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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I am not known as a young adult author, but I have published two novels about an adolescent character. Travis Hollister is, in the first book, 12 years old, and in the second, nineteen. The novels, Sweet Dream Baby and Night Letter, are really one story, or the stories of two years in Travis’s life, with a gap of six years separating them. My subject here is voice, which is distinct, I believe from style. Style is a grammarian’s notion. Voice is a writer’s concern. Voice is the sound of a human being speaking, and it’s a performance that can include, I believe, the sound of a character’s thoughts. In my teaching, I have used the term, “voicey,” to describe novels, us…
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In the early twenty-tens, I read Albert Camus’ The Plague. Due to its allegorical treatment of the French Resistance to Nazi occupation during WWII, it reminded me of the current gentrification resistance movements popping up all over Los Angeles. At the time, I lived in South Central, although urban planners and city leaders attempted to rebrand it as South Los Angeles in order to liberate it from the negative stigma it developed in the 80s and 90s in relation to: the crack epidemic, gangster rap, street gangs, graffiti, and social-realist urban films. But of course, a simple name change cannot delete a region’s past. Yet, in a city like Los Angeles, where culture is dri…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Helen Cooper, The Other Guest (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) “Difficult-to-put down thriller… Brilliantly characterized, boldly plotted, and boasting an ending that readers will think they have figured out only to have everything turned around. The perfect vacation thriller.” –Booklist, starred review Dwyer Murphy, An Honest Living (Viking) “Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite . . . For anyone who wants a portrait of this New York, few recent books have conjured it so vividly.” –The New York Times Book Review Matt Query and Harrison Query, Old Count…
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This month is chock full of it—whatever you want, it’s here. There are elaborate, several day long weddings. There are tense family reunions in gloomy mansions where the tide cuts off access to the estate for hours. There’s a Groundhog Day–Memento-time twister. There’s a taut thriller by a real up-and-comer named Joyce Carol Oates. And finally, there’s Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, fictionalized. Amanda Jayatissa, You’re Invited (Berkley) My Sweet Girl was a smart debut, and Jayatissa has raised the stakes with her second novel. Amaya is surprised to be invited to her former best friend’s wedding in Sri Lanka, and even more surprised to find out the groom is her …
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A Killing in Costumes, my debut cozy mystery, is set in the world of Hollywood memorabilia collecting, so I decided to interview a top dealer—because I didn’t want the research for the book to consist exclusively of a debut novelist browsing Wikipedia to procrastinate. I asked a few people in the antiques world who I should talk to, and everyone mentioned the same name: Joseph Maddalena, founder of Profiles in History, where he spent thirty-five years building the largest Hollywood memorabilia auction house in the world before becoming executive vice president at Heritage Auctions. When we spoke, the first thing he told me was that he had thoughts about the plot. “It’…
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A look at the week’s best new releases. * Yasmin Angoe, They Come At Knight (Thomas and Mercer) “A second round of action-packed, high-casualty intrigue for professional assassin Nena Knight. A lethal tale of an all-but-superhero whose author promises that ‘in this story, there are no heroes.’” –Kirkus Reviews Rijula Das, Small Deaths (Amazon Crossing) “[Rijula] Das’s searing debut centers on the plight of sex workers in contemporary Calcutta, India…This devastating novel is in turn touching and painful to read. Das, a Bengali-to-English translator, is definitely a writer to watch.” –Publishers Weekly Erica Blaque, Among Wolves (Polis) “Readers will f…
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I’m sitting in a room that has an abundance of plastic flowers. There are two mugs of tea on the glass-topped, round dining table, and the plastic wrap around its wrought iron frame is still unpeeled. I’m in Priyanka’s apartment––one she shares with two other girls. They are escorts, who, not too long ago, worked in a brothel in Shonagacchi, Kolkata’s largest red-light district and purportedly Asia’s too. I’m calling her Priyanka because Priyanka Chopra is her favorite actress. There is a large cut-out of the actress, from her early, comparatively less glamorous days, pasted to the wall next to the door. When you enter this apartment, Chopra, in a magenta saree, welcomes …
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Mysteries and detective fiction are usually thought of as the inventions of Edgar Allan Poe, but the truth is that they have both been popular in China for over a thousand years. The Chinese have no clear place or person of origin for mysteries and detective fiction, the way the West has Poe, but what the Chinese do have are centuries’ more mysteries and detective stories than the West does. The first Chinese proto-mysteries—that is, mysteries who some but not all of the elements of modern mystery fiction—were the “gong’an” (“court case”) stories. Told in the form of oral performances and puppetry shows, the gong’an began appearing during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1…
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There were signs of life back on the Brighton Beach boardwalk. Brighton Beach Avenue was entirely quiet, but on the boardwalk, husbands and wives strolled to-and-fro. They wore down coats from the bargain basement shops on Brighton Beach Avenue. They delighted in the stillness of the night—engaging in a European mode of relaxation called la dolce far niente—sweet inertia. To my anxious Egyptian eyes, they looked like zombies. They say that the boardwalk at Brighton Beach looks like St. Petersburg. Some of the night people of the boardwalk looked like their parents had, strolling in their sensible, Soviet, monochromatic woollens along the frigid Baltic. I was hurriedly …
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This is normally the column where I recommend some international thrillers to get you through the weekend, but since we have an extra long holiday weekend coming up in the States, I thought I’d do something special, focusing on adaptations of le Carré novels, something of a passion of mine. In particular I want to hone in on a few of the lesser heralded selections. Really, this was just an excuse to recommend The Russia House: “Spying is waiting. Spying is worrying. Spying is being yourself but more so.” If you love peace…and Sean Connery’s dissolute charms… The Russia House (1990, dir. Fred Schepisi) I’ve been somewhat insistently telling people this is the most und…
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Summer is coming, and mystery and thriller lovers are looking for that perfect beachy read to savor with an umbrella drink in hand. How about a story set in paradise? Suspense novelists have long been attracted to idyllic settings. What is it about the concept of paradise that inspires dark fiction? Is it the vicarious joy of writing about white sand beaches and shimmering blue water? Is it the irresistible lure of an escape from reality? Or maybe we writers like the diabolical appeal of inflicting mayhem on a cast of unsuspecting tourists. To me, the most appealing aspect of a writing a suspense novel set in paradise is the challenge of creating a story world where not…
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In my new Maggie D’arcy mystery, The Drowning Sea, Maggie, a former homicide detective, is trying to relax and take a vacation. She’s out of a job and spending the entire summer on a gorgeous and remote West Cork peninsula, where she and her boyfriend and their children plan to get to know each other and decide if Maggie and her daughter should move to Ireland in the fall. When a body washes up at the base of the cliffs, she’s thrust back into her old line of work. I’ve always loved the trope of the professional detective who goes on vacation, but is pressed into service when the discovery of a body interrupts the leisurely rhythms of a recreational trip or restorative h…
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Let’s get something out of the way: what exactly do we mean by the term “locked-room mystery”? It’s a phrase I’ve seen used incorrectly in the past to refer to works in the similar but distinct “closed circle mystery” subgenre. What sets locked-room mysteries apart from the rest is an element of impossibility. As a matter of fact, I tend to use the term synonymously with “impossible crime,” meaning a story in which a crime (usually murder) is committed under seemingly impossible circumstances. Often these stories have an ambiance of the eerie and macabre, with apparently supernatural occurrences and foreboding atmosphere. However (and this is crucial) the whole thing is u…
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Seeing Nope before all the knowing hype is the closest thing I will probably ever experience to seeing Jaws in theaters in the summer of 1975. Of all the films I’ve been fortunate to critique, few have been as difficult to review as Jordan Peele’s new movie—not because I don’t have much to say about it, but because I’m very afraid of saying too much. Nope’s clever advertising campaign has shrouded much of the film’s narrative and themes (which for Peele are always the same thing anyway) and my anxiety about diving in too deeply is not a reflection that the film is only interesting for the revelation of its heavily-guarded happenings, as much as an acknowledgement that th…
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Over the years the idea of “tropes” has gotten a bit of a bad reputation. However, if there’s one hill that I’d die on, it’s that tropes are beloved and used for a reason. The right trope will even have me picking up a book I otherwise know almost nothing about. I love forced proximity, enemies-to-lovers, forbidden romance . . . But there’s one trope in particular that takes the cake for me: non-human love interests. If you’re anything like me, I hope that you’ll enjoy this list of a few books with this trope that I’ve read and recently enjoyed! With Fire In Their Blood by Kat Delacorte Witches, mafia wars, and steamy love squares oh my! With Fire in Their Blood is a …
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On January 6th, 1972, inside a small Staten Island diner, a former physician from Willowbrook State School met secretly with a reporter. After describing the horrible conditions he had been fired for trying to improve at the state-run institution, he handed the reporter a key to one of the buildings. That reporter was Geraldo Rivera. With that clandestine key, he would lead a film crew unannounced into Building #6 at Willowbrook, where they would capture the appalling abuses, filth, and overcrowding inflicted upon its residents. This year, 2022, marks the 50th anniversary of when Rivera’s television exposé shocked the nation with that horrifying, raw footage. It sparked …
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The twist has become the cornerstone of the psychological thriller, aiming to keep readers on the edge of their seats, turning the pages furiously as the story turns and writhes, and reveals come thick and fast. My debut novel, HER PERFECT TWIN, is—perhaps unsurprisingly —about identical twins; a trope that has been used extensively in thrillers. So, I knew I needed to break the mold and deliver a series of twists that would take the reader on a deliciously dark journey they weren’t initially expecting. To achieve this, I utilized an arsenal of tools (including a trusty whiteboard and stack of post-it notes) to assist in the meticulous plotting required. But I also took …
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Political intrigue, death on the beach, murder most poison… such is stuff that books and movies and TV shows are made from. Ripped straight from the headlines. It makes sense, then, that while I was plotting No Way Home, my young adult thriller, in which an American exchange student faces a life-or-death situation in Rome, I considered going that route. In the end, I didn’t (or sort of didn’t), but it got me to thinking. When we travel, we generally sightsee in typical travel-guide mode, taking in hotspots at face value. Yet, do a deeper dive into the true-crime histories of so many sites, and watch how it sheds additional dimensions to any experience. Here’s a peek at…
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You’ll notice something unusual in the titles below—while in previous years, we’ve dedicated much of our preview space to crossovers, especially in the realm of horror and science fiction, almost all of the picks for this year’s big most anticipated list are strictly crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Why? Because there are so many darn good ones out this year! There’s, like, a book from every big name in the genre coming out this year, plus a wonderful new crop of debut voices and plenty of up-and-coming writers with new releases. But never fear, we’ll still be running our spinoff previews for YA, horror, historical, and speculative, you just won’t see quite as much…
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In 2004, following allegations of widespread inter-governmental spying at the United Nations headquarters in New York, then Spanish ambassador to the U.N., Inocencio F. Arias, told the Washington Post: “In my opinion everybody spies on everybody, and when there’s a crisis, big countries spy a lot.” Despite the delicious irony of Señor Arias’ first name, he was right to point out that no government is innocent of espionage; they’re all doing it, and they’re all denying it. To us regular citizens, there’s an inherent absurdity here: why go through the rigmarole of denying you’re doing something that everyone knows everyone’s doing? As I write, NORAD has spotted the third—…
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The mix of political maneuvering, terrorism, murder and the volatile dynamics of marriage makes for great thrillers. The TV series “House of Cards” very well might have perfected this recipe. Now comes “The Diplomat,” which at times plays like “Scenes From a Marriage” mixed with “Jack Ryan.” The eight-episode Netflix series, which debuted April 20 and hopefully will see a second season because of how effective it is and also because it ends with a cliffhanger, is the latest in a bunch of new political thrillers like “The Night Agent” that plays to the strengths of the genre while subverting it, not unlike the 2022 series “The Old Man.” Instead of the patented globe-hopp…
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One joy of being an Oregonian is the number of writers the state can claim. From Raymond Carver to Beverley Cleary, not to mention Ken Kesey, Brian Doyle, and Ursula Le Guin, we have an almost embarrassment of literary riches. For crime fiction fans, here are some of the Oregon classics you should check out: Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion is frequently overshadowed by One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, but avid crime readers should check the book for its creepy, heavy ambiance. The novel features the Stamper Family, contract loggers with a “never give an inch” motto. The story explores the dynamics of the Stamper family compared to each other and the town, and it’s …
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In honor of Asian-American and Pacific Islander heritage month, we’re highlighting the incredible array of crime books and thrillers by Asian-American authors publishing in 2022, so you can keep reading these stories all year long. JANUARY-APRIL Mia P. Manansala, Homicide and Halo-Halo (Berkley) “While the follow-up to Arsenic and Adobo is a cozy mystery, it’s darker, dealing with PTSD, predatory behavior, dismissive attitudes toward mental health, and other issues. Filipino American food and culture, as well as family and community, remain essential elements in the story.”—Library Journal, starred review Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers (William Morrow) “The Ca…
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On January 6, 2002, Christa Worthington was found raped, beaten, and stabbed to death in her Cape Cod home. Her two-year-old daughter, Ava, who was physically unharmed, clung to Worthington’s body; the toddler’s mother had been dead for up to 36 hours. The details found in the most basic description of the crime are horrifying on their own and needed no sensationalization, but that didn’t stop the media—and it didn’t take long for Worthington to become the antagonist in her own murder. In the months leading up to September 11, headlines were dominated by another high profile case with some parallels to Worthington’s: the disappearance of Chandra Levy, a 24-year-old inter…
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In the Robert Altman film, The Player, Tim Robbins stars as Griffin Mill, a big-time Hollywood producer who spends his days listening to pitches from aspiring movie directors and screenplay writers. Mill’s claim to fame? Only 12 out of every 50,000 pitches he hears ever get the studio nod. Why? Because in Hollywood, there are no tales that haven’t previously been told. So the enterprising supplicants package their two-minute story summaries by stringing movie tropes together like rosary beads. A comedic romp about a clueless American who travels to Africa and becomes worshiped as a god by a pagan tribe is pitched as a hybrid of Cactus Flower and Out of Africa. Mill simpli…
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