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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Married couples are a staple of the crime-fiction world, where husbands and wives are forever realizing that the person they thought they knew best is effectively a stranger they didn’t know at all. In many an opening chapter, cracks are starting to show in a hitherto happy union. Dark secrets simmer beneath a delicate surface tension, threatening to boil over and break through. At least one half of the couple knows something is terribly wrong, but doesn’t know quite what it is yet. The fun for the reader is in finding out not only what the thing is, but how it could have been hidden from the one person with whom you’re supposed to share the most. I’m thinking of everythi…
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August’s roster of international crime and mystery includes everything from straight-up thrillers to magical parables and more. Whether you’re in the mood for slow-simmering suspense as the summer drags on, or high-octane action to make it pass more quickly, beat the heat with these releases from around the work. Kotaro Isaka, Bullet Train Translated by Sam Malissa (Overlook) This book is so much fun!!! Bullet Train reads a bit like if Elmore Leonard was hired to adapt Murder on the Orient Express and it was directed by Bong Joon Ho. Several groups of criminals converge on on train headed from Tokyo to Morioka—an odd couple protecting a gangster’s son and a suitcase…
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The “coming-of-age” novel is its own multiverse of stories, spanning genres from fantasy to romance to adventure. Varied though these novels may be, they are generally underpinned by the universal themes of self-discovery and a fall from grace. The difficulty of finding your way into a rigid society is always in the ether too, authority of one kind or another looms large and a protagonist will either succumb to the tight space of adulthood that is on offer, or find a way out. The “coming-of-age” novels that have elements of mystery or the supernatural are my personal favorites. They are like fairy tales for grown-ups where the notion of the end of innocence is taken to e…
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After I was raped at knifepoint at thirteen years old, I recall thinking that I could never call the police if I were raped again. No one would believe a two-time loser. I’d had my one bite at the apple when it came to protection from that kind of violence, and it hadn’t been much of an apple. Battered and visibly bruised, I’d endured the rape exam in the hospital; a nurse telling me she “would have scratched the guy’s eyes out”; and multiple police interrogations, epitomized by one cop’s artful question, “Did he stick his thing in you?” The rapist was never caught. And, in my mind, I was beyond the protection of the law. For writers of thrillers other than police proced…
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Like many people watching Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony on September 27, 2018, I found myself crying at her description of the assault she had experienced and the psychological aftermath—what she called the sequelae—of that attack. Many women reported reliving their own traumatic experiences as they listened to Dr. Ford. I am fortunate enough not to have experienced sexual assault or rape; the person I cried for as I heard Dr. Ford describe the claustrophobia, panic attacks, and anxiety that she experienced for years was my mother. My mother slept with the light on her entire life. She shook when I took her to the doctor and had such bad claustrophobia that she n…
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There’s nothing more delicious than a good scandal, and the best scandals are practically a cottage industry, spawning books, movies, even the odd opera or two. Here are six of my favorite scandals and the novels that bring them to life. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes Oh, how they must have gossiped when the original Real Housewife of Sparta ran off with a younger man! I’m talking, of course, about one of the most legendary scandals in history—Helen and Paris. It’s often referred to as an abduction, but most versions show Helen an active participant, throwing off her arranged marriage for an elopement with a sexy Trojan prince. We don’t know if it was historical o…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Vera Kurian, Never Saw Me Coming (Park Row) Vera Kurian’s extraordinarily entertaining Never Saw Me Coming is one of a few books in a new trend I’m calling “yoga pants noir,” in which hot girls in athleisure wear are no longer the victims—and they might be the killers. College freshman Chloe has carefully cultivated her nonchalant Cool Girl personality, but she has a secret: she’s a psychopath, hell-bent on getting revenge against a boy from her past who’s also attending the same school. The problem is, she’s not the only psychopath on campus—there are at least six others, all part…
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Crime investigation is a daunting process. It involves numerous hours of tedious and meticulous gathering and analyzing of physical and trace (forensic) evidence, searching for and interviewing witnesses, as well as figuring out the motive, and, in some cases, the mod us operandi. After and only after the evidence is conclusively verified would the offender be tracked down and arrested. Circa 1990, before the World Wide Web (www) was made a public domain and became an integral part of our everyday life, crime was viewed as a tripartite affair. An affair confined between the victim and family, the perpetrator and accomplices and the investigator (police). Some may say, the…
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How’d you get like this? * One night, I’m talking to my three older siblings—Linda, Karen, and Lee—about our proximity to heinous crimes and mysterious deaths over the years. We talk about our neighbors in Oakland who plunged to their death off an icy mountain road on Thanksgiving, 1972. Husband, wife, two children, a lone surviving son. A tragedy. Forty-nine years ago now. They’re buried across from our grandparents in a Jewish cemetery in Portland. Whenever I’m up there, I leave a stone on their graves, though I have no memory of them, just a memory of the story. “Mom said it was a mob hit or a murder-suicide,” Karen says and we all sort of agree: That was a thing Mo…
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___________________________________ The Life and Crimes of Marie Dean Arrington ___________________________________ Marie Dean Arrington had been taking matters into her own hands for her entire life. So when she found herself in a minimum security jail cell—well, what was she supposed to do? Just sit there? Marie was thirty-five, and she’d been committing crimes for over a decade. At 23, while working at a motel as a maid, making 75 cents an hour for scrubbing floors, she suddenly realized that she could make a lot more money if she just robbed the motel instead. So she robbed her boss, and then she tied herself to a chair. When the police arrived, she said that she w…
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(This article contains spoilers for Psycho and Les Diaboliques. And The Sixth Sense.) This year marks both the 60-year anniversary of Psycho and the 65-year anniversary of Les Diaboliques. Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, has become one of the most famous movies of all time. Its brutal murder in a shower and its jolting all-strings score by Bernard Herrmann have acquired the status of memes. Even people who haven’t seen the movie have mimed stabbing movements while emitting staccato screeches to evoke the idea of a psychopath. Les Diaboliques, made 5 years before Psycho by French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, isn’t as well-known these days, though we might not ha…
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Lone Star Sleuths: An Anthology of Texas Crime Fiction from the Wittliff Collections (UT Press, 2007) included a bibliography of 196 Texas authors, past and present. Likely there are enough now to fill every one of the state’s 254 counties. Among the names—from Texas or writing about Texas—were some of the best in the business: Jim Thompson, Joe R. Lansdale, James Crumley, Rick Riordan, Patricia Highsmith, James Lee Burke, Harry Hunsicker, Rolando Hinojosa, Walter Mosley, Jay Brandon, Kinky Friedman, Lee Child, Dan Jenkins. An updated list today surely would include Attica Locke, Cormac McCarthy, Meg Gardiner, Nic Pizzolatto, Kathleen Kent, Lisa Sandlin, and Fernando Flor…
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Travel through time and space with October’s best international thrillers, some set in the past, and some concerned with fractured memory and never-solved crimes. Whether you’re interested in picking up a Nordic noir, immersing yourself in a French gothic thriller, or staying up late with a South Korean thriller, these international crime books are the perfect pulse-pounding reads to warm you up this fall. Kjell Ola Dahl, The Assistant Translated by Don Bartlett Orenda Books Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but in Europe in the late 1930s, a cheating spouse is never just a cheating spouse (especially when a PI gets involved). In this historical Scandi noir set dur…
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“Your father was working for the CIA,” said Bogdan, husband of my second cousin, a provocative person, especially after several bottles of local Slovenian wine. Nine of us were finishing a pleasant dinner in Ribić, a seafood restaurant on the Adriatic coast near Trieste in 2010. We were reminiscing about the years our American and Slovenian families had known each other, a relationship that began in 1951, when I was brought to Yugoslavia as a ten-month-old. My parents were in London for a year on a Fulbright grant when my father decided to visit the Slovenia mountain village his parents left in 1911. Bogdan’s claim stopped the conversation. “Preposterous, out-of-th…
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After Duso left, Brunetti began to consider how best to go about questioning Vio’s uncle. He could present himself unexpectedly at the office of the transport company and ask to speak to Signor Borgato, or he could arrive with the full panoply of the law: visit not announced, police launch with an armed officer as well as the pilot, demands in place of suggestions. And certainly more trouble for Marcello. Brunetti had always loathed, above all, bullies: he despised their arrogance, their contempt for people weaker than they, and their calm assurance that they were to have more of everything for the asking or taking. To oppose them was to provoke them, and to provoke them…
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Meet Mexico’s first narco. For public enemy number one, José del Moral, was a bit of a disappointment. As the police dragged him out of his house on Calle San Jeronimo in the center of Mexico City on July 20, 1908, he cut a disheveled figure. Grimacing from his toothless mouth, he was in his late fifties, grey-haired, and dressed in a tattered waistcoat and trousers. Of course, the tabloid press of the time didn’t call him a narco. They had yet to come up with such convenient shorthand. Instead, he was “the capital’s poisoner in chief” and “the king of the grifos [stoners].” Del Moral was not royalty, but he was the capital’s biggest marijuana wholesaler. Three days ea…
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I heard about Tony Costa weeks before I met him. I was seven that summer of 1966, when Mom got the job at the Royal Coachman and the three of us shared a single room on the first floor near the office. Louisa and I did our best to stay out of her hair, and whenever I could, I’d tag along behind Cecelia as she made her rounds through the rooms. If she wasn’t humming some church hymn, she was talking about “my Tony.” “When my Tony gets back from his trip, I’ll have him come over and meet you.” “My Tony is a good man.” “I raised my Tony by myself after his father died in the war.” She didn’t say what war, but I figured it was a long time ago and far away. Cecelia talked ab…
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The headline pretty much says it all—after three decades of reviewing an incredibly wide variety of crime novels, Marilyn Stasio has retired from writing the New York Times Book Review’s crime column, although she will still contribute occasional reviews to the newspaper. Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita and frequent contributor to national publications as well as editor of a number of landmark anthologies, is the natural choice to succeed Stasio—Pamela Paul of the NYT calls her the “the most obvious suspect” and we couldn’t agree more. We won’t be seeing her Crime Lady newsletter as much anymore, but we’re looking forward to reading her column—the first one’s up…
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Revisiting The Anderson Tapes, Sidney Lumet’s Wisely Paranoid Heist Film, 50 Years Later
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The Anderson Tapes is a heist movie, there’s no doubt about that. It depicts the typical thrills and shenanigans of the genre, beginning when a charismatic ringleader assembles a colorful crew of criminal masterminds with varied skills, to pull off one last job. It is, to say the least, a good time at the movies. When it was released in 1971, it did quite well at the box office, grossing $5 million. But it received mixed reviews, and if it is remembered today at all, it is for presenting the world with the first mainstream film performance of Christopher Walken. But, if you really listen to The Anderson Tapes, then you will learn that it is bolder than a traditional heis…
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Setting is a key element in all fiction, but in crime, mystery, and suspense, a book’s setting plays a critical role in establishing the flavor of the story. Imagine reading about murders that take place in a dumpster-lined New York City alley…in a family-owned café in an Iowa farming community…in an isolated Alaskan hunting lodge, and you immediately envision three vastly different mysteries. Many years ago, I survived a harrowing whitewater rafting accident, so when I began writing Over the Falls, my starting point was the vision of several specific whitewater kayaking scenes. Once I coupled those scenes with Bryn Collins, a main character who has walled herself off f…
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It’s no secret that cozy mysteries often feature cats. They’re the trusty side-kicks, the comic reliefs, the silent partners with noses dewy for crime. Rarely are they the protagonists though. That role is saved for the sleuthy humans with their dual legs, lavender lattes, and marvelous penchants for snooping. Yet, as much as I love these mysteries with their human protags and perspectives, as an animal lover, I always find myself wanting to know more about the cats. Perhaps it’s because I’ve realized that when they bathe they’re actually doing laundry, or because during food time they all have the vocal ranges of Pavarotti, but I’m curious to experience the world (and th…
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I was born an only child, and to my sorrow remained so. Growing up I longed for a brother or sister, someone I could connect with in a special way. All my life I’ve been searching, but that connection remains a mystery to me, a fascinating puzzle I’ve yet to resolve. Which is why in my novels I try to peel back the layers of the particular closeness between siblings. And yet, as I’ve discovered to my great surprise, many siblings are not close. In fact, a bitter enmity has arisen between them, something that, again, I cannot understand. To me, having a sibling is so precious I can’t fathom how people could throw it away as if it was yesterday’s paper. And, like yesterday…
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In 2015, American writer Robert Stone passed away in Key West at the age of 77, and the world lost a literary lion. Stone was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, once for the PEN/Faulkner Award and five times for the National Book Award for Fiction. He always let his books do his talking and he rarely sought the spotlight. His passing was noticed by aficionados—Bruce Weber’s obituary in the New York Times was especially good—but, in general, the event made few ripples on the world stage. As a devotee who had read, and re-read, all of Stone’s eight novels, including one that I believe is among the very best American crime novels, I wondered if the great writer’s legac…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Lisa Gardner, Before She Disappeared (Dutton) “… a sharply-written, tension-filled yarn full of twists readers are unlikely to see coming. The most compelling element, however, is the character of Frankie, a recovering alcoholic whose obsession with the missing is a penance of sorts for the burden of guilt and grief she carries over a past trauma that took the life of a man she loves.” –Bruce DeSilva (Associated Press) Anders Roslund, Knock Knock (Putnam) “With a story stretching from Stockholm to Montenegro and back, this is definitely a tense and detailed thriller, giving some inter…
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I think it’s safe to say that becoming an expert in Shakespeare’s plays presents difficulties. What would “expertise” entail? Does you need to know every consistency and inconsistency in all the versions of every play cobbled together in the First Folios (pluralized because all the extant versions are also slightly different)? What about wordplay rooted in local pronunciation of the era, which sounded a little like current English in areas of Ireland or England’s West Country? Should you know the etymology of every single word—if Shakespeare didn’t allegedly coin it—and everything that word alluded to at the historical moment in which each play was written, a date that’s …
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