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 never thought I’d watch a show like Evil, by which I mean I never thought I’d watch a show in which evilness was the central theme, especially in a Biblical sense. In Evil, a Catholic seminarian, a psychologist, and an environmental researcher investigate numerous mysterious events, attempting to conclude on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church if such incidents have been caused by true supernatural (often demonic) forces or have scientific explanations. Possessions and exorcisms terrify me. I am not a religious person, or an overly superstitious one, but I still don’t mess with content that includes those things. No, thank you. I keep my head down. I avert my eyes. And…
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A look at the week’s best new releases. * Alice Feeney, Daisy Darker (Flatiron) “A dark, twisty tale about a dysfunctional family…Feeney’s nod to Agatha Christie’s classic mystery And Then There Were None adds a delightful twist to this quirky thriller. Aficionados of locked-room stories and family dramas (plus Feeney’s large fan base) will enjoy this highly recommended title.” –Library Journal Meg Elison, Number One Fan (MIRA) “A tense, creepy, and deeply spooky thriller that locks you down and wrings you out in the best way possible. I had other things to do today, but I couldn’t put this down—so those things didn’t get done.” –Cherie Priest Jason Mosb…
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When one of my writing pals sent me a link to a vintage Key West Woman’s Club cookbook published in the 1940’s, the plot for my 12th Key West mystery, A DISH TO DIE FOR, finally took off. First, a little background. Food critic Hayley Snow and her dog find a body on the beach about ten miles north of Key West. It’s a shock of course, and she’s still reeling from the emotional fallout of her discovery when she remembers she’s agreed to help sort donated cookbooks for the Friends of the Key West Library. When I reached this point in the novel, I’d been talking with my writing friends about struggling with the plot. I loved the opening scenes, but how did this man’s body e…
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Many of us honing the craft of mystery, crime, and thriller writing sat initially, and still do, at the alter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His Sherlock Holmes short stories and novellas are indelibly etched on our minds. How joyous when the two-volume annotated Sherlock Holmes reappeared after being out of print for years; for a time it was available only in rare and used book stores, when one was lucky enough to find it. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s best-known novella, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), sets the stage for mystery, crime, and thriller writers wanting to pose the following question in our efforts: Man or Beast? Placed in the gloom of the English moor, The H…
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They say you never forget your first true love. Mystery, specifically cozy mysteries, were my first love. I remember reading my first Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It blew my mind. When I read, And Then There Were None, I was a goner. Over the years, I wasn’t always faithful to my chosen genre. I went through phases where I strayed and read romance, fantasy, and science fiction, but even the Queen of Crime herself wrote romance novels under the name, Mary Westmacott. Regardless of what other genres I read, I always returned to mysteries. When I decided I wanted to toss my hat into the ring and write books, I knew it would have to be a mystery. But the worl…
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The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them. The above quote comes near the end of Flannery O’Connor’s shockingly brutal short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” That story, from the early 1950s, defines the modern Southern Gothic sensibility in American fiction. A normal, everyday family (a father, a mother, three children and a grandmother) becomes involved in blood-drenched horror when they encounter a stone-cold killer on a vacation trip. Inspired by Poe’s equal bloodthirstiness, O’Connor (who attended Catholic mass regularly)…
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It was a regular day in September. Which is to say it was a regular day within the first few months of the pandemic. I’d been going through a particularly long stretch of no’s. Part of being a TV creator and screenwriter is hearing no. You suffer through hundreds of no’s and you make a living from the occasional yes. At this particular moment in 2020, the no’s were abundant, and not limited to the rejection of screenplays. No, you shouldn’t leave your apartment. No, we don’t know when there will be a vaccine. No, we don’t know where Covid came from. But on this September morning, instead of the usual no’s, I started getting emails with people interested in making a TV sho…
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To be entirely honest and upfront, I’m not sure there’s a single crime show premiering in September that’s really worth getting too excited about. The slate is just too crowded with the new fantasy juggernauts (House of Dragons and Lord of the Rings) and the perennial onslaught of network procedurals back on the air after summer breaks (Law & Order, FBI, Chicago, CSI, etc, ad infinitum…). That said, there are some lower-profile projects coming up, and one of them may just turn out to be a new favorite, who knows? Fakes (Netflix / Premieres September 2) It’s hard to pin down the exact tone on Fakes—is it more Superbad, Claws, Brick? what are we talking here?—but t…
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Books are a bit like children for authors, we’re not really allowed to have favourites, but Daisy Darker is mine. It is a dark and twisty tale set on a tiny tidal island just off the Cornish coast. The Darker family haven’t all been in the same place at the same time for years, but they have come together one last time to celebrate Nana’s 80th birthday. When the tide comes in, they’ll be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours. When the tide goes back out things will never be the same again, because one of them is a killer. I often think of Daisy Darker as my Agatha Christie book. It’s my own little tribute to one of my favourite authors, and my take on the l…
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“Brynn!” someone calls, and I turn to see Mason Rafferty standing in the second row of the auditorium seating with his hand in the air. Mason is a head taller than most of our classmates—unreasonably tall, he used to say—with longish dark curls and a gap-toothed smile. He cups his hands around his mouth to amplify his voice above the buzzing crowd and adds, “We saved you a spot.” I catch sight of Nadia beside him and push my way toward them, happy to feel included. “Is there space for Ellie too?” I ask when we reach the row. “Of course,” Mason says, plucking a coat off a couple of empty chairs. “Hello, Eleanor. Nice to see you again. Still tearing up the flute?” “Hello…
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I’ve been writing all my life but for most of it, it was a secret indulgence, like swimming naked in the sea at night or eating chocolate belonging to my children. Most people who knew me didn’t realise that I wrote, and wouldn’t have been interested if they had. I wrote snippets here and there, short stories and even shorter things that didn’t even warrant the title ‘story’. Observations, notes for characters, there was no pattern to it and no discipline. I had five children and when they were little they slept in a crib on wheels. I could rock the crib with my foot while I lay on the bed propped on my elbow, scribbling in an exercise book. Guess what, those children gr…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Lawrence Osborne, On Java Road (Hogarth) “No one else writes ‘thrillers’ as languid as Lawrence Osborne’s. His novels tend to be leisurely, slow-burn mysteries that could be mistaken for impeccably observed travel memoirs … The tale begins to move more quickly … Human nature and atmosphere will always interest Osborne more than the traditional pyrotechnics of a thriller. The palpable sense of dread that hovers over Hong Kong and Osborne’s exploration of Adrian’s own moral conundrum is what kept me turning the pages … Osborne skillfully — and with exquisite prose — probes the nexus of commun…
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Karen Cleveland, a former CIA analyst turned thriller author, has written some of the most propulsive, tight-knit suspense and espionage fiction of the past decade, and her new one is just as much of a nailbiter as her previous novels. In The New Neighbor, a suburban cul-de-sac in which most of the families have ties to the CIA becomes the setting for a deadly cat-and-mouse game between a spy being forced to retire and her long-elusive prey. Karen Cleveland was kind enough to answer a few questions about the book and her career. The New Neighbor is now available from Ballantine. Molly Odintz: You’re a former CIA analyst—how does that influence your writing? Do you need t…
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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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It was certainly ironic, when I was writing the last chapters of Widowland, a dystopia set in 1953, to find a real-life dystopia engulfing the world. Yet Covid and lockdown and all that followed are perfect examples of how everyday life can be transformed in the blink of an eye. And indeed, how ordinary people can adapt to changes that they previously would have found insupportable. I’ve always been fascinated by dystopias and alternative histories. I’m tantalised by how a mere reshuffling of historical cards—a small, imaginative twitch on the tiller—can have catastrophic results. In Widowland Britain and Germany have not gone to war but instead formed an Alliance that h…
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It was the worst possible timing—or maybe the best. A major hurricane churning its way up the East Coast, unleashing chaos: traffic jams, stripped store shelves, canceled flights, subways and trains shut down. Overloaded 911. Distracted cops. Prime opportunity for crime—if Fiona could dodge floods and flying debris. Boz offering her a new life for two hours’ work made it worth the risk. Raindrops pattered the windshield of the junky Toyota SUV. The rainbands arriving faster now, only twenty minutes apart, as the hurricane’s fingers scratched New Jersey and the southern edge of New York. On the radio, a breathless announcer warned the storm was the biggest in decades, al…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Lawrence Osborne, On Java Road (Hogarth) “No one else writes ‘thrillers’ as languid as Lawrence Osborne’s. His novels tend to be leisurely, slow-burn mysteries that could be mistaken for impeccably observed travel memoirs … The tale begins to move more quickly … Human nature and atmosphere will always interest Osborne more than the traditional pyrotechnics of a thriller. The palpable sense of dread that hovers over Hong Kong and Osborne’s exploration of Adrian’s own moral conundrum is what kept me turning the pages … Osborne skillfully — and with exquisite prose — probes the nexus of commun…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Lawrence Osborne, On Java Road (Hogarth) “No one else writes ‘thrillers’ as languid as Lawrence Osborne’s. His novels tend to be leisurely, slow-burn mysteries that could be mistaken for impeccably observed travel memoirs … The tale begins to move more quickly … Human nature and atmosphere will always interest Osborne more than the traditional pyrotechnics of a thriller. The palpable sense of dread that hovers over Hong Kong and Osborne’s exploration of Adrian’s own moral conundrum is what kept me turning the pages … Osborne skillfully — and with exquisite prose — probes the nexus of commun…
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There is possibly no more enjoyable archetype in crime film than the con artist. Probably because it’s a fascinating profession. The con artist isn’t exactly a thief… he (or she) is more manipulative than that. A thief takes your money, but a con artist convinces you to give them your money. And that’s a big difference. Here at CrimeReads, we often discuss the legendary pros of the great movie cons, and today, finally, we’re bringing that discussion to the site. What are the rules? Simple. To be on this list, a character has to be more of a swindler than an actual thief. We’re talking confidence men, frauds, tricksters, charlatans, impostors, swindlers, shady real estat…
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Someone who read an early draft of my novel The Marsh Queen wrote me to say, “Loni is like a girl-detective grown up.” She meant it as a compliment, and I took it as one. There might be more than one girl-detective, but the one I understood her to mean, of course, was Nancy Drew, the protagonist who showed girls they could be detectives and probably anything else they wanted. Nancy was a regular person—a teenager with a reasonable dad, a sometimes clueless boyfriend, and incredible curiosity. I know, I know, “Carolyn Keene” might have been a room full of writers churning out stories for an enthusiastic, if gullible, easy-reader audience base. However, the basic template …
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The CrimeReads editors select their favorite books of the month. * Kelly J. Ford, Real Bad Things (Thomas & Mercer) Ford’s 2017 novel, Cottonmouths, remains a standout in the suspense category, and she’s back this year with a powerful story of a young woman who confesses to the murder of her stepfather. Rather than going to jail, she carries on with her life, moves away, starts over—because the police never actually found the body. Two decades later, the corpse turns up, and she’s forced to return to her hometown in Arkansas to reckon with her past and what’s left of her family. –DM Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety (Doubleday) What could be better than a ne…
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“Who was the greatest influence on your life?” “Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death. When Richard Widmark pushed that old lady in that wheelchair down that flight of stairs, it was like a personal breakthrough for me. It resolved a number of conflicts. I copied Richard Widmark’s sadistic laugh and used it for ten years. It got me through some tough emotional periods. Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death. Remember that creepy laugh? Hyena-faced. A ghoulish titter. It clarified a number of things in my life. Helped me become a person.” —White Noise, Don DeLillo Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947) is a roundly solid little crime thriller that earn…
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“Write what you know.” It’s the second-oldest piece of writing advice there is, right behind “show, don’t tell.” There’s a long rich history of authors weaving details of their personal lives into stories, to varying degrees and with varying regard for subtlety. There are full-on roman à clefs. Protagonists who just happen to be depressed, struggling authors. Stephen King books set in Maine. It’s an old piece of advice because it works. The more you pull from real firsthand experiences, the more your writing feels… real. Revelatory stuff, I know. But pulling from life can get complicated in a darker genre like crime. At least horror authors like King can mask their real…
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