of Asian-American and Pacific Islander heritage month, we’re highlighting the incredible array of crime books and thrillers by Asian-American authors publishing in 2022, so you can keep reading these stories all year long. JANUARY-APRIL Mia P. Manansala, Homicide and Halo-Halo (Berkley) “While the follow-up to Arsenic and Adobo is a cozy mystery, it’s darker, dealing with PTSD, predatory behavior, dismissive attitudes toward mental health, and other issues. Filipino American food and culture, as well as family and community, remain essential elements in the story.”—Library Journal, starred review Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers (William Morrow) “The Ca…
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I have stared into the glassy eyes of a killer and seen myself reflected back. As a college senior, I pulled into a disheveled driveway – with pen and pad in trembling hand – to meet the teenager whose best friend had been slain by mysterious gunmen the night before. It was standard fare for a 20-year-old grateful to see his byline in the pages of the Miami Herald. No one was eager to cover routine crime stories. No one was overjoyed to descend into inner-city Fort Lauderdale. Send the intern. His mother should not have let me, a blood-sucking reporter, into her home. But the sight of this boy journalist must have disarmed her, as her son and I were no more than a few …
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In Adrian McKinty’s new breakneck thriller, The Island, an American family visiting Australia takes a chance on an afternoon’s diversion, paying for an hour’s time on a private island outside Melbourne, hoping that the sight of a few koalas will help heal their rifts. But a tragic accident soon changes everything, with the family pushed to the very limits of safety, endurance, and morality. For several hundred pages, your heart will not stop pounding. McKinty, a veteran noir writer, has brought tremendous style to his new turn as a thriller author. Above all he has a way with characters – of finding the core of their humanity, and putting that core to the test. With The I…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Adrian McKinty, The Island (Little, Brown) “Expertly choreographed and breathlessly exciting . . . both the peril and the family are like no other. The Chain was McKinty’s breakthrough novel and this one could be every bit as big.” –Booklist, starred review Robin Peguero, With Prejudice (Grand Central) “With Prejudice is a brilliant debut, full stop. Written with warmth, humanity, and raw emotion, this is a both a gripping thriller and an insightful look at the complexities of American crime and punishment. Robin Peguero has written a modern-day 12 Angry Men.” –Harlan Coben R…
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In the summer of 2021, a tweet made the rounds claiming that anyone who comfort-watched Criminal Minds needed help. We were in the midst of a pandemic that still hasn’t gone away and I was in the midst of a binge of that very show. I laughed, sent it to fellow fans, and forgot about it. Sort of. Because here’s the thing: for many of us, that show is the comfort we need, especially when the world is ending. Now, for the sake of the argument, any fiction-based crime show can be subbed in for Criminal Minds here, but true crime is a different beast and I do not claim any parallels between it and the fictional worlds I’m going to discuss. It also must be noted that my …
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Doctor Cassandra Kuba is a PhD biological anthropologist, and a university professor focusing on the study of the human skeleton (osteology). She is a forensic consultant—an expert on-call with police, at the ready to analyze human remains. Dr. Kuba also helps creative types—television script writers, crime novelists—get their forensic and procedural matters right. She’s consulted on TV crime dramas including the long running series CSI, and Bones. Today I have the pleasure talking with Dr. Kuba about her experiences with crime, real and fictional. (Hawtrey is the author of the new novel, And by Fire.) Evie Hawtrey: Welcome Cassandra! Let’s start with the real-life nit…
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Serial killers and cult leaders. I’m not sure how many times I’ve Googled either of these true crime sub-categories in conjunction with the word “podcast” or “documentary” or “non-fiction.” Having cut my teeth on Stephen King and Dean Koontz and Unsolved Mysteries, this interest in the macabre has long been very on-brand for me. But since my twenties, it’s been rather important that the murder stories I consume be true, real-life stories. The fact of them having actually happened is what I apparently crave, the knowledge that fellow human beings lived through (or didn’t) that sort of darkness. It’s pretty distinctly fucked-up, hey? But I’m not prone to moralizing, partic…
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In writing my crime novel What They Don’t Know, I wanted my lead character to have an unusual relationship with her collection of dolls. As a psychological thriller, what better than to include haunted dolls? Not knowing a lot about haunted dolls and wanting to learn more, my research took me to Alabama where I met with Kevin Cain, ghost hunter, haunted doll collector, and author. There we discussed real doll-infested crimes, proving once more, that reality is sometimes stranger than fiction. Here are a some of the questions I asked Kevin: SF: You’re a member of Alabama’s Spirit Communications and Research team. Can you tell readers a little about S.C.A.R.e. And what ty…
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Dad and some men from the neighbourhood have congregated in our living room to toast the birth of my brother with a glass of rye, but mostly the conversation is about the trouble that’s happened down the highway at the Tremblay’s. It’s all anyone has talked about for days. I’m on my front step because Jennifer, my best friend, is walking over from her house a few blocks away. Mr. Pendergrass, her next-door neighbour, is escorting her—kids haven’t been allowed to go anywhere alone since the afternoon it happened. Before supper Jen called and said she wanted to come over to talk about high school, so, because grade nine is weighing heavily on my mind, I rushed through dishe…
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__________________________________ From MIND MGMT. Used with the permission of the publisher, FLUX HOUSE. Copyright © 2022 by MATT KINDT. View the full article
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You’ve Got Mail is a many splendored thing: a fascinating, variegated film that braids together themes of hope and despair, friendship and heartbreak, love and hatred, preservation and destruction, resistance and surrender, technology and analogs. It is a depressed capitalist critique, a doting literary pastiche, a valentine to New York City, a paean to mom-and-pop-shops, a tortured love story, a nervous prognostication about the digital world to come. It is everything, except maybe a murder mystery. It is not a murder mystery. Except it almost was, a little bit. This undeveloped twist relates to one of (I think) the most relatable moments in You’ve Got Mail—or, really, …
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We’ve got a few big spring weekends coming up and while maybe you want to watch The Little Drummer Girl for the third or fourth time, hoping that this go around it might actually be good, that Michael Shannon won’t undermine the whole thing with his bizarre choices, that in this viewing it’s just going to be Pugh and Skarsgard on a cross-European iridescent spy romp, but no, it won’t be, it can’t be. So we need some new shows. Here we go. (Or if you don’t want new shows, you want the old, the good, and the le Carré, opt for The Night Manager instead; that one really holds up.) The Informant Streaming on: HBO Max Seasons: 1 Here’s a worthwhile new series about 1980s…
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Who could have known that newspaper comic strips and crime stories, including noir, were a match made in heaven? Newspaper comic strips are an artistic genre that’s largely forgotten now. The strips that remain are for the most part humor strips like “Garfield.” A handful of dramatic strips are still published. But serial dramatic strips were once a staple of the newspaper comics page. Many of them were soap opera-ish strips like “Mary Worth” and “Apartment 3-G.” To say that drama strips were slow moving is an understatement. I wish I could remember who joked that they came back to read “Apartment 3-G” after decades away and the caption read, “Later that afternoon …” B…
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What is the ideal medium for a true crime story? In the last decade, we’ve seen countless examples, from longform podcasts to feature films. Sometimes things converge in unexpected ways — a podcast begets a television miniseries (Slow Burn and Gaslit, respectively); a fictionalized account leads to a documentary (All Good Things and The Jinx, respectively). A true crime story can expose societal inequality or venture into a troubled psyche. It can thrill or enlighten; it can also take readers or viewers to places they never thought they’d go. From 1997 to 2001, a trilogy of works by writer Gary Indiana were published, each in its own way a work of true crime. Over the la…
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First, a mention of a book that I decided is not quite in the purview of this list but I need to recommend: Chris Holm’s Child Zero (Mulholland). I enjoyed Holm’s previous books about a righteous hit man, and I knew that he had a science-y background (as us English majors call it). Some will say Holm has been gifted the perfect time for his medical—specifically, bacterial—thriller, in which antibiotic resistance causes all kinds of nasty diseases to infiltrate the world population. Holm’s book is remarkable in the way it details what could happen and methodically explores what could happen after that; the fear and paranoia is never unearned. This is a truly scary psycholo…
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The bells of St. Mary-Le-Bow toll eleven o’clock. The narrow streets of London’s East End are strangely deserted. Out of the swirling fog comes the clip-clop of horseshoes on cobble. A carriage appears. I squint, struggling to decipher the crest on the carriage door. From within the passenger compartment, a gloved hand emerges. Wait—is that a gun? I flip the page, my heart in my throat, as the modern world vanishes in the foul-smelling mist. It’s London, 1850. Soon a body will turn up—floating in the Thames or sprawled in one of the brick-walled alleys. I settle in for another blissful sojourn in Victorian England. “Sexual repression, dark alleys, great detectives, orn…
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In 1996, a young couple – Julie Williams and Lollie Winans – were brutally murdered while backpacking in Shenandoah National Park. The case quickly became front page news nationwide; that media attention only intensified five years later, when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that not only had an individual been indicted in the case, but that that person would be the first to be tried under new federal hate crime legislation. A few years later, the case against that man, Darrell David Rice, was quietly dismissed. In her new book, Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders, investigative journalist Kathryn Miles details both the crime itself and h…
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When writing my debut novella, Something Is Always Happening Somewhere, my goal was to make readers feel the sort of haunting, full-bodied mental and physical anguish I felt while grieving the loss of my mother, father, and grandmother. And based on some of the Goodreads and NetGalley reviews I’ve been getting for the book so far, which range in sentiment from “this was a beautiful depiction of grief,” to “I didn’t feel as a reader I need more misery. I was glad to finish reading in the end,” it seems like maybe I achieved that goal. I lost my mom in 2013, my dad in 2017, and my gramma in 2018. That’s my core family right there, all gone in a relatively short span of tim…
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It is often our subconscious self that underlies the decisions we make, and so it must have been with my far-reaching decision at a relatively young age to travel. That decision—more instinctive than cohesive—moved me off a single career path toward wide vistas of varied occupations. Every conceivable means of transport has taken me from one point on the map to another. Over the course of an unconventional career I have been a book publisher, the founder of a magazine, a corporate officer of a large multi-media company, and the chief-of-staff of a think tank operating in several international timezones and with a remit of global security. These decidedly different roles s…
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Biology is creeeeepy. At least, that’s the lesson I’ve learned from early readers of my new thriller, Child Zero, which takes place in a post-antibiotic near future. As a former molecular biologist, I’d been laboring under the misapprehension that biology was neato. My bad, I suppose. Lee Child, of Jack Reacher fame, called Child Zero “really scary.” New York Times bestsellers Joseph Finder and Tess Gerritsen opted for “terrifying.” So did Edgar Award winner Lou Berney, who added that it gave him nightmares “in the best possible way.” (Sidebar: is that even a thing? God, I hope so—because otherwise, Lou secretly hated my book.) Acclaimed authors Matthew FitzSimmons and M…
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Tell me if this story sounds familiar: A young woman moves to a new town and finds work caring for a little boy (or a little girl, or maybe one of each). The parents are distant or completely absent, caught up in busy careers (or possibly dead). The children have few friends, and every night the house is troubled by strange noises. The nanny suspects supernatural activity, but everyone says it’s just her imagination. These are the broad strokes of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and my novel Hidden Pictures plays with the formula by moving the action to an affluent New Jersey suburb and adding tons of creepy black-and-white drawings (the child in my story is an art…
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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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