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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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Adam Oyebanji, Braking Day (DAW) “This is a story of people who are their own worst enemies as groups fracture, danger ramps up, and options close in. It will appeal to fans of colony ship stories and coming-of-age tales.” Library Journal, starred review Anna Downes, Shadow House (Minotaur Books) “Downes is . . . sowing the seeds of psychological terror, rooted in everyday traumas from sleeplessness to coping with teens, and branching out to create a nightmare world. A hair-raising mood piece you’ll be glad to awaken from.” Kirkus Reviews Will Thomas, Fierce Poison (Minotau…
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Sometimes this whole “city” thing can really get you down. So many people, so much noise, dirt, traffic. You need a break from the urban. Somewhere remote, quiet, maybe even lonely. I’m thinking perhaps, the Faroe Islands. Eighteen islands form the archipelago of the Faroes. Two hundred miles north of Scotland, about halfway between Norway and Iceland, technically a ‘constituent country’ of the Kingdom of Denmark, and with a population of just over 50,000 hardy folk speaking Faroese, which is apparently impenetrable even to their neighbouring Danes. The best descriptors for the islands are rugged, windy, wet, cloudy, and surrounded by whales. You’re a long way up north so…
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The big three. Or, maybe it’s The Big Three. Either way, it’s impossible to exaggerate their influence on literature the world over. Located in Edinburgh, Scotland, in an area of Old Town called Lawnmarket, is a place that celebrates them as they deserve to be celebrated. The Writers’ Museum is all about Scottish writers Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, and Robert Burns. Inside the museum you’ll find many collections – books, manuscripts, notes, portraits, and personal items like Burns’s actual writing desk, the rocking horse Scott used as a child, and Stevenson’s wardrobe, which was made by the infamous Deacon Brodie, whose life might have been the inspiration for…
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It’s been raining for three days straight by the time I find a moment to sit down and watch my screeners of Tokyo Vice, HBO Max’s new series, a fish-out-of-water newsroom-noir set in 1999 Japan. A dark, rainy evening is the perfect backdrop to take in the show, whose inaugural episode (directed by Michael Mann) takes place across numerous dark, rainy evenings. In this way, the series might seem to resemble every other movie set in Tokyo: shadowy and rain-slicked streets, glowing neon signs, dim karaoke lounges, billboards merging ukiyo-e aesthetics with pop art. It looks a little like Blade Runner, a little like Lost in Translation. But it clearly tries to move past such …
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When Satan finally returned, old Beelzebub came in the form of a smiley-faced, spray-painted figure on the wall of a small country church. The scene at the church, as reported in The Muncie Evening Press in April 1989, included a pentagram, the goofily drawn devil himself and a one-legged baby doll with some red substance on it. Could it be blood? And as Dana Carvey’s Church Lady used to say on “Saturday Night Live,” could it be … Satan? I can forgive my old newspaper employer and the reporter who provided the breathless coverage of what a police officer believed he had stumbled across: evidence of Satan worship. That’s because the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s was a r…
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That there are two systems of justice in America, one for the wealthy, one for the poor, is hardly a novel observation. But that there are two types of science, one for the rich and one for poor people, is less commonly understood. “Poor people science,” a theme I explore throughout Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System, is the difference between the scientific evidence used in civil litigation, where money is at stake, and the “scientific” evidence used in the American criminal justice system, where life and liberty are at stake. The difference speaks to our values as a society. I am not a scientist. I’m a lawyer, a second-generation public defender. My …
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If the key to comedy is timing, the key to subterfuge is, well… also timing. Adapted from Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series (the eighth installment of which is due out this May), Apple TV+’s Slow Horses launched last week with a bang—literally. At the end of the first two episodes the streamer dropped by way of premiere, one of the series’ titular Slow Horses ends up slumped on a rainy front stoop, shot through the head. Pan back, cut to black, see most of you could-have-been spies next week. If this sounds like the culmination of what must have been an explosive pair of opening hours, you don’t know the Slow Horses. Incompetent, dull, and slow off the mark, the Slow Ho…
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Every writer I know has a finely honed system for avoiding writing. Some develop a sudden need to deep-clean their houses when they’re on deadline. Others (fantasy writers, in particular) convince themselves that they can’t write the story until they’ve fully developed the monetary system and international trade patterns of the world they’ve imagined. For most writers of historical fiction? It’s research. I’m guilty. Oh, am I guilty. For anyone working in the Gilded Age, research is a marvelously effective means of procrastination. There’s just so much fascinating historical minutia available from the period. Photographs, letters, dinner menus, personal diaries, and eve…
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Hello, readers, and hello, April. There are some fantastic books on the near horizon by the writers you love: Adrian McKinty, Elizabeth Hand, Don Winslow, Sara Paretsky..I could go on but since you are here waiting patiently let’s talk about April. It’s not quite as spectacular as March, and May is an embarrassment of choices, but there is plenty here to like. Let’s look at these books, then, as palate cleanser, a literary amuse bouche to keep you reading until the summer begins. The Secrets We Share, Edwin Hill (Kensington) Hill’s Hester Thurby series is a delight, but I always like to see a good writer trying new things. Hill’s first standalone is a story of siste…
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PEGGY September 1945 “Frank, if you would only listen. I’m not saying I want to leave you and move in here. I’m not even saying I’m tempted . . .” When there’s no reply, Peggy turns from the window, but her father-in-law is gone. She hears him descend the stairs, and the latch clicks on the front door, and when she peers down from the window he’s there, on the paved terrace, looking out across the garden. Peggy pivots hands on hips, taking in the overflowing bookcase, and the hairy cat basket, and the four-poster bed with red curtains. Aunt Maude’s bed. The mattress is as high as a pony’s back—how ever did the old lady manage getting in and out? Laurie would love it …
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Good morning! I have amazing news. It turns out that author, actor, esteemed Sherlockian, NBA-all-time-leading scorer, NAACP Image Award-nominee, Presidential Medal of Freedom-recipient, and all-around Renaissance man Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote an episode of <em>Veronica Mars</em>. From the new season! It is going to be a wonderful day, folks. This fact was recently shared on Twitter by writer and Bitch Media co-founder Andi Zeisler, who tweeted in jubilant stupefaction, “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a writer on the Veronica Mars reboot and none of you monsters told me?!? What is Twitter even FOR.” Yes, indeed! We agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly and looked…
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I’ve always been drawn to the nineteenth century, and I’ve probably seen nearly every true crime drama and documentary on television, so it’s no surprise my first novel is based on a true crime set in the mid-1800s. I’ve also read a lot of historical fiction, of course, and especially enjoy novels based on real people and true events, whether it’s about a murder or an interesting but relatively unknown historical figure, often thrust unwillingly into the spotlight. It’s been said the truth is often stranger than fiction. I would say the truth is often more fascinating than fiction. At least that’s what I found when I researched my first novel about a murdered 19th-century…
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Kellye Garrett spends her days coming up with ways to commit murder. For anybody who’s read her books, that’s probably no surprise. Kellye is the queen of the twist, which makes sense considering her background in screenwriting. A graduate of USC’s famed film school, Kellye spent eight years in Hollywood, including a stint working for the CBS drama Cold Case. Kellye’s the author of Hollywood Homicide, Hollywood Ending, and Like a Sister. She’s been awarded nearly every crime-writing award out there, and is known to give one hell of an acceptance speech! Despite warning me she’d be my “most boring guest yet,” Kellye goes deep into her writing process while offering up pr…
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When do we truly grow into our adult selves? Is it when we graduate high school or college, get our first job or apartment, solidify our first serious relationship? Or do we learn who we really are only when we’re under pressure or in pain, coping with heartache or weathering a crisis? Maybe it’s a bit of both. Ideally, we never stop changing or growing, but we certainly learn a lot about who we are and what we’re capable of when we’re up against the wall, struggling to overcome obstacles, or trying to regain our equilibrium during rocky times. Rocky times abound at the start of my coming-of-age thriller All the Best Liars, out April 5 from Flatiron Books. The book’s th…
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If you’re a mother, you’ve probably been called a ‘superhero’ at one time or another. The analogy is much used, and for good reason. According to the dictionary, a superhero is ‘one who possesses abilities beyond ordinary people, and uses them to protect human life’—and what are mums if not that? As far as superpowers go, we may not be fending off laser beam attacks or other such unrealistic feats but, hello, we grow people inside our bodies. We push them out in a tumble of arms and legs and tiny fingernails, and our breasts become food. We endure the kind of sleep-deprivation often favoured by expert interrogators, and operate for years in a constant state of hypervigil…
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For almost a year after he was shot, Stride didn’t miss his job. The shooting happened in late July, when a bullet tore open one chamber of his heart. The surgeons performed an emergency thoracotomy to save him, which meant cutting open his entire chest cavity. The odds of his surviving the surgery at all had been no better than one in four. He’d actually died on the operating table during the procedure, and they’d had to shock his heart back to life. The doctors had warned him that it wouldn’t be an easy or fast recovery, and it wasn’t. It was well into the fall months before he felt strong enough to take daily walks on the beach again. Even then, a few minutes of effo…
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So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. —Epicurus Welcome to the town of Sand Lake, New York, population 8,425: a beatific, pastoral town nestled in the south-central corner of Rensselaer County, about thirteen miles east of Albany, the state capital. On the town’s outskirts, deep within the woody terrain, lies the neighborhood of Taborton, named after Mount Tabor in Lower Galilee, Israel, which is where, according to the New Testament, the transfiguration of Jesus occurred; he radiated with light and conversed with the great prophets Moses and Elijah. Taborto…
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Einstein once wrote: People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. This is hard to understand because we experience time as an arrow, life as sequential. I’ll leave it to physicists and mathematicians to parse Einstein’s exact meaning—and chose instead to look at it as a nod towards the possibility of time travel. Having Einstein’s stamp of approval on the dream of time travel means maybe, just maybe, someone could invent a time machine—and that’s a perfect place to start a story. It’s where my second novel, ATOMIC ANNA, begins, with the convincing, Einstein approved possibility t…
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One of my favorite movies is the crime classic “Before and After.” Meryl Streep plays Carolyn Ryan, a doctor and mother married to a hot sculptor played by Liam Neeson. (Neeson even sports a scruffy moustache.) Life is idyllic for the couple and their teen son, Jacob, until the town Sheriff shows up at their front door, looking for Jacob and revealing that Jacob’s girlfriend has been brutally murdered. The parents are shocked and reeling; Jacob is not, as he should be, asleep in his bed. Hot sculptor dad decides in an instant that his son might be a murderer and refuses to allow the Sheriff inside. Mom Meryl stares, stunned, at her husband, who believes without pause that…
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We’re all likely aware of examples of the law of unintended or unexpected consequences—when an unforeseen benefit, drawback, or perverse result flows from a purposeful societal policy or individual action. For example, on the benefits scorecard, the longtime pain reliever aspirin gained new purpose when found to help prevent heart attacks, and of course, there’s the blood pressure drug that found an entirely new purpose and worldwide fame as a little blue pill called Viagra. In the drawbacks category, there are many examples of societies introducing animals or plants for purposes of food (rabbits in Australia), decoration (kudzu in the US), or pest control (European sta…
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FRANKENSTEIN, published in 1818, established Mary Shelley’s monster as a permanent icon of horror, and is considered by many to be the first true science fiction novel. Yet The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, published nine years later, has a much stronger claim to that position. It was also the first work of fiction to feature an Egyptian mummy restored to life, but it was too far ahead of its time to become the foundational text for the later wave of horror featuring vengeful mummies. Despite some Gothic flourishes, The Mummy! is not strictly a tale of horror. It does not deal in ancient curses or dark magic, and if at first the mummy of Cheops appears as a…
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In his essay “When Fiction Lives in Fiction,” Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges points to some moments in literature that we could call “auto reference,” in the sense of a logical loop in which fiction turns to itself. Borges first mentions the night in One Thousand and One Nights in which Scheherezade begins telling the sultan her own story as a captive, triggering the possibility of an infinite cycle: “Could the reader clearly envision the vast possibility of this interpolation, its curious threat? Let the queen persist and the motionless king will hear forever the truncated story of One Thousand and One Nights, now infinite and circular…” Borges also comments on…
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On July 4th, 1827, Private James Lewis deserted his post in the British East India Company’s army base in Agra, India. He was soon a wanted man. As a fugitive traveling the region, he assumed the name Charles Masson, passing himself off variously as a scholar, a physician, and an adventurer. He would eventually come to Afghanistan. Throughout his journeys, he was fascinated by the lore of Alexander the Great. The following is excerpted from Edmund Richardson’s The King’s Shadow: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Deadly Quest for the Lost City of Alexandria. ___________________________________ Masson was a long way from safety. No westerner had ever tried to travel through …
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When Grace D. Li’s absurdly entertaining Portrait of a Thief came across my (now virtual) desk, I inhaled it faster than a toddler can fail the marshmallow test, and for the same reason—why ever post-pone consuming something so utterly delicious? In Portrait of a Thief, a group of Chinese-American college students are given an epic task by a mysterious Chinese government official—steal back the art once looted by colonizers and return it to its country of origin. In order to steal the art, they must come up with an elaborate heist plan, and also get into not a small number of scrapes and shenanigans. Grace D. Li was kind enough to answer a few questions ahead of her new b…
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When my publisher asked me to write a new historical crime series with a female protagonist, my first thought was to set it in New York, where I live. I thought I knew something of the city’s history, having wandered its streets happily for many years in search of historical treasures—old buildings, hidden secrets in dark alleys, street names reminiscent of its Dutch past—even visiting the caves once inhabited by its native people, the Lenape tribe, who gave Manhattan its name (“the island of many hills”). I am a frequent visitor to the New York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York; I had two friends who were city tour guides I thought the research …
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