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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There were signs of life back on the Brighton Beach boardwalk. Brighton Beach Avenue was entirely quiet, but on the boardwalk, husbands and wives strolled to-and-fro. They wore down coats from the bargain basement shops on Brighton Beach Avenue. They delighted in the stillness of the night—engaging in a European mode of relaxation called la dolce far niente—sweet inertia. To my anxious Egyptian eyes, they looked like zombies. They say that the boardwalk at Brighton Beach looks like St. Petersburg. Some of the night people of the boardwalk looked like their parents had, strolling in their sensible, Soviet, monochromatic woollens along the frigid Baltic. I was hurriedly …
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A look at the week’s best new releases. * Kate Atkinson, The Shrines of Gaiety (Doubleday) “[Atkinson] takes on London in the 1920s, masterfully capturing both its shimmer and its seediness…It’s a deliciously fun, absorbing read.” –Time Sarah Bonner, Her Perfect Twin (Grand Central) “Airtight, cat-and-mouse plotting with twists that will draw Gone Girl comparisons, this is a compulsively bingeable debut thriller.” –Booklist Iain Reid, We Spread (Gallery/ Scout) “Reid combines magnetic character development with clipped, eerie prose in this masterfully crafted psychological thriller that will keep the reader guessing until the very last word on the fin…
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Below are six YA novels that I adore for their complexity, their willingness to grapple with larger social and moral questions, and their resistance to easy answers. Part of adolescence isn’t only coming to understand one’s own self and place in the world; it’s about questioning why the world is the way it is in the first place. No wonder adults find literature and teens so terrifying. They ask the questions we don’t always have the answers to and force the issues we’ve never been prepared to answer for. Courtney Summers, The Project A girl grieving for her shattered family. A father grieving for his lost son. Their pain, their suffering, as well as her own, lead you…
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Joe R. Lansdale is the author of more than 50 novels and 30 short story collections and is perhaps best known for his Hap and Leonard series of crime fiction novels. Jussi Piironen is a Finnish artist and illustrator, whose most recent illustrations appear in the graphic novel adaptation of Lansdale’s now-classic Hap & Leonard novel, Mucho Mojo. Thanks to Joe and to Jussi for answering a few questions about the collaborative process, the graphic novel form, and the cult classic series. What inspired you to adapt MUCHO MOJO into the graphic novel form? JOE R. LANSDALE: This is actually a question for Jussi, but for me the answer is simple. What a cool idea! JUSSI …
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Holidays are fun to write about. Each has its own vibe. And we immediately associate iconic symbols with them. Colorful eggs mean it’s Easter and pumpkins take us straight to Halloween. There are special foods that we expect, too, like chocolates on Valentine’s Day and turkey at Thanksgiving. While families don’t gather for all holidays, when they do, authors love to write about dysfunctional family chaos. It can be very entertaining, provided it’s not our families that are involved. A GOOD DOG’S GUIDE TO MURDER is set at Thanksgiving and takes the reader into the holiday season. Holly Miller’s Jack Russell terrier and her calico cat have noses for murder. When they sho…
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Witches are powerful women. Like all powerful women, they have been maligned, persecuted, hated, desired, feared. They are eternal, mythical subjects, a source of endless fascination. In American history, they occupy a unique place where folklore blurs the lines of reality; we remember the “witches” of Salem, Massachusetts, who were not actually witches. They have become totemic figures in television, movies, books, and pop culture, and their appeal shows no signs of waning: as of this writing, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem is devoting a full-scale exhibit to the power and imagery of the witch. The witch has an interesting relationship to ghostlore; she is both part …
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In 1927 Alice Dorothy Ormond Campbell—a thirty-nine-year-old native of Atlanta, Georgia who for the last fifteen years had lived successively in New York, Paris and London, never once returning to the so-called Empire City of the South—published her first novel, an unstoppable crime thriller called Juggernaut, selling the serialization rights to the Chicago Tribune for $4000 ($60,000 today), a tremendous sum for a brand new author. On its publication in January 1928, both the book and its author caught the keen eye of Bessie S. Stafford, society page editor of the Atlanta Constitution, a genteel southern lady who seemingly, like the Bourbons of France, had forgotten nothi…
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In 2018, I was asked to speak at a local university known for its diverse, working-class student body. I identify as queer, southern, and working class, so I said yes. And as a non-academic, not-especially renowned author, I felt like a beautiful unicorn. They were gonna pay me to talk about myself? I could not say no to that. After the speech, members of the department took me out to dinner, which was a lovely gesture, if a bit anxiety-inducing for someone who really just wanted to go home to her wife, cat and TV shows. A professor who taught Southern Fiction was also in attendance. On the way to the restaurant, amid the white noise of rain patter and windshield wipers…
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The twist has become the cornerstone of the psychological thriller, aiming to keep readers on the edge of their seats, turning the pages furiously as the story turns and writhes, and reveals come thick and fast. My debut novel, HER PERFECT TWIN, is—perhaps unsurprisingly —about identical twins; a trope that has been used extensively in thrillers. So, I knew I needed to break the mold and deliver a series of twists that would take the reader on a deliciously dark journey they weren’t initially expecting. To achieve this, I utilized an arsenal of tools (including a trusty whiteboard and stack of post-it notes) to assist in the meticulous plotting required. But I also took …
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The Regency era is often viewed by present-day readers as a romantic time of fancy silks and satins, filled with glittering balls in Mayfair mansions and country house parties at grand estates. But there is a grittier side to the era. Historians consider it to be the birth of the modern world, with radical new ideas coming to life and fomenting fundamental changes in every aspect of society. This is especially true in science and technology, as innovations in chemistry, medicine and engineering—to name just a few of the disciplines—were turning the old world upside down. In my Wrexford & Sloane mystery series, I use scientific innovation as the core catalyst for each…
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In the bedroom that Ralph grew up in, there’s a galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. There are chips of paint where he’d replaced posters of superheroes with posters of bands and beautiful women, all gone now, rolled up and bundled together and leaning in one of the house’s many closets and crannies. When we first moved in, we talked about peeling up the stars, softening the corners with vinegar, scraping them up with the edge of an old credit card. We use something similar at the Northern Star Seniors’ Complex, where I work, to free medical tape from the natural cling of formless flesh, a special tool that only works half as well as a credit card would. We…
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Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age (Berkley Books) “… so inventive, the only ageist wisecracks it deserves are the ones its characters make about themselves … a singular suspense story thanks to its deftly fluctuating tone, which is by turns comical, violent and unexpectedly affecting … t’s impossible not to root for these dangerous dames and their refusal to let themselves be put on the ash heap — a phrase that, in this thriller, should be taken literally.” –Maureen Corrigan (Washington Post) Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion (Harper) “Fast-paced yet wonderfully detailed … Cleverly, the adventures and privations of Ned Whalley and his son-in-law, Will Goffe…
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Sometimes you discover writers in the most roundabout ways. I must have seen Michael Powell’s 1960 film Peeping Tom two or three times before I knew anything about its screenwriter, the man responsible for its unusual story about a shy and sympathetic cameraman who is also a serial killer, his modus operandi being to film his victims while he stabs them. I’d never put together that the name listed as screenwriter in the film’s credits, Leo Marks, bore a similarity to the main character’s name, Mark Lewis. It wasn’t until I bought the Criterion edition of the film on DVD and watched the documentary extra on it called “A Very British Psycho” that I learned the rich story…
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Over the course of the pandemic, we (the royal, anxious, self-isolated we) watched a lot of horror movies. More than usual. In fact, Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s chilling pandemic thriller from 2011 was one of the most streamed movies of 2020. This data generated a few headlines of course, because why on earth would we (the collectively sad and terrified we) want to micro-dose on fear in the middle of a waking nightmare? There’s a thing that people say—usually to themselves just before a rectal exam, but also sometimes to other people going through a tough time: the best way out is always through. Meaning, among other things, that life’s challenges can’t be avoided, on…
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It was Halloween thirty-seven years ago and I was seated with my thumbs balled into my fists, a bit too shy to look into the camera. My mother, hurriedly trying to snap the picture so we could set off trick-or-treating before sundown, attempted to coax out a smile. But I had donned my cowboy hat and my gun belt for this occasion and wouldn’t be caught dead smiling in either of them. Even at five years old, I knew that cowboys never smiled for pictures. But then my mother made a joke and despite my best efforts, she captured my pearly whites. That portrait stands as the earliest record of my fascination with the Old West. I was raised in the East, and since I could rememb…
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On a Saturday in early November, Guido Brunetti, reluctant to go outside, was at home, trying to decide which of his books to remove from the shelves in Paola’s study. Years ago, some months before the birth of their daughter, he had renounced claim to what had been his study so that their second child could have her own bedroom. Paola had offered his books sanctuary on four shelves. At the time, Brunetti had suspected this would not suffice, and eventually it had not: the time had come for The Cull. He was faced with the decision of what to eliminate from the shelves. The first shelf held books he knew he would read again; the second, at eye level, held books he wanted t…
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It’s just about October, which means your streaming services are going to be packed full of horror, but for the avid crime watcher there’s still quite a bit to look forward to, as long as you don’t mind a tinge of fright in your weekly viewing, or else you’re a fan of British mystery in particular, in which case you’re in luck, because there are some gems headed across the Atlantic in the weeks ahead. Here, a few highlights on the calendar. Sherwood (Britbox / Premieres October 4) Set in a Nottinghamshire mining village, Sherwood tracks an investigation into two murders in a community still processing the legacy of a miners’ strike decades before. Clues point to one …
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CrimeReads editors select the best new nonfiction crime books from September and August. Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Godmother: Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women (Penguin) Barbie Latza Nadeau’s new study brings us inside the mafia clans of Italy to draw a revealing portrait of the women who prop up these family structures, and who sometimes build power bases of their own, to violent ends. The book is in large part the story of Pupetta Maresca, the Naples woman who, at eighteen, avenged her husband’s gangland murder, served time in prison, and later became a media sensation. But The Godmother is also about the largely misunderstood role women play…
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I am obsessed. I can’t escape it. My thoughts are dominated by the evil, the mystery, the cruelty of one eccentric episode in modern history: The Cold War. It’s what I read. It’s what I write. It’s my lens for the world. And, even though the Cold War was pronounced dead with the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of 1989, I see evidence of the Cold War around me daily, lurking like some half-seen figure in the shadows. The war in Ukraine? The daily propaganda messages from the Kremlin, amplified by China’s supportive posturing against the West, is the mirror image of events from the Korean War of the 1950s, when China was the combatant and the Soviet Union was the supp…
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“It feels, indeed, as if the characters and everything that happens to them exist in some limbo of the imagination, so that what I am doing is not inventing them but getting in touch with them and putting their story down in black and white, a process of revelation, not of creation.” Nobody could put it better than that. The quotation comes from the inimitable P. D. James, in Talking About Detective Fiction. And that’s what it’s like for me: the characters are there, somewhere in that limbo, and I check in with them whenever I want to see what they’re up to. So, character is, to me, the most important element of a story. And I must have succeeded to some extent: I get v…
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While I’m an unabashed fan of straight-up mysteries—see: the high stack of Simenon in my house, along with the works of Elizabeth Hand, P.D. James, John le Carre, and Stieg Larsson; more than one paperback picked up in an airport bookstore; and roughly ten million police procedurals and Nordic noirs in my streaming history—my deepest love is for mysteries and thrillers that remain mysterious even after the final scene. Sometimes you don’t know who did it, or even what was done; sometimes you know who did it, but will never quite be able to pass judgment on why and what the consequences were; sometimes you, reader, feel implicated as well. The gray areas call to me to come…
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Grant Morrison is best known for their innovative work on comics, from the graphic novel Batman: Arkham Asylum to acclaimed runs on Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the X-Men, as well as their subversive creator-owned titles such as The Invisibles, Seaguy, The Filth, and WE3. Their debut novel, Luda, is the story of an aging drag queen usurped by their promising protégé while performing a pantomime. Morrison was kind enough to answer a few questions about genre, gender, drag, and the art of pantomime. Molly Odintz: Luda is all about the instability of identity, exemplified by drag. What did you want to say about the identities we are assigned, and assume? Grant Mor…
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Several years ago, I was chatting with an editor and mentioned an idea I had about clones and murder in space. She loved the idea and after the ink was dry on the contract, I went into a panic. “Hang on. I don’t know anything about murder mysteries! What have I done?” So I went into research mode. I spent the next few months reading all the Agatha Christie I could get my hands on, and started watching murder shows regularly. I’m from Generation X, so I did know one thing about murder: Jessica Fletcher was the most successful serial killer in history. Or at least that was the joke back then. My husband and I consumed a lot of more recent murder mysteries in TV and book fo…
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In novels (if not in life) there is something very pleasurable about being taken for a ride. You might argue that all fiction does this by luring the reader into a temporary belief that made-up people and events are entitled to their time, energy and emotions—but the effect is definitely heightened when an unreliable narrator is part of the mix. The lack of reliability may be innocent: a result of the narrator’s own limited perspective. It may be knowing, but well-meant, if they have a particular agenda to push. On the other hand, the unreliable narrator may be a deliberate manipulator, wanting nothing more—or less—than to mess with the reader’s mind. The unreliable …
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new novels. * Wanda M. Morris, Anywhere You Run (William Morrow) Wanda Morris burst onto the scene last year with her impeccably plotted legal thriller, All Her Little Secrets, and her new novel keeps a legally-minded heroine as one of its leads but takes us back to 1964. When Violet Richards is raped by a white man, she takes her revenge, then goes on the run, soon followed by her sister Marigold, who aspires to be a lawyer but first must make a decision about her unwanted pregnancy. A southern setting where voting and abortion are both increasingly restricted feels…rather like today, if I’m honest. Wanda Morris, too, …
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