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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In Bodies Bodies Bodies, the new film from director Halina Reijn and writers Sarah DeLappe and Kristen Roupenian (of “Cat Person” fame), a group of mean, rich, and very high twentysomethings weather a storm in a huge mansion, believing one among them to be a killer after the lights go out and a party game goes awry. When wealthy, newly sober Sophie (Amandla Steinberg) brings her new girlfriend Bee (Academy Award-nominee Maria Bakalova) to her friend’s manor house for a super-sleepover, not only are the party-attendees surprised to see Sophie and meet Bee (Sophie is briefly excoriated for not responding to their group chat), but they’re also dealing with their own petty f…
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I was in a canoe on the Edisto River in South Carolina with my dad when I stumbled onto a crime story that would, over the course of many years, shake me to my core. It was a reverse murder mystery. I was presented with the killer, but not a victim. It was raining and we were sheltering beneath a bridge when I asked him why his father, who was white, had the name Hernando. My dad told me that Hernando’s father, Dr. I.M. Woods had to hide out in Texas for a time after the Civil War and a Spanish speaking woman saved his life and he promised to name a child after her husband. “Why did he have to hide out after the war?” I asked. “He killed a man,” Dad said, looking away…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Amanda Jayatissa, You’re Invited (Berkley) “This story is deliciously messy…Buckle up. This is a psychological thriller with corkscrew-tight twists and surprising depth as the novel explores issues of class, identity, and friendship.” –Oprah Daily Zac Bissonnette, A Killing in Costumes (Crooked Lane) “A Killing in Costumes has all the hallmarks of a great cozy: a unique setting, an intriguing cast of characters and an exciting mystery.” –Bookpage Martin Walker, To Kill a Troubadour (Knopf) “Smoothly integrated into Bruno’s investigation is information on a multitude of sub…
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Damascus – capital of Syria and the oldest continuous capital city in the world. The ‘City of Jasmine’ is of course sadly bomb damaged and war-torn these days, its two million population in dire straits and so many forced to flee as refugees. But still, the city has a long history from the third millennium BC and not least, a lot more recently, as a plaything of competing Empires with the French and British vying for control. Fertile ground for some good crime writing. Damascus is also a major cultural centre of the Levant, the Eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. The master of the pre-war accidental spy genre Eric Ambler wrote The Levanter in 1971. It deals with mach…
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Quick Confession Let me start by admitting something that may be a little shameful, a little anathema, on a site like this: I’m not a crime fiction aficionado. Honestly, I read other genres much more extensively. I’ve never read Agatha Christie (gasp!), Lee Child, Gillian Flynn, Harlan Coben, Dean Koontz, James Patterson, John Grisham etc. Sadly, the list goes on. Are you still reading? Am I still invited to this club? Maybe, maybe not. Let me also say, I fully enjoy the thriller/crime/mystery genre. I love Tana French, Kate Atkinson, and Val McDermid; I especially enjoy thrillers that toe the line between other genres like Julie Phillips’ Disappearing Earth or Jeff Va…
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Chances are, your favorite suspense novels are stories filled with unexpected twists and turns; pulse-pounding, page-turning action; and gritty, dark discoveries. But even the darkest thriller is balanced with a sliver of light. And what better to bring in that light than love—a compelling love interest who stands by the main character amidst all the chaos. Many readers have commented on the creep factor of my new novel, Iris in the Dark, when the main character hears a chilling voice in the night while staying at a remote hunting lodge on the South Dakota prairie. But just as many readers have raved about the love interest, the swoony lodge caretaker, Sawyer. To me, ea…
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As a writer of speculative fiction, by definition, I make things up. I imagine things into existence, at least on the page. It’s an act of creating something from nothing, and it’s limited only by one’s imagination. There’s a kind of beautiful of freedom in that. Andy Weir has never been to Mars, but that didn’t stop him from writing The Martian. Tom Clancy was never in the military, but that didn’t stop him from becoming one of the most prolific military thriller writers to ever work in the genre. Octavia E. Butler never had to trek across countless miles of lawless wasteland fighting for her life in the apocalypse, but that didn’t stop her from writing Parable of the So…
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A man in a suit enters a darkened, empty house. He sets his gun and keys on the table and walks over to the windows overlooking the ocean. He stares into the watery void, lost in his thoughts. That’s an iconic scene—among many—from Michael Mann’s “Heat,” which is widely regarded as a masterpiece 27 years after its release. Critics and cinephiles love picking apart the movie’s expertly choreographed robberies and gun battles, but it’s the quiet moments that provide the texture: Robber Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) at their most introspective, staring off into the L.A. night. “Heat 2,” the newly released novel by Michael Ma…
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There’s nothing more ironic than thrillers set at weddings. You take something typically romantic where everyone is expecting a happily ever after, and turn it around so you wish you’d never RSVPd in the first place! It’s this very contrast (and slight obsession with watching Say Yes To The Dress) that led me to write my own wedding thriller—You’re Invited. It has all the elements for wedded bliss— a lavish Sri Lankan wedding at the stunning, beachside Mt Lavinia Hotel, an instagram-worthy bride from an affluent Colombo family, and a handsome, successful groom. Oh, and murder, of course. Here are a few more thrillers set at weddings that I think you’ll enjoy. The Gues…
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My brother, John, is an actor. A few years ago, he was cast in an independent Irish horror movie called Beyond the Woods. Filming took place in a secluded house in the Cork countryside in the dead of winter, mostly at night, over the course of a couple of weeks, with the small cast and skeletal crew staying onsite. Before shooting could begin, the director had to visit the local Garda (police) station to say that if they got a report in the middle of the night of blood-curdling screams coming from the woods, it wasn’t someone getting murdered. It was just them, shooting their horror movie. It’s a hazard of my job (crime writer; yes, spare a thought for our parents but th…
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Slow cookin’, slow dancing, I’m a big fan. Slow first chapters, you’re probably going to lose me. You see, I’m a big believer in launching your first chapter with a major bang. Ever seen a James Bond movie? Before you’ve had your popcorn good old Bond is zooming along the Autobahn in his Aston Martin where—kaboom!—he gets shot at and skids into a ditch. Undaunted, 007 dons a pair of skis, schusses down a glacier, and ends up piloting a Russian MiG while heat-seeking missiles buzz around him like errant mosquitos. Now that’s what I call a thrilling, reach-out-and-grab-ya opening. And I truly appreciate that same type of nail-biting excitement in the opening chapters of the…
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There are two godfathers of modern crime writing, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. For my money Hammett was the better writer. Even if Chandler had the gaudier patter. Chandler was a superb analyst of the genre. I’ve taken what he said about Hammett—in ordinary paragraph form—and turned it into a list. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons … with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it w…
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At its heart, the cozy mystery is the story of a woman—usually—determined to restore the social order in her community after a crime—murder, usually—tears it apart. Driven by a deep sense of injustice and armed with her wits, her knowledge of the community, and her belief that one passionate individual can make a difference, she dives in. She puts herself in harm’s way. She asks questions only an insider can ask and sees connections only someone with a stake in the matter can see. Because she understands the community and the people within it, she can look beneath the surface and identify the true conflicts, relationships, and motivations between the victim, witnesses, an…
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I never wanted to come back home. Reachwood Forest still waits here over a decade later. Trees cut through the suburb, growing too close together in the steep ravine. Tangled branches cast shadows deep enough and dark enough to make me shiver and roll up my window. Nothing has really changed. The streets still bear the same names, leading up to the opulent houses at the top of the hill. The same wealthy families still live there, overlooking the neighborhood and the forest below. “Are we going to be there soon?” Marjorie fidgets with the sleeves of her jacket. Nearly fourteen-and-a-half years old, but she hasn’t learned how to be patient. “We’ll reach it in a few minut…
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Metafiction is the ultimate analog binge-reading experience, and we love literary inception in our reading diet, and a lot of it. As unapologetically obsessive bookworms, we will take all of the stories we can get stuffed into a single volume. And nesting doll stories about writers and writing, the horrors of the creative process, and the mental toll of making shit up for a living (or stealing it) is so rife with satisfying plot twists and questionable character behavior, we find ourselves returning to the proverbial well time and time again. In our latest novel, The Rule of Three, we had a blast crafting our own contribution to this category. In our case, the story fea…
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Between the ages of twelve and thirteen I read the entire Agatha Christie oeuvre in under a year. They were like crack for me, my first addiction, I couldn’t get enough of them. I read four a week, under the bedcovers, by torchlight. Then I discovered indie music and that became my next obsession and I forgot about reading books entirely. I rediscovered reading in my early twenties when I read widely and eclectically, but oddly, given my earlier predilection for Agatha Christie’s detective novels, one thing I did not read was crime. I did not read Raymond Chandler, PD James, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Cornell, Patricia Highsmith or Elmore Leonard. I did not read Lee Child, …
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Musical theater and crime aren’t typically thought of as concepts that go hand-in-hand, outside of dad jokes about Broadway ticket prices. But the two have been interwoven for longer than you might guess. For centuries, the theater scene was considered separate from polite society, a refuge where groups like queer people, sex workers and people of color were frequently creative pioneers and, if still not all the way accepted, more accepted than they’d be in the light of day. Less importantly, but more importantly for the purposes of this article, the musical genre in its varied splendor has given us a wealth of great crime stories. Here are six of the best, as well as whe…
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Hey, guess what? It’s my birthday! And what better way to celebrate than to recommend some stirring new international crime fiction to y’all. This month’s picks include Nazis on the run in South America, a new Swedish-style Sherlock story, an action-packed Japanese thriller, a brooding Lebanese detective story, and a Kafkaesque take on the mid-century Japanese legal system, all beautifully translated and most from small presses. Olivier Guez, The Disappearance of Joseph Mengele Translated by Georgia de Chamberet (Verso) As Olivier Guez’s brilliant historical novel begins, the despicable doctor Mengele is living in Argentina, where he’s been welcomed by Peròn, who …
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Isaac Hayes was born on August 20, 1942, in Covington, Tennessee and passed away at the age of 65 in 2008. Hayes led a full life that went from being a poor sharecropping child to working in a slaughter house as a teenager to changing the sound of Black music at Stax Records with Hot Buttered Soul (1969) and becoming the first African-American composer to win an Academy Award for the iconic 1971 soundtrack for “Theme from Shaft.” In honor of Hayes 80th birthday, I was inspired to write about the man, his art and our first meeting twenty-seven years ago. It was Valentine’s Day, 1995 and I was on my way to meet soul man Isaac Hayes at East of Eighth, a bistro on West 23…
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“What about that one?” My sister whispers into the phone as though anyone but me can hear her. She’s excited, and I feel my own heart starting to race at the prospect of what’s about to come. I’ve only helped identify the mark before. I’ve never picked one for myself. I’m sitting alone in a booth at the roadside diner, cradling a lukewarm cup of black coffee. It’s Saturday and there’s a lunch rush. Forks and plates and laughter all around me. A little girl keeps turning in her booth to smile at me. She holds up the drawing she’s made on her paper placemat and I flash her a thumbs up. She giggles and turns back to her family. “Which?” I ask. My Bluetooth headset is hidd…
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Like a horoscope, everybody has a trope. For you, there’s a word, a phrase, a trope that makes you pick up a book every time. “Unreliable narrator.” “Death in a locked room.” “Gaslighting.” “Madman on the loose.” “Unjustly accused.” You know what works for you, and it doesn’t matter how often you read it, you love seeing how a skilled author crafts the time-worn trope into a new, fresh story. As a writer, the fun comes in my current release, POINT LAST SEEN, when I shuffle tropes like a tarot deck. On a wild, rugged Big Sur California beach a woman washes in on a wave, not breathing, no heartbeat, a ring of bruises around her throat. She’s revived by a “tortured protagon…
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A look at the week’s best new releases. * Catherine McKenzie, Please Join Us (Atria) “I devoured this book in one sitting! The First Wives Club meets The Firm in a chilling, serpentine ride that will leave you breathless. Please Join Us belongs at the very top of your TBR stack.” –Liv Constantine William Kent Krueger, Fox Creek (Atria) “Fox Creek is the best book in the series yet.” –Minneapolis Star Tribune Cate Holahan, The Darkness of Others (Grand Central) “The Darkness of Others is a deftly plotted, smartly observed page-turner that manages to thrill at the same time as capture the emotional chaos of the early pandemic years.” –Attica Locke E…
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Bullet Train, directed by David Leitch and adapted by Zak Olkewicz from Kōtarō Isaka’s novel of the same name, promises a perfectly-contained, hurtling premise: a handful of assassins with vague ties to one another all find themselves, seemingly randomly, executing conflicting missions on a speed train bound for Kyoto. Even without knowing anything else about it, that should be enough to make you buckle up. Brad Pitt plays “Ladybug” (a nickname given to him by his witty handler, whom he talks to via earpiece). He is a cheerful but unlucky small-time operative sent to the bullet train to steal a suitcase from the baggage area. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry ar…
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On September 5th, 1965, the Courier of Waterloo, Iowa ran an article concerning the scourge of juvenile delinquency. The juvenile caseload was “small but involved,” the headline read, presided over by a judge who “can’t reach youngsters.” 20 juvenile cases had been tried in the neighboring city of Cedar Falls across the past nine months, and though this number fell well below the number of adult cases that made their way through the courts, these situations were far more complex. In some cases, so-called delinquents appeared before the judge not because they’d broken the law but rather at “the request of parents who find their children ungovernable.” “They are the ‘shook…
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My debut novel, The Awoken, is a different kind of science fiction in that it is actually about an absence of science. Despite the story being set a century into our future, most scientific and medical innovation has been halted, and in some cases even made illegal. The story is centered around a young woman who dies and then is brought back to life from cryogenic preservation a century later. The issue is, in this future world, it is illegal to be a resurrected person. The technology to resurrect humans from preservation has been discovered, but the science has been criminalized due to society’s fear of wielding such a Godlike power. The result is that the millions of pe…
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