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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It may come as no surprise that my bookshelf is dominated by spy novels and non-fiction books about the CIA and the KGB. While I prefer novels, there are several non-fiction books I consider essential to understanding the world of espionage. But first, the novels: ___________________________________ Fiction ___________________________________ A Gentleman in Moscow (Amor Towles) While not a spy novel, per se, A Gentleman in Moscow is an exquisitely written tale about a Russian nobleman who finds himself on the wrong side of history after the 1917 Russian Revolution. When the new communist government declares Count Alexander Rostov an unrepentant aristocrat, he is sen…
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To say that Alex Segura has a nerd’s dream job, or several dream jobs, is getting it backwards. In fact, he has forged a highly successful career out of turning his personal fascinations – with crime novels, comics, sci-fi and music – into unique artistic projects. The author of the acclaimed Pete Hernandez PI series, set in Miami, he has also written a Star Wars novel, Poe Dameron: Free Fall, and worked on a series of comics, including the The Black Ghost, the YA music series, The Archies, and the Archie Meets crossover series, featuring The Ramones, B-52s and others. Now many of these threads come together in Secret Identity, a thrilling noir novel set in the world of c…
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Running from the law does not belong to America. It is, rather, as human as our own skin. The very first people to ever waltz the earth, Adam and Eve, went on the lam directly after eating that forbidden fruit. Their son went on the lam after killing his brother, sweet Abel. Abraham, father of nations, went on the lam to Egypt. Moses went on the lam out of Egypt, four hundred years later, after killing a whip-happy Egyptian guard. Etc., etc., and on up to this modern American minute. America didn’t invent the outlaw, no, though the Land of the Free did turn outlaws into proper, transcendent stars. And by “proper” I mean famous with movies, television shows, serialized …
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As a lifelong reader of classic whodunits, I’m always a little disappointed when the first murder that occurs is the only murder in the story. I always crave that mid-point killing, the one that completely changes the dynamics of the narrative. The truth is, I want multiple murders. My favorite Christie is And Then There Were None, which comes right out and tells you that there will be no one left standing at the end. Of course, I’m probably not the only one amused by the fact that the great detectives of fiction often don’t catch the murderer until half the suspects are dead. Hercule Poirot in Christie’s Death on the Nile gets all the credit for eventually uncovering th…
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John Dickson Carr (1906-1977) was one of the most prominent mystery novelists during the Golden Age of detective fiction, loosely defined as the period between the two world wars. A defining feature of the popular mysteries of this time was a fair play puzzle plot that focused onto “howdunnit” as opposed to the “whydunnit” in a whodunnit. Psychological mysteries rose in popularity later and came to dominate mystery fiction, but in Golden Age mysteries, the puzzle was key. I’m a huge fan of locked-room mysteries, those puzzles in which the crime appears truly impossible (locked-room mysteries are also known as “impossible crimes” or “miracle problems”). I read them widel…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Alex Segura, Secret Identity (Flatiron) “You don’t have to be a comics fan to love this novel; it’s a masterful book filled with real heart and soul. A triumph.” Kirkus Reviews, starred review Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers (William Morrow) “The Cartographers is wildly imaginative and totally mind-bending in the best possible way. Shepherd has crafted a juicy mystery masquerading as a grown-up scavenger hunt filled with astonishing twists and revelations.” Bookpage, starred review Wayne Johnson, The Red Canoe (Agora) “A powerful story of Indigenous people who are abused …
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There was a time when the church and the government were the arbiters of moral authority. But since those institutions have often proved corrupt (and, at times, both corrupt and criminal), another institution has often filled the void—the free press. Investigative reporters, bolstered by the first amendment, are often the last resort for individual citizens seeking the truth. They follow the breadcrumbs of information, burrow into the dark recesses of corporations or government agencies, and expose secrets hidden by those in power. In my debut novel, Truth and Other Lies, I explore the moral imperative journalists have to expose treachery both here and abroad. So it’s no…
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The phrase #RepresentationMatters permeates the queer writing community as a reminder that we all need representations of ourselves in the art we consume. As a queer teen who loved to read horror and crime fiction, I rarely found characters like myself highlighted in the glossy pamphlets of popular books from my small public library. The lack of LGBTQIA visibility around me sent a message: something was wrong with these characters; therefore, something was wrong with me. Queer representation in crime fiction has grown substantially since I was a teen, particularly in the last ten years. Not all areas of representation in crime fiction have shared that same growth and atte…
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Birmingham, England – The West Midlands, once a major industrial city of the British Empire, and, crucially, not the Birmingham in Alabama. The UK’s second city, which can boast more miles of canal than Venice and more parks than Paris. If you never really thought about Birmingham much before, the Steven Knight-created Peaky Blinders phenomenon has probably put “Brum” on your radar. The long running BBC show (now in its sixth and final season) featuring the Irish-Romani Shelby family terrorising post Great War Birmingham has been, perhaps surprisingly, an international hit. And spawned plenty of books… …Because the Peaky B’s really existed. Carl Chinn’s Peaky Blinders: T…
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In The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, the new Apple TV+ series based on the pseudo-detective novel by Walter Mosley, there is no greater mystery than the human mind. Our hero is Ptolemy Grey (a grizzled Samuel L. Jackson), an affable nonagenarian suffering from dementia, unable to function without assistance from his great-nephew Reggie (Omar Benson Miller). Reggie takes him to the bank and the doctor and out to lunch on his frequent visits, but mostly Ptolemy is alone all day, sitting in a rusty lawn chair in an Atlanta apartment clogged with random paraphernalia and dusty furniture, with plumbing that doesn’t work, countertops that are covered in garbage, and cabinets that …
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Literature and espionage have long had a close relationship, from writers who were spies, such as John le Carré, to the CIA’s manipulation of literature during the Cold War. One of the most fascinating chapters in this relationship, however, is the story of Ian Adams, a man whose fiction was so true to life that he was sued for libel by a real-life spy and ordered to disclose his sources in a court of law. Ian Adams was the author of books such as S: Portrait of a Spy and Agent of Influence, which was turned into a film starring Christopher Plummer. He was the first spy novelist to focus on Canadian espionage, and probably the most successful espionage writer in Canadian…
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At first glance, it seems like the oddest possible pairing of artists and material: actor Robert Downey Jr. and writer/director Shane Black, the motormouth duo behind the cult noir film “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” joining forces yet again for a screen adaptation of the Parker novels, written by Donald E. Westlake under his Richard Stark pseudonym. If you’re unfamiliar with those novels, the underlying premise is brutally simple: Parker is an ice-cold thief who meticulously plans his scores; when things go wrong (and they usually do), he’s just as methodical in killing whoever made the mistake of betraying him this time around. He doesn’t say much, and when he does, he keeps i…
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The world of poisons has always been something of immense fascination to me, I think because I always saw the other side to them. Don’t get me wrong, they were always alluring in that poetic and murderous way, sure, but growing up with an herbalist mother meant I was raised with the idea that a lot of things that may harm you can actually be used to heal more often than not. As the saying goes, it’s the dose that kills—and it’s that idea of the dose that has kept my interest all of these years. The fact one drop can help, and ten can kill. It’s also an idea that has existed throughout history. I recall sitting in a lecture hall one day in graduate school, staring at Pow…
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Well, I never had a use for one before, but once I realized that the book I’d embarked on with good cheer would require services of that kind, he wasn’t far to find. My story was located in Northern California and up to Seattle and environs in a summer—2012—that would prove either transitional or transformational for the recreational use of grass (skunk, weed, marijuana, ganja) up and down the Left Coast’s faulted and flamboyant shores. I already had a cop who was involuntarily constrained from busting the people he wanted to because if he did it his town’s economy would fall into the pit and then who would say anything like Eureka about it? I named this vengeful peace o…
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Riddle me this: I am that which when completed never stops Guards cities, and caves, confuses dimwitted cyclops. Always exciting to turn over but hard to place right, It can have four legs, then two legs, then three legs at night. It turns ravens into writing desks, when neither’s like the other, And reminds you that the old surgeon is really just his mother. What am I? (Yeah, it’s a riddle.) (In more ways than one.) I’ve been thinking about the ontology of “the riddle” since seeing Matt Reeves’s new film The Batman, which offers a total retelling of the story of the Caped Crusader and his struggles to fight crime in Gotham City. This time, he faces off against t…
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‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,’ reflects one of the characters in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981); ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?’ ‘Because,’ another character replies, ‘nobody imagines living here.’ Over the past half-century, some of the most vivid attempts to imagine living in Glasgow have been crime novels, from the Laidlaw trilogy of William McIlvanney to the fictions of Frederic Lindsay, Denise Mina, Louise Welsh, Christopher Brookmyre and others. And despite the assertion that ‘nobody imagines living here’, those novels take their place in a venerable tradition of writing about Scotland’s western metropolis. One of the first novelists to write about Glasgow di…
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Christian Fletcher was the ringleader of a band of nine infamous mutineers who, in April 1789, commandeered His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty and, along with their Tahitian brides, launched a quest to find an idyllic island that had been incorrectly plotted in the British Navy’s nautical logs. Dubbed Pitcairn, after the fifteen-year-old deckhand who had first spotted it, the green dot was scribbled on a big blue chart of the Pacific some two hundred miles west of its actual location due to an error in longitudinal reading. After many months at sea, Christian and his men finally found their promised paradise—by the end of their third year, almost all of the mutineers would…
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IN THE GALAXY of New York City nightclubs, the Copacabana burned brightest. Getting in wasn’t easy. Celebrities, socialites, and sports stars all jockeyed for a coveted table amid the faux palm trees. But one particular patron never had a problem. When he made his entrance—striding briskly, confidently, and with a slight smile—a frisson of excitement rippled through the crowd. Patrons of the club knew exactly who he was. Asked where he sat when he went to the Copa, Sonny Franzese—handsome and charismatic underboss of the Colombo family—smiled and said, “Wherever I wanted.” Sonny frequented all the city’s top clubs, but he felt most at home at the Copacabana, with its r…
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I’ve never read a “crime” novel. Nor a “thriller”, a “horror”, a “fantasy”, “Sci-fi”, “Dystopia”, “Romance”, “YA”, “Middle Grade” or a “Children’s” book. Not true, actually. Pout Pout Fish is a wonderful book. It teaches a good lesson: smile if given the choice. It exemplifies the point of Good v. Evil: Fish is grumpy. He finds someone who isn’t. Now he’s happy. Not every book operates on that fulcrum, of course, but close. Good v. Evil. Socrates’s Tragedy v. Comedy. A good book is a good book, regardless of genre or topic. I don’t find myself searching the genre sections at the bookstore. At my local store Stephen King and Barbara Kingsolver are stocked next to each ot…
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Oscar, for the twentieth—maybe even thirtieth time since he got here—is lost in the medina. The problem this time is that his phone has died, so he can’t use it to navigate, and he has no cash, having given it to a man whose wife was dying and needed medical care. (A man who, in retrospect, might not have been telling the truth.) The medina is a maze as mysterious to Oscar as the many branches of his own misfiring neurons. Circlings; dead ends; occasional, unexpected connections. Above it all, the call to prayer, rising and undulating, in a language he can’t interpret.Which means Oscar can’t have grown up here. Useful information. One country, Morocco, ticked off the li…
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There’s a reason Clark Kent went to work for a major metropolitan newspaper. Newsrooms are where the action is. Clark knew that Superman had to be close to the heartbeat of Metropolis and that was the Daily Planet. When crime broke out, the newsroom knew it. Plus, newspaper break rooms are the best places to find day-old pizza and that last half of a donut that someone carefully cut off with a plastic knife because a whole donut was just too much. Newspapers and crime are a natural fit, as anyone who’s watched a newspaper movie will tell you. Has there ever been a newspaper movie without a crime plot? If so, I don’t want to hear about it. So here’s a look at newspaper …
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David Corbett entered college never intending on becoming a novelist. In fact, he had no intentions at all—so he dropped out for a year to play bass in a bar band. He toured the Great Midwest, landing in such musical hotspots as Lima, Ohio, Ft. Wayne, Indiana and Midland, Michigan. It was a formative time for the nineteen-year-old Catholic boy who met many cocktail waitresses along the way. Returning to college, he majored in math, largely because of his professors. “They were the most humble, intelligent, honest, hard-working people I’ve ever been around—totally committed to their students, no gas bags, no phonies.” However, he soon found his talents drifting toward the…
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Western China in the late 600s of the seventh century. In a candle-lit bedroom of a shabby tavern on the outskirts of the Tang Dynasty capital Chang’an (now known as Xian) sits Dee Renjie. A man more commonly known simply as Judge Dee. He is the Imperial Circuit Supervisor of the Tang Empire, appointed by no-lesser personage than the Empress Wu herself. Judge Dee has a white beard, wears a blue robe and a black skull cap, while sipping his favourite Dragon Well tea. He is out of favour at court, a victim of the internecine infighting between the squabbling Wu and Li political clans throughout the troublesome middle years of the dynasty. He is a Confucian scholar-turned-ma…
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From the recent declassification of archival documents, to the high stakes, to the clear delineation between good and evil in the war between Allied and Axis powers, the popularity of WWII-set fiction endures. Writing fiction allows authors to imagine dialogue and fill in the blank spaces left by incomplete records, but to be able to do so with authenticity, they draw heavily on memoir, autobiography, and biography. In researching the real-life superheroines Virginia d’Albert-Lake and Violette Szabo, for Sisters of Night and Fog, there were many riveting works of nonfiction by and about the women and those in their networks. These accounts were a tremendous help in under…
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The woman across the table had a favor to ask of me. We were sitting in a windowless conference room on the basement level of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley; I was there to do research for my new novel, and she was among the employees meeting with me to answer my questions about the agency. She was an in-house psychologist, warm but intimidating, with decades of experience at the CIA. When I told her that the spy at the center of my novel was a woman, she seemed glad at the news. But then came the request. Please, she said, with an acerbic tone: “Just don’t make her a promiscuous headcase.” I nodded and told her that wasn’t my plan. Normally I would have be…
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