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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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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When I started writing my current thriller, Fool Her Once, it was a huge surprise to me that there were only a couple of other thrillers set on the North Fork of Long Island. Run a Google search on “crime thrillers set on the North Fork of Long Island” and you’ll find that the second result (sometimes the top result) is for a blog I posted in 2021 titled: “North Fork of Long Island: Why It’s The Setting for Book 3.” The first time I ran that search, I was so surprised, I nearly spilled my glass of wine all over my laptop. By that time, I’d come to know the North Fork well. It’s a spit of land extending 30 miles from the “crotch” of Long Island at Riverhead, where the l…
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Linc: So, Doug, what’s going on here? Doug: I think we’re supposed to have a conversation about how we met and what it’s like writing bestselling novels as a team. Linc: OK. We can do that. Doug: Do you think we ought to tell the truth? Or make up something more interesting? Linc: I think we’d better tell the truth. Especially since we already know what things to leave out. Why don’t you start with your recollection of the first glimmerings of RELIC, the novel? Doug: I worked at the American Museum of Natural History, writing a column each month for the museum’s magazine on weird little stories about the history of the museum. You were an editor at St. Martin’s Press…
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Eli Cranor is a writer’s writer. That’s a complicated tag to hang on someone and it comes with all kinds of implications and suppositions, so let me get this straight up front, too: He’s written the debut novel of the year: Don’t Know Tough (Soho Press). When your friends ask what book you’re reading, and you know that what they’re really asking is for you to tell them about something that they can get excited about, something they can tell other people in their life about and together all of you will enter into some kind of communion over this new, wonderful, unsettling thing – that book, this year, is quite likely to be Cranor’s new one. It should be anyway. It is for m…
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Across the world of fiction, it’s hard to argue that there are few settings more iconic or emblematic than the American West. Rich in history and mythology alike, the West has long remained a fixture of our collective awareness, and for good reason. There are heroes and sagas, adventures and heartbreak aplenty west of the mighty Mississippi. But what about horror? Well, to mangle an old saw: there’s scares in them thar hills. You just have to know how to find them. Stories about the American West have always been rife with scares and horrors sure to delight and repulse even the most hardened of horror fans, from pulpy matinee fare like Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula to lite…
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Perhaps predictably, the most famous movie about electronic eavesdropping ever made, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), ends with a telephone call. After discovering that he has facilitated the murder of a high-powered corporate executive, professional wiretapper Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) sits alone in his apartment, playing his saxophone along with the jazz recording that blares from his stereo. Harry’s number is unlisted, so when the sound of a telephone interrupts his performance he hesitates to pick up the receiver. At first no one responds on the other end of the line. But the phone rings a second time a few moments later, and the high-pitched sound o…
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I love heist stories. I love fantasy heists, I love general fiction heists. My novella, Comeuppance Served Cold, features a heist. Heist books, films or television shows, I love them, and I’m not alone. Why love a heist? One reason is competence porn. Fantasy or general fiction, book, film or series, heists involve people at the top of their skill set—or who used to be—with circumstances that test them strenuously. Heists also satisfy the “quest” craving, since they map almost perfectly onto the quest plot. Something valuable must be acquired or disposed of. A group of people from different communities join forces, face obstacles, probably endure at least one betrayal, …
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We all know the scene. We’ve read it in a thousand crime novels and seen it in almost as many films. A female body is found, battered, half naked, carelessly discarded. (Silence of the Lambs, Mystic River, pretty much every single episode of CSI). Usually a man then appears, in the form of a detective, a cop, a private eye. He’ll be hard boiled, hard drinking, divorced, the only one who can get inside the mind of the killer because he too has darkness inside him. (There are so many, but let’s face it, they’re all the lovechild of James Bond and Batman). At some point after that another man will be arrested, and phrases like ‘crime of passion’ will be thrown around. Justi…
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Autopsy technician Alaina Urquhart, along with hairdresser Ashleigh “Ash” Kelley, hosts the popular true crime show Morbid, and if having a hit show and a day job weren’t enough to keep her busy, she’s also written a new novel, The Butcher and the Wren. Alaina was kind enough to answer some questions over email about her career, the true crime boom, and her foray into fiction. You can read the interview (and see the book’s beautiful cover), below. Molly Odintz: You’re an autopsy technician. Tell us a bit about your job and how it intersects with your life as a podcaster and writer. Alaina Urquhart: I love being an autopsy technician. Working with the dead has given me …
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By and large, the private eye has never been big on family. Other peoples’ families, sure. But Sam Spade showed more interest in his partner’s wife than in finding one of his own, and A is for Alibi begins with Kinsey Milhone introducing herself as “twice divorced, no kids.” While there are exceptions, the PI has generally been a creature of solitude, give or take a sidekick or secretary. No one of his generation had more success telling PI stories in Hollywood than Shane Black. 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and 2016’s The Nice Guys, both written and directed by Black, drew inspiration from pulp writers such as Richard S. Prather and Shell Scott, adding tongue-in-cheek hum…
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During my short time as a civil rights attorney, I worked on several cases involving harassment on the job. Without fail, my clients had two things in common. They wanted the harassment to stop; and they thought retaliation for reporting the harassment was just a continuation of the abuse. They had no idea that the law, and, more importantly, juries, viewed retaliation as a separate, greater offense. I guess when you’re in the middle of such trauma, you just want it to end, and you want life to go back to “normal.” Unfortunately, a return to normal is an elusive goal, even if a complaint causes the harassment to stop. Such was the case of my protagonist Yolanda Avila seve…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Ally Wilkes, All the White Spaces (Atria Books) “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 . . . from gritty seafaring challenges to a desperate struggle with demons that blur the line between the supernatural and the subconscious.” -Publishers Weekly Brian Hochman, The Listeners (Harvard Univ. Press) “[A] fascinating history [of] how wiretapping by U.S. law enforcement agencies went from a ‘dirty business’ to a ‘standard investigative tactic.’… This is an essential a…
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The concept of the frenemy is not new. A potent mixture of friend and enemy, this oxymoronic portmanteau first appeared in the English language in the late 1800s, albeit with a different spelling (“frienemy”). In recent decades the word has been dusted off, streamlined, and given new life. Fueled by the duplicity of social media—the ability to behave one way IRL and wear another face online—the frenemy appears in more guises than ever both in novels and in films. It’s little wonder that the frenemy continues to haunt us. It’s a powerful archetype; characters we both love and hate hold a unique fascination. They are more maddening than simple friends or enemies; because …
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This is the story of two novels, both written by me, one unpublished and one that just came out this month. The first, the one in the drawer, was a very violent tale about people who are able to regenerate. The second, a direct reaction to the first, is about a world where violence is no longer possible. But the real story here is how writing these two books led me to reconsider my own approach to writing violence in fiction, and to think more broadly about both readers’ and writers’ expectations around violence generally. I have always been a little squeamish. I nearly failed biology in college due to an inability to dissect a frog. And I’ve never gravitated toward the …
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March’s international crime fiction contains almost no fast-paced thrillers—instead, we find literary noir, coolly choreographed action, and slow-burn psychological thrillers. Along with the usual suspects from France, South Korea, and Scandinavia, you’ll find two great Latin American noirs on here, each in conversation with political upheaval in recent history. Some of us are traveling these days, but even if you’re back to jetsetting, you still won’t find anything close to the tours of the underworld that crime fiction can offer. Sit back, put your feet up, and dream of other worlds… Maria Gainza, Portrait of an Unknown Lady Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bun…
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As the recipient for Betsy Faria’s insurance after Faria’s murder, Pam Hupp shocked investigators with her callous and bizarre attitude towards her dead friend. Hupp soon became a suspect in Faria’s untimely end. June 25, 2012—six months after the murder of Betsy Faria The big, bald cop had no reaction when his prime witness casually tossed off the most unexpected, shocking comment defense attorney Joel Schwartz had ever heard in a police interview. He watched the video of this new interview intently as murder suspect Pam Hupp explained to Sergeant Ryan McCarrick that the many personal issues she was juggling—selling a house, buying a new house, her own medical issues—a…
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I became a private investigator because of my face. It’s an ordinary-looking face, but if I ask “How are you?” sometimes people start crying. “I’m getting a divorce,” they say. “He ended our marriage by text.” Or “I was just diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease.” Or a man grips a packet of peas in the frozen food aisle and asks, “How do you cook these? My wife died last month.” Or an immaculately dressed woman suddenly tells me, “I hate my job so much I want to kill myself. I’ve been saving up Ambiens.” Then we sit on a concrete curb, or stand in line at a train station, or clutch clear plastic cups at a party as the near-stranger in front of me dabs away mascara with…
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