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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Summer is coming. I promise. It’s right around the corner. If you’re anything like me, summer means the beach. And the beach means getting in some uninterrupted reading. That’s a luxury for most of us. One year, I took a beach vacation with just a girlfriend and myself, with no children and husbands—it was complete heaven. We ate when we wanted, slept when we wanted, and read uninterrupted. At one point I turned to my friend and said, “The only thing that would make this beach better is a bookstore.” Voila! My Beach Reads series was born. The third book in my series A Killer Romance, takes place during the off-season. Have you ever wondered what becomes of those little…
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The rise of the unreliable narrator in fiction has made huge success of bestsellers like The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and Fight Club. The narrators of these stories have compelling tales to share, but what makes them even more exciting and keeps us turning those pages is not what they’re telling us…but rather, what they aren’t. I first listened to The Girl on the Train and was immediately drawn in by the weaving stories of several different main points of view. It’s Rachel, though, who’s telling a story we simply can’t be expected to believe. Her drinking means that she can’t really trust her memories (or rather, those big blank spots in them) and therefore, neither…
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It’s that season again—the time to plan summer vacations. How about touring small towns and visiting some occasionally wacky, but always fun, festivals? In Wisconsin, for instance, where the Deputy Donut Mystery series is set, provides a wealth of summer fairs, festivals, and family-fun weekends. At one gem and mineral show, kids can dig for treasures in an agate pit! Three different festivals provide sawdust piles where kids can grub around looking for things. At least one of these sawdust piles is stocked with money. And speaking of not exactly staying pristine, you could participate in, or merely watch (maybe from a distance), a cow chip hurling competition. There are …
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Whether it’s whispered around a campfire, or passed down across generations, folk tales have often been the spark that ignited much of our love for stories. They give us brief glimpses into different times and different cultures, and it’s always a treat for me to find these threads woven into works of fiction today. It has even inspired me to reimagine my favourite Sri Lankan folktale in my latest book, Island Witch. In my new novel, set in 1880s Ceylon, Amara, the daughter of the local demon priest, is caught in the cross currents of her traditional beliefs and the new colonial ideas that have been brought into her coastal town, while being bullied and called a “witch” …
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My initial exposure to Juanita Sheridan was harrowing: I’d just sent my publisher my first Hawaiʻi murder mystery when a friend asked, “Have you read the Hawaiʻi mysteries of Juanita Sheridan?” Unsettled, I scrambled to find Sheridan’s books – all out of print, so it wasn’t easy. When they finally arrived, I opened The Kahuna Killer at random and found to my consternation that Sheridan had ended a chapter this way: “Pilikia. That word means trouble.” I’d ended a chapter of my book nearly identically: “Pilikia. Trouble.” Yikes! I snapped her book shut and resolved not to read another word until I’d completed at least my second Hawaiʻi murder mystery. I didn’t want m…
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I am eight years old. The bullies are waiting for me outside the girls’ bathroom. I race down the school hall as fast as my young legs can carry me, but the bullies are faster. They pounce, pushing me down, and I hit the floor hard, the air slamming out of my lungs. You’re a killer. A boy yells. Like your mom. Killer, killer. I tell myself not to look at them. That gloating stretch of their mouths. The shadows lengthening over me. The front door bursts open, and Mimi appears, her eyes spitting black fire. My cousin, only a year older, but her rage fills the hall. The bullies scatter like frantic ants, but this time, she is faster. A well-aimed punch and the leade…
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There is a famous image of a ballet dancer’s feet—one clad in pale tights and a pristine pink pointe shoe, ribbons neatly tied, while the other foot is bare. Band-Aids, blackened toenails. Blisters and bunions. The contrast is stark, the statement obvious: in ballet, there is the illusion and there is the reality. There is beauty, but underlying that beauty is pain. As the mother of a professional ballet dancer, this image resonates with me. And when I began writing my most recent novel, The Still Point, about a group of pre-professional ballet dancers in their final year of high school and their ambitious mothers, I wanted to offer both sides of this world. I wanted to …
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When I set out to write my second novel, A Step Part Darkness, I knew it was a lot more ambitious than my debut had been. Several elements made it more complicated: it has a dual-timeline with a separate but related mystery in each and it had an ensemble cast. Specifically, it had six main characters, each of whom would have their own POV in both timelines. When ensemble casts are good, they are so satisfying to readers, but when they are bad, they feel quite hollow, often because they’re rendered somewhat lifelessly—we’re simply told that this is the gang and that they’re bonded rather than this sentiment being earned through elbow grease. A Step Past Darkness is very d…
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Gothic novels, those strange, melancholy reads that drip with atmosphere, have been around for over 250 years. Ever since Horace Walpole’s gloomy Castle of Otranto, readers have reveled in morbid delight when turning the pages of these books. Safe and tucked away under the eaves reading our hearts out—far from the gloomy moors, haunted castles, and asylums that often figure large in these stories—we dare to be transported to mysterious places, the unexplained, the hidden, the lost, and yes, the supernatural. Why? Because we know Things That Go Bump in the Night are imaginary. Or are they? Perhaps the best thing about these dark stories is that they might have elements o…
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It was at a small writer’s workshop in New York City when one of the instructors, Paula Munier (senior agent for Talcott Notch Literary Services and the USA Today bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mystery series) introduced a literary agent to our group of twenty. The idea was to pitch our work to the agent in hopes he might want to represent one of us. I think of pitches like the Hunger Games of publishing—survival depends on slashing your competition to bits with just a few short sentences that you hope are lethal enough to convince an agent that your book is better than the rest and worthy of publishing. Midway into my pitch, the guest agent, Adam Chromy, Preside…
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We get by with a little help from our friends—right? But what if those friends don’t really have our best interests at heart? What happens when a friendship veers into enemy—or frenemy—territory, leading to secrets, betrayals, maybe even murder? My upcoming novel, Keep Your Friends Close, follows Mary and Willa, two moms who meet at a Brooklyn playground and become fast friends … for awhile, at least. Only then, Willa ghosts Mary, disappearing from her life without so much as a trace. It all comes to a head later that summer when Mary sees Willa up in the Catskills. Or she thinks she does: Willa is calling herself Annie now, and she’s got an entirely different family i…
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It’s still early in the 2020s for number ten, so this partial list (incomplete and biased) looks at nine favorite filmed novels published across 90 years (1936 to 2016, one per decade). While the passage of time makes many movies seem historical (think Agatha Christie adaptations), I’ve stuck to a strict definition. All the novels are set years before their original publication dates. The books are still in print, and the films are available on DVD or streaming. In a sign of changing viewing habits, the last two novels are not theatrical releases but streamed series. In Murder by Lamplight, Dr. Julia Lewis and Inspector Richard Tennant meet in the 1860s, the same decade …
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Fairy tales have always been rather grim and murderous, even before the Brothers Grimm complied their collection in 1812. “Fairytale” was a term coined by Marie-Catharine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy. Also known as Comtesse d’Aulnoy. She published in French many fairytales including Finette Cindron, or Cunning Cinders (1697). A tale that is better known as Cinderella. In this rendition, Finette Cindron’s royal parents attempt to abandon their three daughters so that they cannot find their way home. Luckily, Finette Cindron’s fairy godmother has given her a string that helps the princesses find their way home. Undeterred, their mother decides to take them on a…
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I’m far from being the first ex-lawyer to turn fiction writing. While my book Prima Facie is a book of fiction that definitely focuses on the law, other lawyers don’t always deal with the law specifically. Lawyers do, however, tend to interrogate ideas and systems in their work. What is it that an ex-lawyer brings to their writing that feels so exciting? All writers are unique in their preoccupations and stories, but to my mind they seem to incorporate into their work the way lawyers are trained to think about story and information. All lawyers (and specifically criminal lawyers) are trained to go beneath the story on the surface and to reflect on how and when social sys…
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Just weeks after I moved from my hometown of New York City to the California Bay Area in fall 2017, I woke up to smoky skies. On my way to work at HuffPost’s office in downtown San Francisco, I passed people with scarves clenched over their mouths, N95 masks on, years before the pandemic would make this a common sight. At my desk, my throat scratching oddly, a headache blossoming between my eyes, I saw the latest reports come in: a historic blaze had torn through Sonoma and Napa, leaving fields of ash where neighborhoods once deemed at low risk for fire used to stand. I got into my car and drove north, toward a thickening cloud of ash. As I pulled into the town of Santa …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, A Fire So Wide (Harper) “Ruiz-Grossman’s captivating debut chronicles a wildfire’s impact on a diverse set of residents of Berkeley. . . . It’s a gripping page-turner with a surprising twist, as a set of disgruntled survivors form an unlikely alliance and take drastic action. The complex characterizations and realistic scenarios converge to deliver a satisfying punch.” –Publishers Weekly Leah Konen, Keep Your Friends Close (Putnam) “[A] fast-paced, plot-driven novel that manages to poke fun at millennial parenting and the culture of wealthy Brooklynites . . .…
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Sitting majestically on the Garonne River in southwestern France, capital of the country’s Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, with approximately a million “Bordelais” (masculine) or “Bordelaises” (feminine) in its metropolitan region. A city and region of castles and wine, that likes to think of itself as the world capital of wine. And wine also happens to appear in rather a lot of Bordeaux crime novels too… So let’s start with that most Bordelais of crime fighters – the winemaker –detective. Jean-Pierre Alaux and Noël Balen’s Bordeaux region set series of crime novels now numbers 22 books (14, and counting, of which are available in English). They all feature the world-renowned…
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The path from Sherlock Holmes to modern baking cozies may not seem like a direct route, but there are plenty of ways that Sherlock set the stage for our current iterations of beloved bakeshop heroines. The moment John Watson meets Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, the famous detective has taken over a university lab and is perfecting a chemical concoction for identifying the presence of blood. Holmes, a master observer, understands clearly that some results require careful composition and attention to detail. This scene being the point where we, as readers, first meet Holmes alongside Watson is important in that it shows us there is more to Holmes than simply a sha…
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“Didn’t you once cause quite a stir by challenging heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali to a fight?” Black Belt magazine asked Jim Kelly in an interview. It was even more unbelievable than that! On December 16, 1973, UPI reported that the stars of the upcoming feature Three the Hard Way—Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, and Kelly—had challenged Ali, George Forman, and Joe Frazier to a fight. This wasn’t a publicity stunt for the still-shooting movie, nor was it a staged event for charity. This appeared to be a good, old-fashioned street challenge, woof tickets being sold to three boxing champions by two former football players and a karate expert. And what woof tickets the…
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During my three-year quest to rediscover a “lost lady” of detective fiction, Carolyn Wells, another mysterious woman appeared in the margins of Carolyn’s backstory. She is referred to as the “Unknown Woman,” the unidentified victim of a Victorian murder in Rahway, New Jersey, where both women are buried within walking distance of each other. Wells never wrote about her, but I have a hunch the cold case inspired Wells’s decades-long career as a mystery author. In May of 2021, I took a field trip to Wells’s hometown, checking out her former home, the building where she had once worked as a librarian, and her gravesite. It was less “research” and more communion with spiri…
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CrimeReads editors make their selections for the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Jenny Hollander, Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead (Minotaur) A young woman with an enviable media job and a seemingly perfect relationship goes into survival mode when an old classmate reappears, making a big movie about events that she would rather not be dredged up again. Hollander parcels out the truth about what really happened in their grad school days with a perfect sense of pacing and enough twists to keep readers on the edge of their seats. –DM Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, A Fire So Wild (Harper) Ruiz-Grossman’s ambitious debut is set in Berkeley, C…
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Like little wreaths of funeral flowers, death crowns mark the passing of a loved one. But death crowns – seen as comforting to some, ominous and otherworldly to others – are not ordered up from a florist shop. Just where death crowns do come from is a mystery, and an unsettling one at that. If you’ve never seen a death crown, or angel crown for the more religiously inclined … well, that tracks. I’ve only ever seen a few and those were behind glass in an exhibit of death and funeral folklore at the Museum of Appalachia north of Knoxville. There’s no entry for death crowns in the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, which at 1,864 pages is the most authoritative source on Appalac…
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As we’ve long been proclaiming on this website, we are in a Whodunnit Renaissance. Smart, clever mystery series are popping up left and right, and they are giving us the opportunity to see many delightful actors in the role of “detective.” I’m not an actor, but even I know that performers are on the lookout for roles that feel definitive and original. Creating a detective character allows an actor to make an indelible contribution to entertainment in a way that few other genres permit. How often do we acknowledge the perfection, the irreplaceibility of performers like Peter Falk as Columbo, or Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, or Tony Shalhoub as Monk? At this rate, I …
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What really happened? That question lies at the heart of so many crime novels, and yet the answer, that very truth, can often depend on who’s telling the story and the truth they believe. Authors employ various story structures to dole out information in a way that keeps the questions coming and the answers satisfying. When those truths don’t quite mesh, conflict and tension ensue. I love stories that play with perspective, and how different people interpret the same events, so that question—what really happened?—lies at the heart of my latest novel, Who to Believe. The story takes place over the course of a single night, as a group of friends gather in the wake of a br…
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Recently, one of my favorite authors—who I am also lucky to call a friend—published her first work of crime fiction for adults after putting out seven young adult mysteries and thrillers. I devoured Kara Thomas’s Out of the Ashes last spring, and with the upcoming release of my own debut adult thriller, The Split, after publishing five young adult thrillers myself, I was eager to talk to Kara about making the leap to the adult space after years of writing for a teen audience. I wrote—but didn’t sell—my first thriller for adults in 2017, when my first YA novel was under contract but not yet published. Writing in both spaces has always been a career goal of mine, and I had…
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