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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Since we are spoiled for choice here at the Psychological Thriller department of CrimeReads HQ, I decided to do an experiment. There are no dead girls to put the plot in motion. There are no uncomfortable moments of sexualizing girls. There are no determined moms with empty nurseries. There are no fields of unidentified corpses that turn out to be women who were in the wrong place and took a worse turn, ending up in a mass grave. There is no gratuitous blood and gore, no mandate to raise the body count, and no sexual violence. When asked, I usually say that I don’t really react much to reading about terrible things because I do it so often, which is true. I’m not easy t…
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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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The title came to me first. Love in the Time of Serial Killers. I was reading another true crime book – probably not The Phantom Prince by Ted Bundy’s ex, but it’s thematic so let’s go with that one – and I thought, how the hell are you supposed to fall for someone when the threat of this is out there? Turns out that a character obsessed with true crime is kind of the ideal romance novel protagonist. For one, they are ready to bring the drama. In Tessa Bailey’s My Killer Vacation, for example, Taylor Bassey is an elementary school teacher who is also a die-hard true crime podcast listener. So when she comes across a dead body in her Cape Cod vacation rental, she is ready…
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I have spent most of my professional career in Silicon Valley. In my 25 years in tech, I’ve worked at everything from a two-person, seed-stage start-up, to a 40,000-employee, publicly-traded company. Mostly, I’ve worked at companies somewhere in-between those extremes—venture-backed tech start-ups that have raised millions of dollars in financing but are still private companies. The reality of these private, venture-backed companies is they operate largely without oversight. Most of the time, this is fine. Certainly, the companies I have worked for have all been managed ethically and legally—with the notable exception of MCI, which had the misfortune of being acquired b…
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In June 1934, when a war with Germany seemed a remote prospect, one of Philip Conwell-Evans’s English colleagues found himself in a Berlin suburban garden having dinner with Heinrich Himmler. Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the elite unit created as Hitler’s bodyguard, and already one of the most powerful men in Germany, Himmler would later be responsible for the conception, direction and execution of the Holocaust. The English colleague was Ernest Tennant OBE, a businessman, decorated Great War veteran and amateur butterfly collector. Their host was Tennant’s closest German friend, Joachim Ribbentrop. A politically and socially ambitious businessman, the forty…
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If I’d been told in advance about the blood sacrifice, I would have made up an excuse not to attend the bachelorette party. I wasn’t too enthused about going in the first place. I resented group activities, especially ones where everyone else involved seemed delighted to participate. It made me wonder if I was just a miserly curmudgeon for not wanting to shell out my hard-earned income on someone else’s idea of a good time. Did no one else find it all ridiculous? The engagement party and the bridal shower and the bachelorette weekend and the wedding week. “I’m going to end up dropping five K on someone else’s wedding,” I complained to my mother over the phone as I packed…
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There are few characters in storytelling that are more maligned and misunderstood than the witch. She is most often seen as grotesque and terrifying in children’s stories (not to mention that, yes, she is almost always female), and is willing to do just about anything, including eating wayward children, to retain her beautiful glow. The Evil Queen in Snow White disguised herself as the hideous witch to trick the guileless heroine with a poison apple so she could remain the fairest in the land. Ursula in The Little Mermaid steals Ariel’s voice to become young and beautiful (and let’s not forget thin). It is pretty clear that our most early interactions with the idea of a w…
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Do you follow every rabbit hole in true crime podcasts or watch serial killer documentaries religiously? Does the Forensics Files or Cold Case Files theme songs ever get stuck in your head? Do you pour over each detail in Only Murders in the Building looking for clues so you can figure out the killer before our heroes Mabel, Charles, and Oliver do? Then you, my friend, are an armchair sleuth! You’re by no means alone. Up to 50% of podcasts right now are based on true crime. Murder mysteries—real and fictional—are topping the charts of Netflix and Hulu. We can’t get enough of it, which is a good thing because I’m an avid reader (and writer!) of cozy mysteries. If you’re b…
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I’m often a bit confused as a reader when I enter a bookstore to look for a mystery and find myself in the suspense section. Now that I’m an author, I find it can still cause me to smile when my books are labeled as suspense and in my mind, they’re definitely more of a mystery. I’m not sure that there has ever been a firm definition provided as to the difference, but I’m going to take a stab at it. (Pun intended) Suspense is high-octane, fast-paced, with a villain who has a relatively clear purpose. Mystery is riddled with questions, unclear villain, unclear motives, secrets, and a page-by-page discovery. It can also be a slow burn. I think suspense is a more universal …
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Hercule Poirot hasn’t been brought to the screen as many times as Sherlock Holmes has, but he’s certainly had his fair share of portrayals, throughout the years. He’s been everywhere, from radio to the big screen to the small screen to the stage. The rules: as usual, with these things, I can only rank performances that I can actually watch. So, no radio (VERY sorry not to include a Poirot adaptation with Orson Welles in multiple parts), no theater, no video games. But that’s okay. That leaves us with 20 performances to assess. It wasn’t an easy job. I relied on most of my little gray cells to pull it off. Now, normally, when making these lists, I have to put together th…
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My first real working day at Hexa was a Tuesday. I was originally supposed to start on Monday, but the only time Yena could meet me for a drink that week was Monday afternoon at three p.m., so I traded that first shift before I’d even really begun—I thought it was a miracle they didn’t fire me there and then. Yena was my ex-girlfriend. We’d met at the call center (I told you I’d been much too friendly there, didn’t I?) and had been together for exactly one year, seven months of which we’d spent living together in the house I inherited from my mother. “You’ve probably been with lots of girls, haven’t you?” Yena said the first time she spent the night at my place. We were …
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The poet David Kirby once said that “only shallow people and charlatans begin with perfect knowledge of what it is they mean to say. An honest writer begins in ignorance and writes his way to the truth.” The word “truth” is a bit controversial when it comes to historical fiction. Some authors of historical novels claim they only “stick to the facts,” while others acknowledge and celebrate their expansive creative license. When I wrote Oleander City: A Novel Based on the True Story, I did so with the understanding that our notions of “truth” are complex, and that what we accept as historical actuality is often incomplete or misguided. We all know about eye-witness tes…
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My first hero as a kid was Nancy Drew. My English teacher dad had handmade bookshelves in the den (1970s word for study or office) where he’d grade papers and work on lesson plans, and they were filled with hardcover Nancy Drew by Carolyn Keene novels. He also had most of the Hardy Boys mysteries and tons of classic literary fiction, but from the first few pages of The Hidden Staircase, I was hooked. I know now that I read the second book first, but it didn’t matter at the time. Accompanying Nancy Drew on her secret, compelling adventures, I reveled in the idea that a girl could take it upon herself to solve mysteries while aiding her dad in the process. A girl. Nancy was…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Jennifer Hillier, Things We Do In The Dark (Minotaur) I’ve been obsessed with Jennifer Hillier’s sly psychological thrillers since her breakout hit Jar of Hearts, and Things We Do In the Dark promises to showcase her characters’ signature slippery grasp on morality once again. Paris Peralta is found at the center of a shocking crime scene, but she’s not afraid of the police: she’s afraid of the woman from her past who will recognize the crime and come calling. I cannot wait to read this book. –MO Daniel Silva, Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Harper) Every Daniel Silva h…
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My latest novel, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, takes The Island of Doctor Moreau as a launching pad, probing the connections with race and colonialism inherent in H.G. Wells’ fiction, as well as its literary and film cousins. It is, as you’ll see, a long and distinguished lineage. The Island of Doctor Moreau focuses on a shipwrecked man’s discovery of a distant facility in which a reclusive researcher vivisects animals in an effort to turn them into humans—a hobby that makes him one of the grand mad scientists of literature. By the end of the short novel, Dr. Moreau’s carefully cultivated animal-human society has descended into chaos and murder. But H.G. Wells was not t…
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It’s summer and thoughts turn (after the last couple of stay-at-home years) to travel, venturing abroad, places foreign. CrimeReads’ Lizzy Steiner has recently recommended US-based podcasts so let’s look a little further afield. Here’s a summer round up of the best international podcasts you might want to download before taking off… ___________________________________ England ___________________________________ Scotland Yard Confidential (Noiser Podcasts) Bristol-based Noiser Podcasts have had great success with their Real Dictators, Real Outlaws, Real Pirates, and Real Narcos series’. Their latest is Scotland Yard Confidential, ranging from the early nineteenth ce…
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For about three years, beginning in 1936, Eliot Ness kept tabs on my grandfather Fred P. Stashower. According to information in Ness’s possession, Fred P. Stashower was “an old egg-tossing vandal.” This, I admit, was news to me. Eliot Ness, who rose to fame during the Prohibition era as “the man who got Al Capone,” kept tabs on a lot of people. His private papers, now preserved at Cleveland’s Western Reserve Historical Society, feature a rogue’s gallery of bootleggers, rumrunners, racketeers, and gangsters of all stripes. Scrapbooks from his Chicago days chronicle his storied career as the leader of “the Untouchables,” the legendary team of Prohibition agents who smash…
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I sometimes use movies to talk about books. In my experience, particularly in classroom settings, it’s easy to point to the story structure of a popular film that most, if not all, those present have seen, then compare it to a book that maybe hasn’t made the rounds. It’s not an uncommon practice. As any Black horror writer is aware of post-2017. That was the year Jordan Peele’s Get Out premiered and knocked the entire filmmaking industry back on its heels. “I would’ve voted for Obama for a third term.” The teacup. The Sunken Place. And, my favorite moment, “Where are those keys, Rose?” It is a fantastic film I revisit often. It was certainly the springboard for what we m…
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In visions of the dark night I have dreamed of joy departed— But a waking dream of life and light Hath left me broken-hearted. –A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe Even before relocating to Baltimore in the summer of 1978, I was an Edgar Allan Poe fan. In my Harlem boyhood I’d seen the Roger Corman films on Creature Features, devoured The Raven when I was twelve and drooled over the drawings Berni Wrightson did for his brilliant “Black Cat” adaptation in Creepy #62 ” (Warren, 1974). Though I’d visited Aunt Charlotte and cousin Marie in Baltimore a few times since childhood, I never dreamed that the city where my literary hero died in 1849 under mysterious circumstan…
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“I have brothers and sisters and I find that my sisters are as intelligent as my brothers.” Digitally leafing through stacks of archival documents on 20th century colonial Bangalore as part of my academic research on the city’s ecological history, this sentence struck me with force. Mr. B.V. Ramaswami, a member of the Mysore Representative Assembly, was speaking passionately at a debate on the right of women to vote, during a meeting of the Mysore Representative Assembly in 1922. Ramaswami’s statement may seem obvious to us. But a century back, the possibility that women might become as educated and empowered as men was a matter of concern—even fear—for many men. Indee…
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Zarqa Nawaz is as smart as she’s funny, and that’s saying something, since she’s very funny. Nawaz first became known for her hilarious and heartwarming sitcom, Little Mosque on the Prairie, and now she’s embraced fiction writing with her new novel, Jameela Green Ruins Everything, in which a woman prays for a book deal, accepts a mission from an imam to perform a good deed, and somehow finds herself in conflict with the CIA. Zarqa Nawaz was kind enough to answer a few questions over email. Molly Odintz: The premise for this novel is wildly inventive. What was your inspiration? Zarqa Nawaz: When my memoir, Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, didn’t make it to the New Yo…
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Caution! Poison Snake On Premises! So read a handwritten sign posted at the entrance of our house. Our house was in the outskirts of Tokyo, in a town called Ōizumi in a district called Nerima. The huge Hikari-ga-oka apartment complex rose up just beside. That area had been used as an airstrip by the Japanese military during the war, and then as an encampment by American forces afterward. The grounds of Toei Studio was also nearby. Next door there lived an old lady who worked part-time painting animation cels for Toei, and behind the house, cabbage fields spread far and wide. Carpets were laid willy-nilly over the tatami floors of our house. I was the youngest of four …
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Death of a Mystery Writer Six decades ago, on March 7, 1962, the body of fifty-five-year-old Milton Morris Propper was discovered slumped over in his automobile outside his apartment residence at 1841 West Tioga Street in the Nicetown-Tioga section of northern Philadelphia. Authorities concluded that the dead man had expired in his car three days earlier from “acute barbiturate poisoning”—or, in other words, a fatal overdose of sleeping pills, taken deliberately. This is the sort of death scenario that Golden Age mystery writers are known to have concocted, although in those fictional cases the dead man invariably turns out to have been a victim not of suicide but of can…
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Megan Miranda is known for her twisty psychological thrillers, atmospheric settings, and deep insight into the psychology of her characters. I’ve been a fan ever since I picked up her second book, The Perfect Stranger, and Megan Miranda’s latest continues to cement her reputation as a writer at the top of her field. In Miranda’s latest slow-burn suspense, The Last to Vanish, a small town is the setting for a series of disappearances against a dramatic mountain backdrop. Megan Miranda was kind enough to answer a few questions about craft, setting, and the art of building suspense. Molly Odintz: One of the themes of the novel is that small towns change their residents; new…
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I have a fairly large crime fiction library at home and had access to a vastly larger one still for several years while I was working days at the Center for Fiction, in the old building on Forty-Seventh Street, just shy of the diamond district, which you crossed through on your way to and from the subway and where, in the afternoons, when the diamond hawkers were settled in and feeling good, they would give you a look up and down and decide whether you were a better prospect to buy or to sell. It was a really impressive collection, the Center for Fiction’s. They still have it, only it’s in Brooklyn now, moved by the greater forces of New York City real estate, itself the …
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