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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The pandemic that started in 2020 affected a lot of people in a lot of ways—including writers. Like me. I write mysteries and romantic suspense. I’m used to sitting at my computer and writing. Copiously. Continuously. That didn’t change. However, I was also used to attending conferences, several a year, to meet with writer friends and participate on panels and promote my books. To meet more people, including readers who enjoy the kinds of things I write. Not during the pandemic. Most conferences were canceled anyway. Same thing regarding local book signings and in-person chapter meetings of writers’ organizations. I missed them all. I did, however, attend quite a few of…
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Let’s start with a little story about rejection. Because, who doesn’t love a good rejection story? A few years ago, I was out on submission trying to sell my newest manuscript. Submission means your agent pitches your book to publishers, while you, the author, chew your nails right down to the bone while doom-checking your email. People call this “submission hell” for good reason. Unless you’re extremely lucky to get an offer right away (or offers, or even OMG an auction!), you wait. And wait. And if you’re not a patient person by nature, this is not easy. Then the rejections, or more politely-termed “passes,” start rolling in. Editors will send an email extolling your …
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When Prime Video’s moody, Los Angeles-set detective drama Bosch took its final bow last June, it did so as the Amazon streamer’s longest running original series. Seven seasons! A feat in any television context, never mind in the world of streaming. Still, novelist Michael Connelly has been writing the books that Bosch was adapted from since 1992, with this November’s forthcoming Desert Star marking Bosch’s twenty-fourth literary outing. So while seven critically acclaimed seasons may be nothing to sneeze at, the Prime Original’s 2021 exit still left dozens of storylines on the cutting room floor. Of these, perhaps the most interesting—in terms, at least, of potentially …
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Back when I was a thirteen-year-old regular at my local used bookstore I discovered the novels of John D. MacDonald, those beat-up little paperbacks with lurid covers and great titles. Over the years I’ve grown to love MacDonald’s standalone thrillers, some of which are true pulp classics, but as a young bookworm I was obsessed with the Travis McGee series, easily identifiable because the titles all included a color. Finding one of those meant you were set for a great afternoon of reading, plunked down into seamy, seedy Florida in the 1960s with one of the best detective heroes ever written. Travis (Trav to his friends) McGee is a wiry, knuckly, very tan, very tall boat …
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Since the dawn of humanity, since the moment we’ve been able to think, games have been part of our interactions with others. From the imagination games of children to interactive video games of teens, and even the sudoku puzzles and crosswords of adults – as social creatures, there’s a reason why our brains delight in games. The rules give us enough structure to keep us from going off the rails but enough wiggle room to keep our attention. I would even argue that it is what make the game worth playing–especially when some rules are more flexible than others. Horror movies are their own game of survival. There is a formula, a set of rules that are meant to be followed. Y…
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Ever since Medea took her revenge on her two-timing husband by icing her own kids, examinations of the darker aspects of motherhood have proven a regular fixture in the literature of crime and punishment. The following books range across a wide variety of subgenres—from hardboiled noir, to straight horror, to conspiracy thriller, to the uncategorizable—but at the heart of each is an exploration of the depths a mother is willing to go to either save or damn their offspring. For Mother’s Day, here are 7 dark novels about motherhood. Mildred Pierce, James M. Cain The American roman noir as we know it was practically invented by James M. Cain by way of his first two …
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Military thrillers often feature strangers who become brothers after enduring combat’s fiery furnace. In Hostile Intent, the latest book in my Matt Drake series, the relationship between Matt and his best friend, Frodo, forms the novel’s centerpiece. At first glance, these two men have very little in common. Matt is white, college educated, and grew up on a Utah ranch. Frodo is an African American native of Philadelphia who enlisted in the Army straight out of high school. But their shared combat experience transforms what would otherwise be a surface level relationship into a brotherhood of arms. To accurately portray Matt and Frodo’s friendship, I drew upon my own deplo…
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Fifty years ago, Milano Calibro 9, or Calibre 9 as it was released in the United States, hit Italian cinema screens. A small time mafia foot soldier, Ugo Piazzo (Gastone Moschin, a famous Italian comic actor at the time), leaves prison only to be caught up in a conspiracy around the disappearance three years earlier of $300,000 from a Milanese crime boss known as the Americano. Believing that Ugo took the money and stashed it while he was in jail, the Americano sends Rocco (German Italian actor Mario Adorf), a clownish but lethal mob enforcer, to retrieve it. Ugo denies he had anything to do with the missing cash, but no one, including the police and his ambitious strippe…
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The cliché rings true. David Baldacci was an overnight success. It just took him 15 years to get there. His first novel, Absolute Power, took three years to write, two weeks to find an agent and two days to sell. But it was what Baldacci did in the run-up to his instant fame and fortune, which made the difference. The New York Times bestselling author first wrote short stories, failed at writing screenplays and then thought he was through as a writer before he had ever tried writing a novel. Baldacci always had a fascination with storytelling. “I loved mysteries,” he says. He always wanted to tell so many stories, and never really stopped talking, so his exasperate…
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What happens when a person calls into question the very thing closest to their heart—self? I’d recently overheard a conversation at Rose Elementary School in Escondido, California, where one of the older kids—he must have been a sixth-grader—thumped himself on the chest and proclaimed, “I can hardly wait until I’m twenty-one.” Sitting on the fire hydrant by our driveway hours later, I looked up at an outrageously blue sky and wondered what it would be like to be all of twenty-one—ancient. At seven, it seemed too vast, too long, too big of a chasm for that much time to span. It’d be like waiting for Christmas. Waiting for one was hard enough. Waiting for fourteen? Imposs…
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The CrimeReads editors select their favorite new fiction this month. * Deon Meyer (Transl. K.L. Seegers), The Dark Flood (Atlantic) Meyer brings readers another tense thriller with meticulous plotting, delving into corruption in South Africa’s power structures, police abuses, and land schemes. Detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido, facing exile, go on the search for a missing university student and computer programer, a case that will once again send them down the mean streets of a broken system. Meyer is one of today’s most skilled crime craftsmen. –DM Isabel Cañas, The Hacienda (Berkley) Isabel Canas takes the gothic novel to the haciendas, just as Sy…
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In 1979, the gruesome slaying of a thirteen-year-old boy riveted the suburbs of Suffolk County, New York. As the county hustled to bring the case to a dubious resolution, a wayward local teenager emerged with a convenient story to tell. For his cooperation, Jimmy Burke was rewarded with a job as a cop. Thus began Burke’s unlikely ascent to the top of one of the country’s largest law enforcement jurisdictions. He and a crew of likeminded allies utilized vengeance, gangster tactics, and political leverage to become the most powerful and feared figures in their suburban empire. Until a pilfered bag of sex toys brought it all crashing down. Jimmy the King is the story of…
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No one wrote more mysteries, nor more popular ones, nor better ones, set on Cape Cod than Phoebe Atwood Taylor (1909-1976), best-known for her series of twenty-four novels featuring Asey Mayo, the amateur detective known locally and to readers as “the Codfish Sherlock.” Mayo’s first appearance was in The Cape Cod Mystery (1931), which sold out its first printing of 5,000 copies, an exceptionally strong sale for a first novel during the Great Depression (and not too bad in the present day). In the words of the English novelist Nicholas Blake (the pseudonym of C. Day Lewis), Mayo is “an eccentric individual” who Taylor describes as “a typical New Englander . . . the kind …
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Tension is the jet fuel that propels a thriller. From the slow burn to the shocking reveal, I strive to pack as much of it as possible into my stories. I am often labeled as a medical thriller writer, but I don’t view myself as such, because I also write psychological thrillers and historical suspense. Besides, it’s a deep rabbit hole to fall down to try categorizing suspenseful novels into specific genres and sub-genres of mystery, thriller, or crime fiction. For the sake of this article, and my sanity, can we lump them all into one giant category of suspense fiction? Because, regardless of which of those sub-genres you put a novel into, I guarantee you’re not going to …
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One morning in early October, when I was alone in my office, reworking the trial outline yet again, Bruce Muow called. Are you sitting down?” he asked. “That’s all I do these days. What’s up?” “Sammy Gravano wants to cooperate.” My heart stopped. Of all the possible turns the case could have taken, this was the one nobody had even speculated about. Six weeks later, when Gravano’s cooperation became public, dozens of smart-alecks all of a sudden had known he’d flip. He was too Machiavellian not to, they said. He’d never done a long prison term. He’d never forgiven Gotti for killing Paul, some said, overlooking the fact that Gravano was part of the murder team. There w…
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Even before I sat down to write Magpie, I knew I wanted there to be a stomach-flipping twist in the middle of the book. If writing is the great vocational love of my life, the longer relationship is the one I’ve had with reading. And as an inveterate reader, there is nothing I enjoy more than being swept up in a plot and then—suddenly—having all my preconceptions pulled out from under me with a deft authorial sleight of hand. It’s the literary equivalent of swimming in the sea and being lifted up by a large wave. There’s a thrilling sense of not quite knowing what will happen next, a moment of terror…and then you’re deposited safely back, feet once again grazing the sand…
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Madness lies at the dark heart of some of the greatest and most popular novels in the world, reflecting its power to drive a narrative; readers are deeply intrigued. We are reeled in by our dread of the unknown, by the unexplored darkness out there that it represents as well as the unnerving possibility that it is also inside us Madness is of course an outdated shorthand term encompassing a variety of mental disorders and illnesses; the knowledge that so many of us are on a spectrum that ranges from mild anxiety to severe psychosis makes the literary portraits of the mentally unwell compelling as well as disconcerting. The five books I describe reflect the age in which …
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As someone who reads widely across genres, I’ve found the books I most enjoy tend to transcend genres. This is, of course, a personal preference and there are lots of readers who love the predictability of tight genres that hew close to conventions. As a writer, I find the whole notion of identifying genre at an early stage is suffocating to ideas and creativity. As a result, I largely ignore it until the editing process. It does make it difficult to pitch a new idea, so often I just have to write the book and then let my agent work out where to go from there. I have common trends: strong female characters, relationships between characters that have real depth, emotional …
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When I was nine years old, I learned what it meant to be adopted. My mother had been adopted as an infant, and always spoke about what a gift it was to be raised by her parents, my grandparents. That fact being wholly undisputed, I also recall turning to my mother one day and asking, “But what about our medical history? Do you know anything about that?” She shook her head, and a burning curiosity for answers was born in me. Decades later, I was working on my debut novel when I learned that Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. was identified as the elusive Golden State Killer. Having grown up in Sacramento, California, the area that DeAngelo first began attacking his victims, I was …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Deon Meyer (transl. K.L. Seegers), The Dark Flood (Atlantic) “A fast-moving South African police procedural . . . The plotlines are tightly knitted together, and the story ends with a nifty twist. A well-crafted blend of suspense, culture, and humor. Meyer is terrific.” Kirkus Reviews, starred review Elle Marr, Strangers We Know (Thomas and Mercer) “…the increasingly tense plot takes turns the reader won’t see coming. Marr is a writer to watch.” Publishers Weekly Laura Jarratt, Two Little Girls (Sourcebooks Landmark) “This heartfelt story grabs the reader from the very sta…
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“I have brothers and sisters and I find that my sisters are as intelligent as my brothers.” Digitally leafing through stacks of archival documents on 20th century colonial Bangalore as part of my academic research on the city’s ecological history, this sentence struck me with force. Mr. B.V. Ramaswami, a member of the Mysore Representative Assembly, was speaking passionately at a debate on the right of women to vote, during a meeting of the Mysore Representative Assembly in 1922. Ramaswami’s statement may seem obvious to us. But a century back, the possibility that women might become as educated and empowered as men was a matter of concern—even fear—for many men. Indee…
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Solitude is a favorite hobby of mine. I’m a true introvert and turning into a bit of a hermit as the years go by, so I can entertain myself for days on end without the need to speak to another human. But even I find isolation to be such a shivery and delicious building block of suspense. The feeling that no one can help you and, in fact, they might not even be able to hear you? Ooo, that gives me goose bumps. But between cell phones and cars and the internet, isolating a protagonist isn’t as easy as it used to be, and bad situations aren’t so scary when you know the character can call 911 at any time. So how to amp up that feeling of a character being utterly alone with …
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Gary Phillips, One-Shot Harry (Soho) “Phillips’ knack for making the past feel immediate is on point in the well-plotted One-Shot Harry, his first novel about Harry Ingram … Phillips vividly depicts 1963 L.A … Phillips’ insight into racism, attitudes toward Black veterans, the Civil Rights movement, Black press and politics of the 1960s elevates One-Shot Harry. Readers will look forward to more camera work from Harry, and Phillips.” –Oline H. Cogdill (Sun Sentinel) Don Winslow, City on Fire (William Morrow) “Combustible … City of Fire, with its large cast of memorable characters and…
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This spring is so packed full with new and returning crime series, we decided to lay out a viewing guide to help you keep track of all the dates and streaming services. There’s almost no way you’re going to be able to watch all these shows, so plan carefully. The Staircase HBO Max – Premieres May 5th I honestly don’t know who watched Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s docu-series about Michael and Kathleen Peterson and thought it needed to be a dramatized miniseries, but somebody must have because they went and made the thing. And they went and cast Toni Collette, Colin Firth, Juliette Binoche (Binoche!) and Rosemarie Dewitt (Dewitt!) in the thing, and damn if they didn’t dra…
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Deconstructing the craft of literary fiction in order to create our own is the standard approach to “learning” to write and the foundation of the MFA workshop. Aspiring or current writers of commercial or mass-market fiction, on the other hand, have a less clear-cut course of study. While the distinction between literary and commercial fiction could certainly warrant its own essay, and has certainly been the subject of standalone debate, I’ll propose, for purposes of this piece, that aside from the obvious role of corporate marketing decisions, commercial novels are defined by reader experience. For me, it’s the sense, when I reach the end of a novel, that its parts were …
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