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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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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One of my favourite scary movies is The Changeling. George C. Scott stars as a famous composer who relocates from New York to a small town after his wife and daughter die in a tragic car accident. Desperate to remove anything from his life that reminds him of his family, he rents a turn-of-the-century Victorian manor. The move is eventless, until he comes across his daughter’s favorite ball; it’s blue and red with a white strip down the middle. He hides it away in a desk and slams the drawer, crippled with grief as he cries himself to sleep. Odd sounds begin that night. At first, he thinks it’s only air in the pipes, but then other strange occurrences continue in the foll…
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Below are six YA novels that I adore for their complexity, their willingness to grapple with larger social and moral questions, and their resistance to easy answers. Part of adolescence isn’t only coming to understand one’s own self and place in the world; it’s about questioning why the world is the way it is in the first place. No wonder adults find literature and teens so terrifying. They ask the questions we don’t always have the answers to and force the issues we’ve never been prepared to answer for. Courtney Summers, The Project A girl grieving for her shattered family. A father grieving for his lost son. Their pain, their suffering, as well as her own, lead you…
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I recently chaired a panel in which several American crime writers discussed their most memorable discoveries in terms of noir television and film during the various COVID lockdowns we have all endured. As the moderator I did not get any time to discuss my own discovery, but if I had it would have been the Australian/American television production, Mr Inbetween. Premiering on the American FX Network in September 2018, Mr Inbetween has its US fans, but remains largely unknown. For that matter, it is also criminally unseen in Australia, where it was filmed. Mr Inbetween tells the story of Ray Shoesmith (played by the show’s creator and writer, Scott Ryan), a Sydney assassi…
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Is someone a liar if they tell you something that isn’t true—but they think it’s true? Is a person guilty of misleading you even if the false information they’ve given is a sincere effort to convey something to the best of their understanding? These are the sorts of questions I think of every time I hear the term “unreliable narrator.” In what ways are they unreliable, and what does it mean that we call them that? Is a confused person unreliable? An inebriated person? A traumatized person? Is a character unreliable because they’re manipulating other characters? Or because they’re manipulating you, the reader? Perhaps the term was originally reserved for characters who w…
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The whole doctor-patient confidentiality except in the case of crimes committed and threatened makes mobsters going to therapy a difficult needle to thread. If the point of therapy is to open up without reservations, having to sidestep the emotional fallout of murdering someone makes the whole approach less than ideal. Yet, that very concept of mobsters seeking psychological treatment turns out to be the foundation of not one but two major releases from 1999: the pilot and first season of the television show The Sopranos and the movie Analyze This. The Sopranos aired its pilot on HBO on January 10, while Analyze This debuted in theaters later that year on March 5. Both p…
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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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Richard O’Rawe debuted last year with the breakneck noir Northern Heist, based on an infamous and still-unsolved bank robbery, and informed by the author’s own experiences as a former operative in the IRA. Now he’s back with a second novel to feature James ‘Ructions’ O’Hare, the Provo-turned-independent-operative who graced the pages of Northern Heist with foul-mouthed eloquence. In Goering’s Gold, Richard O’Rawe took on a different unsolved mystery: the disappearance of a vast Nazi hoard of pilfered treasures. O’Rawe was kind enough to answer a few questions about craft, genre, dialogue, and Irish history. Molly Odintz: Your last book was inspired partially by your own …
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When I fell in love with crime fiction, one of the first things I noticed was how crime writers love to evoke an exceptionally rich sense of place. Raymond Chandler’s mean-streeted LA. John D. MacDonald’s cynically despoiled Florida. James Lee Burke’s lush, lyrical, fallen Louisiana. The heroes’ worldviews in these books were so tightly wrapped up in their environments, it was impossible to imagine them being transplanted anywhere else. What really got my attention, though, were certain stories in which very specific environments became something more—not simply expressions of their hero’s persona, but full-throated characters in their own right. Du Maurier’s malevolent…
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A couple of years ago I started keeping track of the movies I watched and the books I read in a little notebook, adding a sentence or two of analysis to each one. The decision was spurned, I hate to admit it, by seeing someone else do it on social media. I liked the idea of being a little more thoughtful about the art I consumed, a little more active in my reading/viewing. I also was, somewhat ironically, starting to wean myself off of social media, and no longer being reliant on Goodreads to track my reading (and therefore no longer having the temptation to hate-read one star reviews of my books) felt like a bonus. Little did I know that a pandemic was going to send us…
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When I set out to write my young adult novel Never Coming Home, my number one goal was to create a killer mystery. My number two was to write a cast of characters that the reader just couldn’t wait to see die. Never Coming Home is a contemporary, social media-based retelling of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the story of 10 strangers who are all invited to a mysterious island under sketchy circumstances. Once they arrive, it isn’t too long before they’re hit with the big M: murder. While Queen Christie’s masterful storytelling and deft deployment of the red herring definitely drew me to the idea of reimagining this story, what really hooked me was that many …
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The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 is thought to have killed over 50 million people worldwide. Yet, while the First World War provides the background for countless novels, the pandemic features in very few contemporary fictional accounts. Even modern writers tend to skate over this devastating episode. In Downton Abbey, Spanish Flu seems to last the length of a dinner party, although someone does die (after having been pronounced perfectly healthy by Dr Clarkson, the world’s worst doctor). I thought about this when planning my fourteenth Ruth Galloway novel. The previous book, The Night Hawks, ended in December 2019 so I knew that in the next instalment I had to face the p…
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Chris Cander found national success writing character-driven novels whose struggles play out in remote and evocative locales. The USA Today-bestseller has transported readers to such places as West Virginia, Chicago, Soviet Russia, and the California desert. But for her fourth novel, A Gracious Neighbor, Cander turned her novelistic gaze on her own neighborhood: West University, an affluent tiny city within the sprawling expanse of Houston Texas, home to business executives, doctors from the nearby medical center, and professors from Rice University—the U in the titular WEST U. At home during the pandemic, Cander found inspiration in her surroundings, transposing the 1917…
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Ah, series. Most readers love them, and most writers love to write them. We get to know the imaginary world we’ve created, and it is fun and rewarding to slip back into that headspace and get caught up on what our protagonist has going on. I don’t believe most authors set out to write a series that lengthens from three or four to eight or more. We start out with what we know, then readers demand more so we happily oblige. Of course, we all hope the work we’ve put into planning out that series will be rewarded with avid readers, but what elements cause readers to care enough to keep reading? I decided to take a look at my favorites and why I love them. The Detective…
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If there’s anything this Florida girl loves more than the silken sands of Siesta Key Beach, it’s the changing of the seasons—more specifically, the changing of the leaves. For better or worse, my knowledge of the photosynthesis-induced light show our arboreal friends treat us to every autumn extends no further than what I learned in elementary school (something about the sun…becoming food?), but what I can tell you is a close second to my excitement over the ~foliage~ is the brand-new crop (see what I did there?) of true-crime podcasts coming our way this fall. Grab your PSL and your coziest #fallfeels sweater and settle in for some downright chilling ear treats. Fed …
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In 1927 Alice Dorothy Ormond Campbell—a thirty-nine-year-old native of Atlanta, Georgia who for the last fifteen years had lived successively in New York, Paris and London, never once returning to the so-called Empire City of the South—published her first novel, an unstoppable crime thriller called Juggernaut, selling the serialization rights to the Chicago Tribune for $4000 ($60,000 today), a tremendous sum for a brand new author. On its publication in January 1928, both the book and its author caught the keen eye of Bessie S. Stafford, society page editor of the Atlanta Constitution, a genteel southern lady who seemingly, like the Bourbons of France, had forgotten nothi…
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We were half-way through the day shift when we got word that a woman in preterm labor was being admitted through the Emergency Room. Though cryptic, the presenting information on the case seemed routine enough to me. Thirty-four, third trimester, first baby. But what did I know? At nineteen, as a nursing student in my Maternal Child Health rotation, it was my job to shadow a nurse and doctor team and do as I was told. Things escalated quickly. The chart that had been hastily put together with her name running down the spine was confiscated. The protected one that replaced it, that only our small team had access to now, said Doe or Jones or Smith. I can’t remember which f…
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Sometimes you need a break. After writing the fifth Sam Capra novel—a series about a young single father and espionage operative who had his share of personal life crises over the course of the books—I was ready for a break. My next four novels were all standalone psychological thrillers, centered on suburban families dealing with dark, deep secrets that upended their perfect, Facebook-curated lives. And those novels didn’t touch on spies or intel or the high-octane action that marked the Sam Capra books. I kept wanting to go back to writing the next Sam but no idea seemed right for his world. And my publisher liked me writing standalones to help pull in new readers. So…
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It feels nearly impossible to effectively eulogize Jean-Luc Godard, the giant of French cinema whose films and writings helped establish the 1960s movement known as the French New Wave and changed the course of cinema forever—and who, after doing that, continued toying with form, style, text, and technology in countless film projects for the remainder of his life. He died on September 13th, 2022, at the age of ninety-one. I think it’s fair to say that Lit Hub is extremely indebted to Godard; so must be any institution which is enthusiastically preoccupied with stories that explore and experiment with narrative, form, timelines, and genre, as well as stories that interrog…
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No, I don’t mean The Art of War by Sun Tzu, the Chinese military strategist who wrote his foundational text on military strategy in the 5th Century BCE. What I want to discuss is how films set in wartime have influenced my writing—how the visualization of war and its attendant violence onscreen has made its way onto the written page. I’m eighteen books into the Billy Boyle World War II mystery series, which means my protagonist has seen a lot of fighting and reacted emotionally to what he’s endured, and inflicted. To write this article, I considered which films over the years informed my vision of what the experience of combat in the Second World War must have been like.…
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Almost a century ago, as he prepared to cover a dramatic double murder trial for the New York Daily Mirror, name-brand newsman Damon Runyon compared the attendant hype to that surrounding a big boxing match or a World Series game. “It wasn’t merely a metaphor,” Joe Pompeo writes in Blood & Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime (William Morrow). “A telegraph switchboard used two months earlier during the world heavyweight title fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney had been installed in the courthouse basement, with a staff of twenty-eight operators at the ready.” It was 1926, and more than four years had passed since the b…
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While I’m an unabashed fan of straight-up mysteries—see: the high stack of Simenon in my house, along with the works of Elizabeth Hand, P.D. James, John le Carre, and Stieg Larsson; more than one paperback picked up in an airport bookstore; and roughly ten million police procedurals and Nordic noirs in my streaming history—my deepest love is for mysteries and thrillers that remain mysterious even after the final scene. Sometimes you don’t know who did it, or even what was done; sometimes you know who did it, but will never quite be able to pass judgment on why and what the consequences were; sometimes you, reader, feel implicated as well. The gray areas call to me to come…
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Turpentine workers’ cabins. Valdosta, Georgia. 1937. Dorothea Lange. Library of Congress. The heart of my horror novel, The Hollow Kind, is the story of northern-born journeyman August Redfern, who marries into one thousand acres of longleaf pine forest. The year is 1917, the setting southeastern Georgia. Here, Redfern hopes to build a vast turpentine estate, but soon he discovers that the land he’s been gifted comes with a terrible price. His father-in-law, a timber baron who stole the land from poor farmers, has made a pact with a monster, and now the evil that dwells among the pines demands new tribute. Heedless of the past, Redfern plunges ahead with his venture, and …
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Secrets long buried, old flames rekindled, grudges resurfacing—there’s endless dramatic potential in a homecoming. Especially when murder is involved. There’s something elemental in the way that place and memory become intertwined. Anyone who has returned to their family home and discovered themselves reverting to old habits and falling into old arguments can attest to the power our physical context has to shape our behavior. Returning to the coffee shop around the corner of your old apartment brings back the memory of old friendships, break-ups, the ache in your feet of a long shift at a terrible job. The ghosts of sensation and emotion stir—there’s a reason we call our…
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