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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I first learned about crime fiction from my father Dan Riordan and his brother Paul. They were old school gents and always called crimes novels “mysteries.” I was introduced to all the greats: Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane and Agatha Christie, Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald. It was always one-way traffic, I would read the books they gave me, not the other way around. That traffic pattern changed in 2005 when I sent them both a copy of a new novel by Michael Connelly: The Lincoln Lawyer, the first book in what would become a long-running series starring Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer, Michael “Mickey” Haller. By 2005, both Dan and…
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“After a last great interval, a seventh sun will appear and the Earth will blaze with fire until it becomes one mass of flame. The mountains will be consumed, a spark will be carried on the wind and go as far as the worlds of God. Therefore, monks, even the monarch of mountains will be burnt and perish and exist no more—excepting those who have seen the path.” – Pāli Canon (29 BCE) As much as we may want a favorite book or television series to go on forever, there comes a time it will end. It is an inevitability. We do not resist this, nor are we shocked by it. It’s a format we learn from the first stories we hear—just as every tale begins with “Once Upon a Time,” so mus…
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Popular culture of TV, film and crime novels would have us believe the role of a sex worker is largely to be a nameless body in the background: perhaps semi-clad on someone’s lap, perhaps grinding against a pole, sooner rather than later most probably found dead in a back alley. Their deaths might precipitate action, a Detective has a case to solve (although the case will only catch attention if several sex workers are killed – one dead sex worker isn’t really all that, is it? Please note I write that with a heavy sense of irony). If the sex worker’s character is fleshed-out at all, it’s when the detective discovers that they were uneducated, unstable addicts without aspi…
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I recently chaired a panel in which several American crime writers discussed their most memorable discoveries in terms of noir television and film during the various COVID lockdowns we have all endured. As the moderator I did not get any time to discuss my own discovery, but if I had it would have been the Australian/American television production, Mr Inbetween. Premiering on the American FX Network in September 2018, Mr Inbetween has its US fans, but remains largely unknown. For that matter, it is also criminally unseen in Australia, where it was filmed. Mr Inbetween tells the story of Ray Shoesmith (played by the show’s creator and writer, Scott Ryan), a Sydney assassi…
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When I look back at who I was just a few years ago and who I am today, it always gives me a jolt. A lot changes throughout our lives, but more often those changes happen slowly and in parts. We move house or change jobs; we meet people, we lose people. At the end of 2016, twenty years of working in Essex as an NHS radiographer in cancer services had left me feeling exhausted, frustrated, and mostly just sad. I wrote when I could, which wasn’t often, and sold short stories while still harbouring my lifelong dream of one day becoming a full-time novelist. And then, shortly after I was given a life-changing medical diagnosis, a very close family member died unexpectedly. I t…
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What does fashion have in common with fiction? At first glance, probably not much. You could argue that they’re both means to express oneself, which is accurate. But these two worlds couldn’t be further apart on the glamorous spectrum, so it might seem bizarre that we ended up going from one to the other. Turns out, there is another unforeseen connection: they both made us cry and have similar barriers to entry for certain demographics. It’s an open secret—fashion is a cutthroat industry. Even if you avoid the Anna Wintours of the business, its ruthless nature can lead to you breaking down and sobbing on any given day. But whenever we cried during our attempt to break i…
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DAY ONE, 7:00 a.m. My wife and I walk our dog at dawn. We live across the street from a little lake connected by a channel to Florida’s St. Johns River, which, eighteen miles away, empties into the Atlantic Ocean. Even so far from the ocean, the lake is tidal, eventually refreshing its old brackish water with new brackish water. But in summer months when the lake is still, Day-Glo green algae scums the surface. It’s a terrible place to dump a body. Our dog Louise, a boxer mix named for Joe Lewis, runs ahead of us and sniffs at the ground beside the lake. She’s a tough old dog, dragging a hind leg years after a car hit her, the muscle above the leg carrying buckshot from…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Christoffer Carlsson (transl. Rachel Willson-Broyles), Blaze Me a Sun (Hogarth) “The first great crime novel of 2023 is Blaze Me a Sun by the decorated Swedish crime writer Chrisoffer Carlsson, who twines together national and personal trauma to devastating effect.” –New York Times Book Review Sean Adams, The Thing in the Snow (William Morrow) “Who knew there was so much wit in hell? The Thing in the Snow is a mystery, an office satire, and a slow-boil study of madness. Trust nothing in this book save for its deadpan brilliance.” –Ryan Chapman Ana Reyes, The House in the Pines…
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The tall, stylish woman lingered by a rail of fur coats in a top London department store, diamond rings glinting, as her fingers brushed against the most luxurious sable. World War Two was won, but with rationing still in place, such a beautiful garment cost more than six months’ wages. This lady was clearly wealthy, so the shopgirl had no qualms about turning her back, to help another woman try on a silk nightgown. It only took a moment for fur to be snatched from its hanger, rolled into a tight bundle, and shoved, unceremoniously, into a special pair of shop-lifters bloomers, which the elegant thief was wearing under her skirt. The sable coat nestled there as she str…
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Welcome to Karachi – Pakistan’s most populous city with more than twenty million people living crammed together on the coast of the Arabian Sea. Karachi has gone from being known as the “City of Lights” in the 1960s and 1970s for its vibrant nightlife before ethnic and political conflict in the 1980s partly spurred by the Afghan-Soviet War in neighbouring Afghanistan. Karachi has suffered from high rates of violent crime which, when spiking, have been met by harsh police and security forces crackdowns. And they seem to work – Karachi dropped from being ranked the world’s sixth-most dangerous city for crime in 2014, to 128th by 2022. So let’s dig down into the city’s under…
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Emotions ran high in the university town of Missoula, Montana, on April 12, 2010. Police termed it “a night of chaos,” with rowdy demonstrators and counter-protesters clogging the streets around City Hall. Within, a tense debate ran well past midnight over what would become Montana’s first nondiscrimination ordinance against LGBTQ+ people. The surrounding hubbub might explain why it took far too long for the man slumped in a nearby alley to rate a second glance. The alley was within sight of both City Hall and the Oxford Saloon, a hangout for the Missoula’s transients. A passed-out drunk near the Ox was par for the course. By the time Johnny Joe Belmarez rated that sec…
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In recent years, our culture has started to speak more openly about our mistreatment of famous women. We’ve looked back at the early aughts with chagrin, lamenting how, for years, female celebrities were mocked and belittled by the tabloids for anything from the shape of their bodies, to how they mothered their children. I was a preteen during this time. I distinctly remember when paparazzi took photos of Nicole Ritchie running on the beach; gossip rags claimed that she was suffering from a life-threatening eating disorder, with no sympathy for how this diagnosis, if it were true, would impact this young woman’s day-to-day life in the spotlight. In a similar, and more hi…
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2022 was a fantastic year for television, so making this list was harder than usual. Picking 15 to rave about on this website was nearly impossible. You do not know what I have been through, making this thing. So I picked 20. TV of other genres was excellent as well, and if you’re looking for recommendations in that department, try Season 1 of Pachinko, Season 4 of Stranger Things, Season 2 of Abbott Elementary, Season 4 of What We Do in the Shadows, Season 3 of Derry Girls, Season 1 of The Bear, Season 4 of Atlanta, Season 1 of Fleishman is in Trouble, and Season 3 of The Boys. But if you want crime TV, keep reading! This was a great year for “the miniseries,” a great…
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We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it. Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction; Nonfiction; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; and Literature in Translation. Today’s installment: Mystery and Crime. * 1. Paradais by Fernanda Melchor, trans. by Sophie Hughes (New Directio…
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Noir stories deal with doom. In such stories, as the great Cornell Woolrich succinctly put it, “first you dream, then you die.” So, if that is the case, how does It’s a Wonderful Life, the tear-jerking family friendly Christmas classic have anything to do with noir? It is because It’s a Wonderful Life is a reverse noir. Or to put it another way it is a kind of film blanc. As Aristotle pointed out, all dramatic stories have to do with two things: fear and pity. Fear is the motivational power behind most human action. Why do we want more money? Because we fear not having shelter or food i.e. dying. Why do we want fancy cars and jobs and more status? So that we …
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I know, we’ve run a lot of lists this December. But when there are so many great subgenres, why not highlight them all? Onwards to one of my favorite kinds of mystery and thriller: the speculative kind. Noir and science fiction have long gone hand in hand, and recently alternative histories have made their own particular mark in the crime world. Below, you’ll find some of the best crossovers to come out in 2022. S.A. Barnes, Dead Silence (Tor Nightfire) S. A. Barnes has crafted a masterful horror thriller in space with Dead Silence. A small communications team at the edge of colonized space following a distress signal stumbles upon the wreck of the most luxurious spa…
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Maybe we shouldn’t put so much stock in first impressions. The storied costume designer Edith Head initially met Alfred Hitchcock during preproduction of his film Notorious (1946). She had been loaned out by her home studio, Paramount Pictures, at the request of star Ingrid Bergman, with whom Edith had developed a rapport. (Forgive the familiarity. I call her Edith because she’s one-half of the detective duo in the Golden Age Hollywood mysteries that I write with my wife Rosemarie under the pen name Renee Patrick.) Edith certainly understood the assignment; a daring midriff-baring, zebra-striped top immediately establishes Bergman’s Alicia Huberman as a self-destructive p…
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When I was in the first stages of writing my new novel American Afterlife, I didn’t know how to write a great thriller. In fact, I didn’t even know how to write an average thriller. I wasn’t sure how to structure a thriller or which elements would make it fit into the genre. I was completely ignorant when it came to arcs, themes, and motifs. I didn’t know what made a narrator a great thriller narrator, and I also didn’t know how to captivate an audience while scaring them a little bit. I’d written and published novels with Random House, Simon & Schuster, etc., but my novels were literary or young adult, eco, or—in once case—a gothic, crime mystery. Critics always use…
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Writing a novel with dual timelines presents opportunities—and challenges. Plotting takes precision. Put simply, a dual timeline novel tells one cohesive story through several time periods and perspectives—typically a character who is living through the events and another character in a different time who is somehow connected to those events. Done well, books of this type can offer depth and insights that their more linear counterparts may not. Regardless of genre, readers are often treated to multiple mysteries as the connection between the characters and events in each era unfolds. Techniques vary, of course. Structurally, an author may employ alternating chapters, mu…
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Do you follow every rabbit hole in true crime podcasts or watch serial killer documentaries religiously? Does the Forensics Files or Cold Case Files theme songs ever get stuck in your head? Do you pour over each detail in Only Murders in the Building looking for clues so you can figure out the killer before our heroes Mabel, Charles, and Oliver do? Then you, my friend, are an armchair sleuth! You’re by no means alone. Up to 50% of podcasts right now are based on true crime. Murder mysteries—real and fictional—are topping the charts of Netflix and Hulu. We can’t get enough of it, which is a good thing because I’m an avid reader (and writer!) of cozy mysteries. If you’re b…
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The new renaissance of horror fiction came to my attention just last year, when the number of books hit such a critical mass I couldn’t help but notice, but the return of the spookiest genre to the highest levels of acclaim has been building for some time. Right now, if you speak with anyone in America, they’ll probably say that horror cinema is where the most relevant stories are being told today, and I’d argue the same for horror fiction, where our wildest fears meet our darkest realities, and every moment holds potential for either shocking violence or even more shocking kindness. Without further ado, here are the 12 best horror novels of 2022, followed by a list of no…
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The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. Katie Gutierrez, More Than You’ll Ever Know (William Morrow) This book is full of so much love. Lore Rivera has everything a woman is told to want: a husband who loves her, two children who work hard to succeed, and a career that values her. When her husband’s business falls prey to a recession, she finds herself suppressing her own success to make her husband feel better. Meanwhile, she meets another man in Mexico City who finds her success a turn-on. Soon enough, she’s got two husbands; soon after that, one husband finds out and kills the other. Forty ye…
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Over a decade ago, I read a book about the Women’s Suffrage movement, and I was surprised by how little of the real story I knew. I had no idea women who demonstrated for this right were jailed and beaten or that they had endured hunger strikes and forced feedings while imprisoned—all to convince the men in charge that they deserved the right to vote. I decided someone should tell this story, and then I realized the someone was me. But how do you tell a story about women working to get the vote without sounding like a textbook? I decided to add a little spice by having my heroine be a con artist who accidentally gets locked up with a group of suffragists and becomes a co…
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2022 was an incredible year for crime films, I’ll just say that up front. We had at least three big-screen whodunnits, several neo-noirs, reboots of beloved detective franchises, two cannibalism stories, several meditations on victimhood, some good superhero movies, some bad superhero movies, and Bullet Train. Here are the rules for our selection. As usual, all films considered had to be full-length feature films, released (in theaters or on streaming services) in the United States during the 2021 calendar year. One of the most annoying things is that several of the year’s best crime films—Australia’s Nitram and France’s Happening (not to mention the best overall, non-cr…
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When I first moved to LA, I felt like I was in another country – and sometimes another planet. There were red-tiled Spanish mansions, giant Seussian cactuses, and scores of gorgeous, gazelle-like young people. But there was also a dark side. Tent cities just blocks from city hall, downtown streets littered with needles, broken glass, discarded underwear, and ambiguous biological stains. Then there were the surprises. Chic speakeasies inside subterranean sandwich joints, soulless-seeming strip malls containing the most delicious hole-in-the-walls, tiny 20-seat theaters staffed by brilliant actors with big dreams. LA is a hard place to put your finger on. It’s a city…
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Where it All Began
