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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SUZUKI LOOKING OUT AT THE CITY, Suzuki thinks about insects. It’s night but the scene is ablaze with gaudy neon and streetlamps. People everywhere. Like a writhing mass of luridly colored insects. It unsettles him, and he thinks back to what his college professor once said: ‘Most animals don’t live on top of each other in such great numbers. In some ways, humans are less like mammals and closer to insects.’ His professor had seemed pleased with the conclusion. ‘Like ants, or locusts.’ ‘I’ve seen photos of penguins living in groups all bunched together,’ Suzuki had responded, gently needling. ‘Are penguins like insects too?’ His professor flushed. ‘Penguins have nothing …
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Music composer Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978), who as Edmund Crispin wrote eight glitteringly witty and amusing detective novels between 1944 and 1951 (as well as, with Geoffrey Bush, a fellow composer and the alleged son of detective novelist Christopher Bush, the classic short story “Who Killed Baker?”) is the subject of a now fifteen-year-old biography by David Whittle, Director of Music at Leicester Grammar School, Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A Life in Music and Books (2007). Every admirer of Crispin’s mystery fiction (and Montgomery’s music) should read this biography, although affordable copies are hard to find—the publisher, Ashgate, lists it at $155. It took me…
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2022 has been a banner year for true crime and critical nonfiction, and it was difficult to narrow it down to just the top 10 —and that’s just so far! August in particular has been a great month for new true crime, and you’ll see the month overrepresented in the following selections, but I promise that isn’t recency bias—it’s just a really great month for true crime. The selections on the list below run the gamut for the true crime genre, including an impassioned take-down of junk science, an erudite history of jazz and the underworld, a deeply empathetic examining of a sensational true crime case, a riveting account of a bizarre historical crime, ethnographic encounters …
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The places and characters in this story are imaginary. The first are not found on any map, the others are not alive, nor have ever lived, in any part of the world. I am sorry to say this having loved them as though they were real. Natalia Ginzburg, Author’s Note, Voices in the Evening, translated by D.M. Low When, in my mind’s eye, I clearly saw five women friends hugging and parting from each other after their habitual weekly gathering, going off in five different directions, I understood that they would not meet again. I immediately understood their relationship with each other and that their lives would be taking different trajectories. I had a sense of their landsc…
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The email arrived on a cold, rainy, November day in Montreal. I was sitting at my desk at the law firm where I was working, watching the rain pelt against the windows, in the moments I used to take between files. My back was turned to my computer, but I could see its outline glowing against the glass—a rainy day in November in Montreal is like winter in one of those places where the sun disappears from months at a time. The clock says that it’s daytime, but it doesn’t feel like it. I turned slowly toward my screen. Was it a weary turn? I like to think so. I often felt weary in November—the lack of light, the wet damp days, the work pilling on, the Christmas break too fa…
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Everyone from scientists to adventure seekers and everything in between could talk about the Florida Everglades for hours. There is so much to unpack—all 1.5 million acres of unique, subtropical ecosystem which homes over thirty-six endangered species. Surprisingly, this marshy swampland is primarily made up of freshwater, and it’s the only place on earth where both alligators and crocodiles coexist. And we can’t forget the caimans. They live there, too. While the Everglades is truly a beautiful, awe-inspiring place, it also holds its share of secrets as well. The environmental facts are intriguing, but the folklore is sinister. The Florida Everglades is prime real estat…
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Unexpected connections abound in crime fiction. They are an important, if often under-estimated, ingredient of the genre—because they illustrate its extraordinary range as well as its enduring appeal. Just because, for instance, some of us may love Golden Age detective fiction by the likes of Christie and Sayers, that really isn’t a reason for us not to derive equal pleasure from hardboiled mysteries by Hammett and Cain, or from Scandi-noir, or from writers as varied as Borges, Gillian Flynn, and Lee Child. The ingredients that connect good crime novels (such as compelling stories and engaging characters) are more important than over-emphasized and often superficial di…
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Tamron Hall is an Emmy-Award-winning talk show host who is also an advocate for domestic violence awareness. She brings all this impressive experience to her debut psychological thriller, As the Wicked Watch (now in paperback from William Morrow), the story of a crime reporter who becomes consumed with her need to bring attention to the murder of a Black teenage girl, the kind of victim who never gets their fair due in the news. As the Wicked Watch eviscerates the news industry as the home of Missing White Woman Syndrome, and combines a driving narrative with a fierce main character for a novel that will keep you turning pages well into the night. Thanks to Tamron Hall fo…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Kathleen Hale, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls (Grove) “Searing . . . As the first researcher into the case to draw extensively from transcripts of vital records, Hale has produced what stands as the most accurate account to date of this horrifying episode. This is a must for true crime fans.” –Publishers Weekly Catherine Ryan Howard, Run Time (Blackstone) “Howard makes her lead’s experiences feel fresh and immediate as she breathes new life into tired horror tropes. Riley Sager fans will be riveted.” –Publishers Weekly …
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Usually if I get a book way out of the perimeter of my admittedly scattered interests, I put it in the Little Free Library pile. But Flung Out of Space was such a cool idea: a graphic (as in with pictures, not with smut) biography of Patricia Highsmith focused on the time when she sold Strangers on a Train and felt like she could quit her day job working in comics and become a legitimate writer. Thus the story of Highsmith’s quest for legitimacy is not just about her sex life, it’s also about her career; not a word applied to women in her time, but the right word nevertheless). There is also a same-sex love story evocative of Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, a romance betwe…
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My writer’s group gets together weekly at a local winery. There’s as much drinking and catching up as there is putting words on the page, but we’ve convinced it’s productive since it “sustains our art”. A frequent topic of conversation is the crime fiction TV series each of us is streaming, where mysteries take center stage. Recently, I noticed that as different as our styles of writing are, we seem to be watching the same shows, including Mare of Easttown and Only Murders in the Building, and when we go old-school, Midsummer Murders and Miss Marple. I thought it would be fun to check out what we might be missing. After viewing a dozen streaming mystery series, below…
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A family room adorned with couch and a coffee table, the aftermath of a disturbing sequence of torture so fresh the blood is still pooling into the fibers of the rug. The body left behind is that of a child, his father dripping wet of sweat and tears crumbled on the floor. The silence, most of all, hangs there, punctuated by gentle sobbing. The boy’s body hidden; he’s no longer in pain—the games that culminated in a bag over the child’s head, devolving into suffocation and strangulation… it’s over. It’s all left to the father to deal with. The father looks up and calls out his wife’s name, suspicious of the dead silence. He gazes over at the lit-up hallway and receives n…
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It truly gives me great pleasure to be able to put a few words to paper to mark the re-issue of The Benson Murder Case, the first mystery novel by S.S. Van Dine, one of America‘s all-time greatest writers of detective fiction. His books may be largely forgotten today, almost a century from the first publication of this book, but undeservedly so. Van Dine should be mentioned in the same breath as other leading golden age authors, such as Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie. His Philo Vance books were phenomenally popular in their day. According to his biographer, John Loughery, in Alias S.S. Van Dine, “Throughout the late twenties, Willard Huntington Wright (S.S. Van Dine) h…
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When people describe me as a mystery writer, I’m a little taken aback. While I am of the firm belief that there is a mystery at the heart of all fiction—why else are we reading but to discover something new, about the world, others, ourselves?—I have never seen myself in that light. A traditional mystery implies a “who-dun-it,” and as far as “who-dun-its” go, I have always found the reveal of “who-dun-it” to be something of a letdown. I’m far more interested in the why-they-dun-it. I also don’t consider myself an author of crime fiction. Police procedurals and detective fiction don’t interest me much at all, and while a crime of some sort often plays a part in my novels…
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In Dan Chaon’s new dystopian thriller, Sleepwalk, his narrator/protagonist draws on a roster of similar but different names, reacting to the shifting existential requirements of his ever-precarious situation. There’s Will Bear, Billy Bayer, Barry Billingsly, and Liam Bahr among his dozen-odd aliases, and each serves a (usually devious) purpose. As Chaon’s spooky tale unfurls, we learn that many in his supporting cast have aliases, too. Their own survival would seem to depend on their ability to “be” someone else when necessary. Chaon is an ingenious writer, and his latest novel reminds me of the essential properties of a name––of our own names (sometimes a pseudonym itse…
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Is there that big a difference between falling in love and solving a murder? Um, yes, there is, especially when writing about love and murder. For me, it’s not just about content but about the craft and process of writing in those separate genres. I find it fascinating that although I’ve been writing for over twenty years, my beginning process for writing cozy mysteries is vastly different than it is for writing in the romance genre. I started writing romances because I love to read them. It’s not a billion dollar industry for nothing! Comprised of formulaic and original plots, as well as a guaranteed happily ever after (HEA,) the genre breeds voracious readers who wa…
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The CrimeReads editors select the season’s best debut novels. * Latoya Watkins, Perish (Tiny Reparations) In this devastating debut, generational trauma has riven a Black Texas family, but the death of their matriarch may give the family a final chance to tell unvarnished truths to each other and maybe, finally, heal. Latoya Watkins’ impassioned prose brings to life her complex characters and their heavy internal struggles, as well as the flawed, but overwhelming, love they feel for one another. –MO Rasheed Newson, My Government Means to Kill Me (Flatiron) You don’t want to miss My Government Means to Kill Me, the debut novel from Rasheed Newson, producer and w…
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Hello to my fellow empaths (a term defined by researchers as ‘the opposite of psychopaths’). As a group, we’re benefited and handicapped by our sensitivity to other people’s feelings. It’s what keeps us from torturing and killing humans and other animals—it’s also what might stop us from becoming CEOs, surgeons, and military generals, professions that require their practitioners to do things like sabotage colleagues, cut open brains with steady hands, and easily weigh the cost-benefit analysis of murdering x-number of civilians to wipe out one prolific terrorist cell. As Paul Frick, a psychologist at Louisiana State University, puts it, “They don’t care if someone is mad …
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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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The frontier of the American West has dominated the cultural consciousness on this continent for centuries, dating back to the earliest era of colonial settlement during which the threshold between the familiar and the wild was drawn along what would now be considered the east coast. As colonial expansion has moved ever westward, exploring and transforming these territories has become emblematic of something indelible in the American experience—confronting the unknown, the dangerous, and the terrifying. The earliest figures to participate in this effort did so during a time of ubiquitous religious observance. Their most fundamental beliefs were challenged by the unpredic…
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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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I haven’t yet been arrested doing research for a book. I don’t think that yet is going to last much longer, though, because this last book put me in such danger I don’t think I’ll get so lucky next time. When I tell this to other writers, they usually think I’m referring to unsavory google searches like how long does it take to get choked to death and how to remove blood from concrete walls. But truly, searches like these are just everyday job hazards for a lot of writers, just fact checking we fire off into the internet hoping the NSA agent assigned to surveil us is also reading along in our super secret manuscript, nodding at our thoroughness. No, what I’m actually wor…
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It had seemed like such a splendid idea: develop a half-hour police-procedural series for American television based on The Naked City, a 1948 film noir shot entirely in the buildings and on the summer-seared streets of New York City. The original feature starred Irish actor Barry Fitzgerald as a philosophical police homicide detective with more than a modicum of leprechaun in his soul, who investigates the bathtub slaying of a blonde model. He’s helped in this undertaking by a callow subordinate (played by Don Taylor), but hindered by a sponging hunk (Howard Duff), whose adherence to the truth is negligible, at best. The motion picture ranked among that year’s top-50 box-…
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I saw a ghost show before I knew what one was. At some point when I was still a kid, I was taken to a local drive-in movie theater and saw some 1960s-era horror movie in re-release. At some point during the movie, monsters – local teenagers in cheap rubber masks – ran among the parked cars. I was alarmed. And while the presence of pimply-faced teens wearing Topstone masks was enough to scare me at that tender age, I wish I’d realized that what I was actually seeing was one of the last manifestations, at least around these parts, of the ghost show, or spook show. The real ghost shows, dating back to the early days of the 20th century and usually held in hard-top, or i…
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There’s this colorful word my dad taught me growing up, common across many South Asian languages. Chalak. It’s not exactly a compliment. If someone calls you chalak, then they think you are cunning, clever, and maybe even devious. It means you use your understanding of people or situations for personal gain. I only have a rudimentary knowledge of my mother tongues, yet this particular word has always stayed with me–perhaps because what it represented stood in stark contrast to the ‘good Indian girl’ stereotypes and expectations I grew up around. And similarly to words like ‘bossy’, ‘aggressive’, and ‘emotional’, chalak can be used as a catch-all to demonize women who def…
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