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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Ah, gaslighting: when someone in your life tries to convince you that you’re going crazy, usually for their own gain. It’s normally a spouse or a partner acting as the villain, but that’s not always the case—and especially not for this list. I’ve always found gaslighting scary, but especially during the time when a woman could be put away for nothing more than being “hysterical,” which is why I chose it as a theme for my third Jane Wunderly novel, DANGER ON THE ATLANTIC. So let’s take a look at some classic gaslighting films. Gaslight, 1944 We couldn’t have this list without it! In fact, this is one of the places that the term originates from. (Remembering that this i…
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The first stories I can remember are crime stories. Episodes of Unsolved Mysteries, watched with my mother while my father was away on business trips. My mother, a nightshift ER nurse, had seen the worst of what can happen to a human body up close. This fact radiated outward in palpable waves of anxiety at all times, but especially when my father was away for the night. On those nights, we propped kitchen chairs under the handles of every door in our suburban home and picked up the phone at regular intervals to make sure the line hadn’t been cut, Golden State Killer-style. The sound of the synthed-out Unsolved Mysteries theme song excited me not so much because it indica…
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The CrimeReads editors best new books out in paperback published in January, February, and March, because usually we do this every month but in January and February we were busy, okay?!? Anyway, here is a very long list of books out in paperback to make up for missing the first two months of the year. Enjoy these newly affordable favorites! * Alma Katsu, Red Widow (Putnam) “Terrific…Fans of FX’s ‘The Americans’ will recognize a world where professionalism can fall prey to sexism, careerism, and garden-variety klutziness. Duncan’s job is a lot ‘like juggling knives,’ and Katsu makes us care that she doesn’t bobble.” –The Washington Post Hank Phillippi Ryan, Her P…
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Several years ago, I sat in a Toronto theater watching a production of Les Miserables. The two leads’ singing were technical masterpieces. They were perfect. Indulge me a moment, this is going to get weird—as I sat in that theatre listening to one of the secondary characters sing her solo, I had an inexplicable sensory moment that, to this day, I have not been able to explain. At one point during her solo, I stopped perceiving the music and lyrics. In those few precious moments, I didn’t hear anything, I felt everything. I didn’t even know that was a thing. On the way home, my husband confirmed his favorites were the two leads. As an audio guy, he understood their techni…
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What is happening in Ukraine is a timely reminder of the way the truth gets blurred in time of war. And so it was in Berlin in 1939. For many Germans, it seemed that the war, which had begun in September, was already over. Poland had been crushed. With that there was no longer any reason for France and Britain to fight since there was no longer any chance of saving Poland. It was merely a question of time before the enemy grasped the futility of prolonging the war, it was believed. It seemed that Hitler’s strategic vision had been proven once again. Others were not so sure. They understood the Fuhrer’s inexhaustible ambition and knew that Poland would never be enough. I c…
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A look at the best new crime nonfiction books released in February and March. Susan Jonusas, Hell’s Half-Acre (Viking) The many murders committed by some members of the Bender family in late 19th century Kansas remain one of the most confounding, unsettling cases in American history, in no small part because the killers seem to have escaped into oblivion, lost to history. In Hell’s Half-Acre, Susan Jonusas goes deep into the period’s archives to uncover previously unknown pieces of the story, focusing in large part on the Bender’s escape across the frontier, aided by communities of outlaws and tracked by incompetent detectives at the center of a sudden public maelstro…
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I’m never really sure whether I believe in ghosts. Despite growing up in some seriously spooky and remote old houses, I’ve never actually seen anything: no figures in white sheets, no women in suspiciously generic period costume. However, particularly when alone, I’ve felt—well, something. The sense of a presence. The idea that you’re not actually alone; that something unseen is with you. Other people, of course, might experience this as the presence of the divine. But for me, it was always something supernatural. My debut novel, All The White Spaces, deals with a fictional expedition to Antarctica in the years immediately after the First World War. I chose to write abou…
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When we think of Maine food, it’s lobster and blueberry pie that first spring to mind. As instantly-recognizable icons for the Pine Tree State, they’re right up there with lighthouses, Mount Katahdin, and the majestic moose. But you won’t see many of the other Maine food items on postcards; take mackerel, for instance. There’s an old downeast Maine recipe for the best way to cook mackerel: you clean it and put it in a brown paper bag, bake it at 400 degrees for an hour or so, and then you eat the paper bag. The oily, strongly-flavored fish is loaded with bones, too, and it spoils so fast once it’s out of the water that in the 18th century, mackerel was the only fish that…
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In order for totalitarianism to succeed, information needs to be controlled, both internally, and from the outside world. An alternate vision of reality has to be created, and repeated every day, every minute, in various forms, in order for the population to gradually accept their leader and the system under which they live. At the very least, the people have to believe that they cannot change the status quo, that they are helpless. A paralyzing apathy is created. The reign of Nicolae Ceausescu, the second and last communist leader of Romania, (1965 – 1989) underwent a gradual evolution toward increasing censorship and restrictions. By the beginning of the 1980s, informa…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Gilly Macmillan, The Long Weekend (William Morrow) “Macmillan writes with verve and emotional acuity…the final meal is rich and satisfying.” New York Times Book Review John Lescroart, The Missing Piece (Atria) “John Lescroart is not only a master of the legal thriller but a master storyteller as well. The Missing Piece is clever, sly, and delightfully twisty.” Joseph Finder Ally Wilkes, All the White Spaces (Atria) “A gripping narrative that is at once explorer’s yarn, trans man’s coming-of-age story, and a tale of a survivor grappling with horrors that defy definition.” P…
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Sure, the killer butler is an obvious suspect, but why isn’t anyone looking at the maids? The easy answer: they were invisible. The harder one: they were too busy dragging water and running from the master to plot a homicide. In the late 19th century, there were many more maids than butlers, and they lived exponentially harder lives than the gentleman’s gentleman at the front of the house. Most of them didn’t choose domestic service; it was often simply the only honest work young girls could find to “do their part in the family.” Maids started early, literally and figuratively. Before child labor laws, it wasn’t unusual to find tweens working sixteen-hour days as scull…
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The first time we meet Irene Barnes—eighty-year-old widow, retired dental receptionist, loyal friend, voracious reader, and possibly my favourite of all the characters in A Slow Fire Burning—she is sorting through a pile of books. The books in question used to belong to Irene’s neighbour, Angela, who has recently died. Now, as Irene flicks through the pages of Angela’s books, she has to decide which to keep and which to pass on to the charity shop. This, as any book lover will tell you, is neither a rapid nor an uncomplicated process; there are many factors to consider. For Irene, the usual considerations (Has she read it? Did she love it? Does she own it? Is this copy a…
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This ‘Crime and the City’ comes to you with a free dose of seriously dry heat, the tinkling sound of sprinklers and the low hum of a thousand a/c units. Yes, we’re in Palm Springs, California. A resort for tuberculosis sufferers (including that most famous crime writing “lunger” Dashiell Hammett briefly), “Playground of the Stars” for Hollywood types, just 107 miles from LA. Raymond Chandler decided to take Philip Marlowe out of the City of Angels to Palm Springs (and into a bad marriage) in his final unfinished novel Poodle Springs. It remained uncompleted at the time of his death in 1959. Poodle Springs was very much Chandler’s version of Palm Springs – “Poodle Springs…
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West Side Story, the charged, nimble musical created by Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Arthur Laurents (book), and Jerome Robbins (story and choreography) is one of the greatest artistic achievements of mankind. It is a blaze of sound and movement and feeling, full of pathos and gracefulness, indelible and ephemeral at the same time. Since it premiered on Broadway in 1957, and even more so since it was made into a Best Picture-winning movie in 1961, West Side Story has hummed in the air, permanent and resonant and revolutionary in the modern cultural imagination to such a degree that it might seem like a terrible decision for anyone to ever remake i…
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To borrow a quote from Doctor Strange in Spider-Man: No Way Home, “The multiverse is a concept about which we know frighteningly little.” Do parallel realities exist? Are they lurking out there in the vastness of known and unknown reality, separated by a thin curtain of rules that dictate the field quantum mechanics? Without access to the mystic arts (or even the technology utilized by the Time Variance Authority), we won’t know for certain if the many worlds interpretation carries any truth. In the meantime, authors with a passion for speculative fiction will continue to imagine what reality might look like had history taken an oh-so-different turn at one point or anot…
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When the outlaw Billy the Kid (born Henry McCarty, also known as William Bonney) was gunned down on July 14, 1881, his legend was already on the rise. Within a year of his burial in New Mexico Territory, his killer, Pat Garrett, complained about the “thousand false statements” circulated via “public newspapers and… yellow-covered, cheap novels.” Over the next century, dozens of books and movies would muddy the actual details of the Kid’s life still further. In “The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid,” his book-length attempt at providing a “true” account of the outlaw’s life, Garrett wrote that McCarty was the “peer of any fabled brigand on record, unequalled in desperate …
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As a boomer kid, I grew up in the space age when science fiction was in its heyday, in books and on screen. I devoured authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Philip K Dick, Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein, fueled not only by a passion for stories, but an intense curiosity as to what was out there, beyond our planet and solar system—and what might await us in the future. With the moon launches and Star Trek and Star Wars dominating small and big screens alike, it was a heady and exciting time to be alive. Back then, it felt like anything was possible. Unsurprising, perhaps, that I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up (with prima ballerina as a default option if …
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The morning newspapers offered precious few developments about the amusement park massacre. The police had discovered the robbers’ vehicle at a rest stop, abandoned and burned. The police said they had leads on the suspects. They were probably lying. I’ve spent fifteen years in this peculiar profession, Miller mused as he sipped his coffee at the little shop across the street from his apartment. Never had one screw up quite this badly. At least I got all the money. Once Miller finished his coffee, he walked south. He was dressed in jeans and an N-1 deck jacket a little too warm for the weather. He blended in with the workmen swarming toward the docks. His heart leapt as…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Eli Cranor, Don’t Know Tough (Soho) Don’t Know Tough is earning all the comparisons its getting to Friday Night Lights—but not the charmed world of the TV show. No, Cranor channels the down-and-dirty world of real high school sports, just as the original book and film versions of Friday Night Lights did before Coach decided to Inspire Us. Don’t Know Tough explores the nexus of class, race, language, and poverty in pushing ordinary teens to brutal acts, and ordinary coaches towards brutal commands. A star player is causing problems for his new coach, who’s got one last chance to m…
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During my awkward teenage years, I produced a lot of angst-ridden poetry on topics such as boredom and unrequited love. I kept those poems in a trunk with a stack of short stories that were also about things that seemed important to teenage me, like the unfairness of parents and teachers. I always thought that one day I would try to write a novel. I never once aspired to be a screenwriter in the glamorous world of film. It simply didn’t occur to me. Until I moved to Los Angeles. I escaped Kansas for California, where my older brother lived. He’d left a few years earlier to pursue a career in acting. At first, I had no interest in his obsession, the television and film b…
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Women in peril is a common theme in fiction. Crafting storylines about damsels in distress has long been a trope in the thriller genre. That theme dominated the subject matter of pulp fiction way back in the twentieth century. A broad hint of the plot within those paperback novels was provided by the cover art: garish color images of attractive young women, invariably bound, eyes wide with terror, popping out of a form-fitting dress (usually red). From our contemporary perspective, were those women-in-peril stories lurid? Absolutely. Did they objectify women? Most certainly. But the market for those stories didn’t end with pulp novels. It still exists in fiction, nonfic…
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Each day started with a brief meditation session where I would clear my mind and say to myself, “All that matters is the characters. Follow their lead, their needs and desires, and everything else about the narrative will unfold naturally.” As after all, in fiction, it truly is the characters who guide the story. Let them lead and the story-arc will follow. During my brief meditation, I would ask my characters what they were doing that day, how they were feeling, what they needed, and even if there was anywhere specific they wanted to go. Then I would kindly ask them to show up to set, so I could guide them on a wild and horrific adventure. And during this new ritual, I…
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I met a friend for coffee last week who opened up our conversation by telling me she’d had a ‘clear-out’ of her friends. She’d gone on to tell me how she’d even used a Venn Diagram for the purpose of sifting through what it was that made her happy in her friendships and who didn’t fill this criteria. She had realised that she spent too much of her time on the people who didn’t make her feel better and not enough on those who did. And while I didn’t have the same need to do it myself, I commended her on realising that there are people in her life who don’t deserve a place. It is interesting how easily many of us can talk about relationships with partners that aren’t worki…
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Thriller fans, we need to talk. Don’t worry, nobody died (yet). But I feel compelled to let you know the next few months are going to be really intense. I know, we’ve had a lot of intense; but this is the good, suspenseful, kind of intensity, the kind that we chase. There is a phenomenally rich year in reading ahead of us. I am already getting alluring summer and fall titles (the powers that be are just being mean when Don Winslow’s new book arrives in January and I have nine lists to do before I should read it). Though I am not an optimist by nature, I hope you know I always give it to you straight. I feel confident here in March to say 2022 is going to be a good one for…
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Rudyard Kipling called sex work ‘the oldest profession’, but the odds of growing old in that profession are and always were vanishing small. Disease and violence, persecution and prosecution have haunted sex work from the beginning of time. Historically, if a person was in the sex work trade, they had a much better chance of living to a financially successful old age if they graduated to management. For women who started from nothing, who had no other way to earn a living, it was a dangerous path to maybe a fortune. It took guts and brains and business sense. It took immense social savvy. One of those women, with a spine of titanium and nerves of steel, maybe the most suc…
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