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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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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I dedicated my latest novel To Jack, and for good reason. In for a Dime is book two in the three part Tildon Chronicles and I’m almost certain that neither it nor book one, No Quarter, would have been written, much less published, if it hadn’t been for Jack David at ECW Press. In the spring of 2013 I’d just completed Cipher, my first attempt at writing a mystery novel, and prior to sending it to Jack I’d done the ubiquitous Google search trying to unearth a bit of background I could use to my advantage in a query letter. When I found an interview during which he’d stated that his reason for founding the press was “shit-disturbing” it seemed an encouraging sign given that…
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Our fascination with twins (and particularly identical twins) likely dates back to the dawn of humankind, as evidenced by Romulus and Remus, Artemis and Apollo, Shakespeare (Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors), the Cheeryble Brothers in Nicholas Nickleby, all the way through to contemporary literature. Monozygotic (aka identical) twins make up approximately 0.3% of the world’s population. But, thankfully, they are significantly more prevalent in crime fiction. When I ponder fictional twins the first image in my head is that of the Grady twins in the Overlook Hotel. Stephen King’s The Shining and Stanley Kubrik’s screen adaptation are both seminal pieces of work. The…
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I shouldn’t be alive today.” That was one of the first things Boris Nayfeld told me when I met him four years ago. On a sweltering Saturday in late June 2018, we sat outdoors at Tatiana Grill, a popular restaurant on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, tossing back shots of Russian vodka chased by the warm salty Atlantic breeze, surrounded by young women from St. Petersburg and Kiev and Odessa who wore more makeup than clothes. Known to his friends and family as “Biba” and described in the New York tabloids as “the last boss of the original Russian Mafia in America,” Boris had every right to marvel at the fact that he was alive and smiling and talking into my digital recor…
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It was in Boston’s most notorious neighborhood that Professor William Douglas met sex worker Robin Benedict. Their stormy relationship, and the terrible crime that occurred, made national headlines. The irony is that they wouldn’t have met if not for the Combat Zone, a neighborhood that served as a magnet for the city’s most desperate and depraved. Douglas had probably heard about the Combat Zone dating back to his days at Brown University in nearby Providence. The neighborhood was already known on a national level as a rough, dangerous place, having earned its name in the 1950s when brawls between local biker gangs and sailors frequently spilled out of the bars along l…
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Last year’s historical fiction was all about the 60s, baby, while this year’s features more from the 1950s, the long 19th century, and the 1970s. I have bad news for Gen-Xers and Xennials: the 1990s are now historical fiction, and there’s plenty coming out about the tail end of the 20th century and the havoc wrought there-in. As continues to be predictable during the pandemic, books set in the post-WWI era are proliferating. And historical fiction continues to meld the history of forgotten voices with highly entertaining storytelling to do the important work of educating us about the past without feeling like a textbook (I assume most of the following titles will not be w…
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My new novel, Red London, revolves around the world of Russian oligarchs living in London. Wealthy Russian expats have been a fixture in London for so long now that the city’s moniker, Londongrad, no longer shocks. The oligarchs are dug in deeply and broadly: Russians are believed to have 27 billion pounds invested in the UK in one form or another, and the top few alone own about $1.5 billion in London property. When Putin launched a full-scale invasion into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, however, it forced a hard look at the ultimate price of this accommodation of Russian elites. Wealthy people have always bought property in foreign locations, whether as an investment o…
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You would be forgiven for having missed one particular news story that did the rounds in August this year. ‘Briton suspected of spying for Russia arrested in Germany’ read the BBC headline, and the accompanying article, describing the arrest of a Scottish security guard working at the British embassy in Berlin, suggested that the same old shadow games were still being played. One of the most remarkable things about the story was that journalists who visited the suspect’s apartment in Potsdam peered through his window and saw ‘two Russian flags alongside scores of military history books, some in Russian.’ Two Russian flags? Isn’t it astonishing that someone working for th…
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I’ve always been a huge fan of the young adult dystopian fiction of the early twenty-first century – The Hunger Games, Divergent and their ilk. I loved these new, feisty representations of young female protagonists who were determined to take on the injustices of the world. However, when I began analyzing what was making them so popular, I began to notice a pattern. Surprisingly often, the characters’ mothers were absent figures in their daughters’ lives. The more I looked into this, the more questions arose. I found that the reasons for this maternal absence varied: from mental breakdown (Katniss’s mother in The Hunger Games), to disinterest (the Uglies series by Scott …
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There was a time when the church and the government were the arbiters of moral authority. But since those institutions have often proved corrupt (and, at times, both corrupt and criminal), another institution has often filled the void—the free press. Investigative reporters, bolstered by the first amendment, are often the last resort for individual citizens seeking the truth. They follow the breadcrumbs of information, burrow into the dark recesses of corporations or government agencies, and expose secrets hidden by those in power. In my debut novel, Truth and Other Lies, I explore the moral imperative journalists have to expose treachery both here and abroad. So it’s no…
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As everyone who reads this website doubtlessly knows—to the point that it might not even be worth saying—there is nothing in this world more delightful than a murder mystery set in the English countryside. Especially if that mystery takes place during the spring, especially if the sleuths on the case are plucky amateurs, especially if there is some sort of riddle at the center of the whole thing. It was with joy and hope in my heart I began watching the new miniseries, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, a show written and directed by Hugh Laurie for the streaming service BritBox, adapting Agatha Christie’s 1934 comic mystery of the same name. In this rollicking novel, the centr…
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Always versatile, a writer of contemporary noir, domestic thrillers, horror, graphic novels, and both Marvel and DC tie-in novels, Jason Starr has now turned to the sort of alternate-reality nightmare story Philip K. Dick might have dreamed up. A criminal attorney named Steven Blitz, who lives in the New York City suburbs, is in the middle of a murder trial for his serial killer client. At the same time, he is undergoing a difficult period in his marriage. When his wife, one evening, declares that she wants a divorce, Steven leaves the house and drives away to spend the night someplace else. A stop at a local gas station leads to an altercation with a man, and a sudden…
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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…
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So, the world closed in on us, right? And while lockdown may have had less of an impact on writers than it did on office workers, chefs, or elementary school teachers, it did mean that those of us who need a crowded coffee house to focus, or who depend on travel for research (honest, it’s entirely for work!) found a lot of doors slammed shut in our faces. The book I’d intended to write was to take place in Paris and the Dordogne. I had been to both places before, and I thought I might be able to fake it, but I knew I’d have trouble when it came to the things that matter—the sensory elements, the geographic oddities that aren’t apparent until you walk the city streets, th…
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Where were you in the spring of 1987? What were you up to? If you were Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Susan Dunlap, Betty Francis, Sara Paretsky, Charlotte MacLeod, Kate Mattes, and Nancy Pickard, you were at Sandra Scoppettone’s place, plotting the creation of Sisters in Crime, with a founding commitment to “helping women who write, review, buy or sell crime fiction.” Why plotting, you ask? I’m being facetious. While it’s obvious now to our 21st-century sensibilities that parity, at a minimum, in any professional space is vital, the creation of Sisters in Crime was met at the time with acrimony in some quarters—not to mention derision, denigration, and denial. Plotting was t…
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Lev AC Rosen, Lavender House (Forge) “A tense character-driven story … Rosen sculpts fully realized characters … Each character’s personal struggles are expertly shown. Like in most families, there are squabbles, pettiness and annoyances punctuating every day, but there also is pure, unconditional love and acceptance that elevate Lavender House. Rosen leaves the door open for what would be a most welcomed sequel.” –Oline Cogdil (South Florida Sun-Sentinel) Ian Rankin, A Heart Full of Headstones (Little, Brown and Co.) “Rankin captures both the heroism and the pathos of that ultimately doomed quest in this cleverly constructed and deeply moving novel.” –Bill Ott…
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“The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains…none were free.” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol Supernatural fiction and ghostlore isn’t exactly short on miserable and pitiable spirits. A few of the more famous examples include, La Llorona, the infanticidal “weeping woman” of Latin American legend, Jacob Marley, the sorrowful, chain-bound harbinger of A Christmas Carol, and the unfortunate, murdered mother-son tandem Kayako and Toshio from Ju-On: The Grudge. These and more are trapped in a hellish afterlife that is presumably endless. For Marley and La Llorona—in the traditi…
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North by Northwest isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The title sequence in which the stark lines of a Madison Avenue office building are ‘woven’ together could be the construction of Cary in his suit right there – he gets knitted into his suit before his adventure can begin. Indeed some of the popular ‘suitings’ of that time, ‘windowpane’ or ‘glen plaid’, reflected, even perfectly complemented office buildings. Cary’s suit reflects New York, identifies him as a thrusting exec, but also protects him, what else is a suit for? Reflects and Prote…
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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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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Rachel Howzell Hall, We Lie Here (Thomas and Mercer) “What’s most special about the book is the array of complex characters…The dialogue is sharp, observant, and emotional without ever straying into sentimentality, and the mystery of who is targeting the Gibson family manages to stay compelling despite many twists and turns…This captivating domestic thriller will keep you on your toes.” –Kirkus Reviews Aggie Blum Thompson, All The Dirty Secrets (Forge Books) “In a rarefied world of wealth and privilege, simmering secrets hide in plain sight. Heart-stopping danger will make you ra…
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James Ellroy, now 74, is known for his sprawling, densely plotted and highly-stylized novels about America in the mid-twentieth century and the desperate and corrupt men, real and fictional, who populated it. He’s the type of literary iconoclast that was discontinued long ago. A street-fighting, loud mouthed prose practitioner who bucks polite discourse. He possesses an almost mythic origin story for a crime writer: when he was ten years old his mother was murdered in an infamous unsolved homicide case in his native Los Angeles. From the furnace of this grief sprung an obsession with crime and the invisible, corrupt forces that drive politics and the underworld. If you we…
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Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is the longest-running West End play in history. It opened in 1952 and has played continuously in its original production in its original theater since then (except for a mandatory fourteen-month break when all the West End theaters closed due to COVID). It has been seen by more than ten million people. But the characters of the new film See How They Run do not know this yet. The film, directed by Tom George and written by Mark Chappell, is set on the night of the one-hundredth performance of The Mousetrap, in 1953. Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) is the lead, playing the detective. His wife, the actress Sheila Sim (Pearl Chanda), …
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“It feels, indeed, as if the characters and everything that happens to them exist in some limbo of the imagination, so that what I am doing is not inventing them but getting in touch with them and putting their story down in black and white, a process of revelation, not of creation.” Nobody could put it better than that. The quotation comes from the inimitable P. D. James, in Talking About Detective Fiction. And that’s what it’s like for me: the characters are there, somewhere in that limbo, and I check in with them whenever I want to see what they’re up to. So, character is, to me, the most important element of a story. And I must have succeeded to some extent: I get v…
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Another year has dawned, and it’s time for another list purporting to be the sum of all Most Anticipated Titles in our beloved genre. I have been asked to keep the number of titles on the list to 50, for my own sanity. But who needs sanity when you have books?!? And what a year of books it is already shaping up to be, featuring tons of high-concept thrillers, deeply insightful psychologicals, Golden-Age influenced mysteries, and plenty of take-no-prisoners noir. Keep an eye on the site over the next few weeks as we draw out various subgenres for additional previews. As always, this list is long not because we expect everyone to read everything—quite the contrary! We want…
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Frank McGonigle was 26 when he left his midwestern home on June 7, 1982. His family never heard from him again. They spent nine years searching and hoping for his safe return. Seven days after he disappeared, an unidentified body was found in some woods 1,200 miles away on the coast of South Carolina. The small-town sheriff and coroner had only a few circumstantial leads to go on. They spent nine years trying to identify this body they referred to as “The boy in the woods.” An unlikely series of events eventually brought Frank’s family some answers and some semblance of peace. When I set out to write Ripple: A Long Strange Search for a Killer, I didn’t intend to work mys…
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