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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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Amina Akhtar, Kismet (Thomas and Mercer) “Akhtar brings to her second novel…a gimlet-eyed view of Sedona, Ariz.’s wellness pretensions and a wicked way with one-liners…the surprises Akhtar has in store upend assumptions about trauma, healing, and the motivations of those who helicopter into lands they claim to hold sacred.” –Los Angeles Times S. S. Van Dine, The Benson Murder Case (American Mystery Classics) “Mr. Van Dine’s amateur detective is the most gentlemanly, and probably the most scholarly snooper in literature.” –Chicago Daily Tribune Tyrell Johnson, The Lost Kings …
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I was born in Hawaii and have at least one picture of my young self on the beach with a huge hibiscus in my hair. Since we moved when I was two, I don’t remember much about constantly being on a beach in a playpen, but I do have the photographic evidence to show that it happened. Maybe that’s why my perfect reading day involves sand, sea, a light breeze, a frosty beverage, and a healthy dose of murder! However, we then moved to Pennsylvania, which does not exactly have oceanfront property. We have a lot of rivers, creeks, and lakes, but not so much a seaside, with Pennsylvania being a mostly landlocked state. New Jersey wasn’t that far away though, and I took every oppor…
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One of the first public events I attended after lockdown was a Solve-Along-A-Murder-She-Wrote at a London cinema, with my mother, brother and cousin. Together, we cheered as Jessica Fletcher asked probing questions and tested alibis in a convent full of nuns. All the while our host, dressed as Jessica in various guises, asked us to judge who we thought was most suspicious—based entirely on which guest star was most famous when the episode originally aired in 1987. It was an absolute hoot, and we loved every moment of it. You see, I grew up in a family of murder mystery addicts, and a mass solve-along is absolutely our idea of fun. As a small child, my first murder myste…
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I aspire to be the feminine embodiment of California Noir. I like neon skies and neon signs. I like the way sunburns turn to freckles. And like in the Cali Noir, I have a dark angsty underlayer. I giggle flirtatiously as I describe my debut novel The Roommate as a psychological thriller when there’s a straight-up slasher scene. I like to imagine Dorothy B. Hughes did the same when describing In a Lonely Place. The Roommate is about Donna, a restless twentysomething who unexpectedly inherits a turquoise bungalow in SoCal. After settling in, she recruits a roommate to help pay the bills. But soon, she realizes her sunny, quirky comrade is not a long-lost bestie but a dange…
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When I first started thinking about writing a spy novel, I read every book I could find about espionage. From Kim to Ashenden to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, along with every book that became a film starring Michael Caine. Having spent several years steeped in spies, I can honestly say that in books, real life is better than fiction. The best books I’ve discovered about espionage are not novels, but non-fiction works about actual spies and their remarkable, deadly exploits. These books are darker than Smiley. Funnier than Bond. More extreme than Jason Bourne. Here are my favorite, stranger than fiction, utterly gripping, non-fiction books about real spies. Operation K…
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Amina Akhtar and Erin Mayer have had fashion and media careers that people dream about. Between them, they’ve worked at every major publication, including Vogue, The Cut, Elle, Bustle, NYTimes.com and more. But they both also made the leap from fashion/celebrity editor to thriller writer. We had to know more! The author of Fan Club and the author of Kismet (out 8/1) interviewed each other to talk about their experiences, and why, exactly, fashion inspires so much rage. Questions from Amina Akhtar: What’s your fashion/media background? Erin Mayer: I have been working in media since 2014. I’ve freelanced for a variety of publications, and was previously an Associate…
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Louis Armstrong did not need to be told that the honky-tonks that were connected were the honky-tonks where you wanted to be. He learned this from King Oliver, whom he worshipped. Oliver was twenty years older than Armstrong. In many ways, the veteran cornetist and bandleader was both a mentor and father figure to the young musician. “I never stop loving Joe Oliver,” said Armstrong. “He was always ready to come to my rescue when I needed someone to tell me about life and its little intricate things and help me out of difficult situations.” Oliver had a big, bald head that he often topped with a bowler hat. He could be formal and stern, but he had a laying style on the…
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This is not a post about puzzle mysteries, but rather a roundup of puzzles for mystery readers. I believe I speak for many of us when I say that in the pandemic I’ve developed a taste for jigsaw puzzles. Yes, just like a newfound love of baking or house plants, jigsaw puzzles are the perfect hobby for home. But I haven’t been doing just any jigsaw puzzles – I’ve been doing themed puzzles! Here are a few very cool recent puzzles that appeal to horror, mystery, and crime fiction lovers. Some are based on specific books to the point of being able to follow along with the plot through solving the puzzle. Some are odes to the beloved figures behind the genre, or to the places …
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Anatomy of a Supercell Supercells are the king of thunderstorms. They can tower ten or more miles high, spin like a top, and produce some of the fiercest weather on Earth. They are elegant and destructive, and beautifully terrifying. And they are a force to be reckoned with. Supercells aren’t like ordinary thunderstorms, which clump together into clusters or gusty squall lines. Supercells are small and potent. A single storm may only be five or ten miles wide, but in that tiny space could be packed destructive straight-line winds, softball-sized hail, flooding rains, and tornadoes. What makes a supercell special is its isolation. While other thunderstorms may compete…
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Limehouse prison is, as you might imagine, horrible. Except maybe you can’t imagine it, not really. There are no games consoles and flat-screen TVs, as you have surely read about in the newspapers. There’s no friendly communal vibe, no sisterly trib—the atmosphere is usually frantic, hideously loud, and it often feels as though a fight will break out at any moment. From the beginning, I’ve tried to keep my head down. I stay in my cell as much as possible, in between meals that could optimistically be described as occasionally digestible, and attempt to avoid my roommate, as she tiresomely likes to be called. Kelly is a woman who likes to ‘chat’. On my first day here four…
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I wish I had a better reason, but the story of how I came to be interested in stories that feature collective narration is a bit petty, really. I was speaking to a good female friend who had recently started dating a man who, as it happens, I had also dated many years before (it adds a certain frisson to say that as a bisexual woman I don’t tend to fall for straight women, but it just so happened that I had an active crush on this straight female friend, because, hey—sometimes life just isn’t complicated enough). I talked to my female friend about the unusually warm weather. She said, declaratively, ‘We’ll go to the pool this weekend, it’ll be beautiful’. ‘Great!’ I said.…
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Long before undertakers organized themselves into the professional group of funeral directors, tradesmen undertakers and families battled a group of ghoulish men called resurrectionists who operated by the light of moon. The resurrectionists were body snatchers, yanking freshly buried remains from the earth and selling them to medical men. Body snatching was such an uncontrolled problem that it led to the invention of the burial vault, a device still used today. The tipping point in the ghoulish behavior was a sensational body snatching splashed across the front pages of every major newspaper. The incident involved a president’s son and a future president, and it uncover…
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Many of us are familiar with the men of the Manhattan Project: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, dozens of male scientists rolling up their shirtsleeves in the Nevada desert. You may not be aware that thousands of women also contributed to the project, both in developing the science that made it possible and in running the top secret facilities where the atomic bomb was made. The Woman With Two Shadows follows Lillian, who travels to the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee where her twin sister Eleanor works on the Manhattan Project as a calutron girl. In order to find her twin, Lillian must pretend to be her. While researching Oak Ridge and the time period, I learne…
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Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are no strangers to comics and noir, blending both primal elements of story into everything they do—whether it’s mainstream superhero work or their more recent, and more personal, forays into creator-owned, character-driven crime comics. Brubaker and Phillips have worked together so long they’ve become synonymous, a pair of names that complete each other, building a legendary reputation with series like Criminal, Fatale, Kill or be Killed, Incognito, Bad Weekend, and more. Their latest collaboration, while still firmly entrenched in the dark corners of graphic novel crime, marks a departure of sorts. Instead of releasing their stories via m…
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I can still remember the first time I saw myself reflected in a story. I had just turned nineteen years old and was nearly through my chaotic first year of university. Although I desperately needed to study for my final exams, I had opened a second-hand book I had picked up from somewhere instead. I was still recovering from a very messy breakup with my first girlfriend. In the late 2000s, the world was a very different place—I wasn’t out to anybody except a few close friends. I had nobody to talk to about it. Needing something to take my mind somewhere else for a bit, I decided this book would do the trick, although I didn’t know anything about it or the author. The bo…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Winnie M. Li, Complicit (Emily Bestler Books) Winnie Li stunned the crime and literary worlds with her intense debut, Dark Chapter, based around a traumatic incident in the author’s own life and nominee for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Now she’s back with another story that mines her own experiences, this time centered on the toxicity of the film industry. Complicit is both a # thriller and a complex literary achievement that sheds an important light on Hollywood’s darkest secrets and brings an essential and underrepresented perspective—that of an Asian-American fi…
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Nothing annoys me more than hearing people describe watching movies as a “brainless” activity—as if it involves somehow turning off your brain’s circuitry and relying solely on your eyeballs to coast through the movie’s run time. Plot twist: your brain is very much involved, engaged, and making the experience for you. Nothing makes this engagement more apparent than watching horror movies, where the filmmakers are crafting scares with your brain’s and body’s most likely reactions in mind. Let’s start with a scene that appears in almost every horror flick ever made. Our protagonist is home alone at night, and the house is dark. They hear sounds they can’t explain, so they…
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It is safe bet that not too many people know about the stifling Tehran night in August 1953 when the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service conspired to overthrow a democratically elected government and its profoundly popular leader, with the enthusiastic participation of right-wing elements in the Iranian military and the unequivocal backing of President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Churchill. But we perhaps should. It was a harbinger of events to come—all over the world—and remains to this day one of the great examples of the law of unintended consequences. Given that it took place in the heart of the Middle East, you’ll be much less surprised to learn—if it i…
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All reporters have to learn to deal with sources who lie. Lies were at the heart of my last book, I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad (co-written with Brandon Soderberg). The story centered around a group of plainclothes cops who lied on warrants, in arrests, and on the stand, robbing from drug dealers and selling the drugs. They lied to each other—about how much money they found, what happened to the drugs, and on overtime slips that allowed them to fleece the citizenry as well. When all of this came tumbling down with a federal RICO indictment in 2017, those with reasons to lie proliferated. Each of the eight cops initially arreste…
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I have always considered my childhood to be rather idyllic, complete with family bike rides, Monopoly marathons, my dad reading from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe after dinner, my mom making me into my bed on laundry day. Yet, even as a child, I knew my family had skeletons in the closet—things which, without anyone having to say so, were clearly to be kept quiet: my uncle’s mental illness and subsequent death by suicide, my grandfather’s tendency to drink too much in the small bar area he called “purgatory,” that stood between his workroom and my grandmother’s kitchen, the fact that the sound of ice clinking in a glass signaled my own father had arrived home. I …
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When I first set my sights on writing crime fiction, it was a no-brainer that it would have to be a culinary mystery. Not only have I been obsessed with food and cooking since my teens, but I even returned to school as an adult to obtain a degree in culinary arts (while working as an attorney, mind you—but that’s a whole other story). Now, with five books in the Sally Solari culinary mystery series under my belt, I find myself looking back to my time in cooking school and wondering, did that experience have an impact on my later vocation as an author of mystery novels? It seems obvious, of course, that being comfortable handling a filleting knife and understanding what …
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When Cop Land came out in August of 1997, the vast majority of attention was, understandingly and deservedly, given over to star Sylvester Stallone’s turn as sad sack suburban sheriff Freddy Heflin, a role which required the Italian Stallion put on 40 pounds and dig deep into his acting chops—something he hadn’t really done since First Blood, 15 years earlier. It was widely hailed as his finest performance since the original Rocky, if not ever, and for a long time afterwards, Cop Land was best remembered as the movie that should have nabbed Sly an Oscar for Best Actor (or at the very least, a nomination), but not much else. Twenty-five years on, however, the tide has slo…
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While crime novels, especially those with courtroom scenes, are the most satisfying to read, they’re the most challenging to write. I say this not just as a long-time aficionado but as an author. After publishing four family dramas—lots of feelings, not much plot—I wanted to level up in my fifth. In When We Were Bright and Beautiful, a white, uber-wealthy Princeton athlete is accused of raping his former girlfriend. His sister Cassie narrates the story, and we follow the fallout on their family, from indictment through verdict. In my rendering, a series of twists culminates in a courtroom reveal that casts everything that came before in a different light. By the end, the …
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Imagine being arrested for killing someone. Imagine that there are witnesses to the crime, that there is evidence, a trail and trial. The extensive details are presented before a jury of your peers and you are found guilty without a shadow of a doubt. And now imagine that you cannot remember any of it. Not the murder, not what led to it, not even who the victim was. Imagine being put in prison for years, decades, waiting to be executed, and you sit there day in and day out, alone, scared, confused, trying to figure out what exactly you did and why. You feel like you were framed. It’s a slow torture. You beat your head against the wall trying to remember, trying to put the…
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Around the year 2000 I had an idea for a book about British aristocrats who aided Hitler during WWII. I sent the idea to my agent who replied with a scathing letter that nobody was interested in WWII, and it was disgusting to show people having an easy time in the British countryside when so many were suffering on the Continent. So, I put the idea aside. Many years and a new agent later, I found it again and decided it would still make a good story. I shared it with my current agent who loved it. It was snapped up by Lake Union (Amazon’s women’s fiction line) and came out as IN FARLEIGH FIELD. It has since sold half a million copies. Since then, I have written THE TUSC…
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