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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Welcome to 2023, thriller lovers! January is here and I have the problem I like: there are easily ten books that could have made this column. I will mention in passing the two books I am most impressed by, and I know I’m not alone: Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (Mariner) and Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows (Mulholland) are the kind of books that might stick with me until December and my 2023 list. I can also vouch for solid January books by writers you probably know by now: Jane Harper’s Exiles (Flatiron) and Mary Kubica’s Just the Nicest Couple (Park Row). So what’s left? Five books that have impressive premises, and/or exceptional writing…
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Two films that work as a double feature are John Cassavetes’ Gloria, from 1980, starring Gena Rowlands, and Erick Zonca’s 2008 film Julia, with Tilda Swinton. Gloria, it’s no secret, inspired Julia; both movies focus on a forty-some-odd woman, unattached in life, who through a violent chain of events comes to have a young child in her custody. Neither woman appears to have the slightest trace of what is called “maternal instinct”, and both Gloria and Julia wind up being on the run from forces, male-dominated, trying to harm them. And yet, in their overall approach and how they unfold, the two films are quite different. They function more as diametric compliments to ea…
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Today, we’re revealing the cover for Kelly J. Ford’s new novel, The Hunt (Thomas & Mercer), scheduled to be released on July 25, 2023. In anticipation of the release, Alex Segura sat down with Ford to discuss the inspiration for her new story. Alex Segura: Kelly, what can you tell us about THE HUNT? Kelly J. Ford: Everything I write seems to come from a nugget of my Arkansas upbringing that I can’t shake, whether it’s the chills I got listening to my dad and Uncle Larry’s ghost stories around a fire, the smells of the world once you leave the asphalt for dirt roads, or the sounds of my childhood favorite local radio DJ revealing the latest clue to the annual Hunt …
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Happy New Year, book lovers! For me, January 1st came and went like a flash, and my TBR pile hasn’t budged one iota since the start of 2022. Not ONE. SINGLE. MILLIMETER. In fact, it’s grown even taller. And the pileup on my e-reader? At this stage it’s reached monumental proportions—a traffic jam of delectable books just waiting to be unleashed. I should begin by confessing that I never make New Year’s resolutions. I only end up disappointed and mad at myself, and who needs more of that? Even where reading books is concerned, especially where reading books is concerned, I simply can’t commit to powering through all of them within a set time frame. My physical TBR pile i…
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Adam and I did all the usual touristy things while in Karachi: Mohatta Palace and French Beach, restaurants and cafés and dhabas. One day, we went to Zainab Market. Adam was mesmerized. In one shop, he picked up a beautiful antique copper paan daan. I explained to him what it was even though he was examining and handling it as if he were more familiar with it than I was. I turned to the shopkeeper to ask how much. The shopkeeper took one look at us and instantly quoted the foreigner rate. Adam replied to him, in Urdu, that he liked the paan daan very much and asked if he could have it for less. The shopkeeper looked at Adam quizzically. “Where is he from?” he asked me, a…
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You’ll notice something unusual in the titles below—while in previous years, we’ve dedicated much of our preview space to crossovers, especially in the realm of horror and science fiction, almost all of the picks for this year’s big most anticipated list are strictly crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Why? Because there are so many darn good ones out this year! There’s, like, a book from every big name in the genre coming out this year, plus a wonderful new crop of debut voices and plenty of up-and-coming writers with new releases. But never fear, we’ll still be running our spinoff previews for YA, horror, historical, and speculative, you just won’t see quite as much…
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Eric LaRocca burst onto the scene with last year’s intense and playful novella, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, and this year he’s back with a new full-length title, Everything the Darkness Eats, to be published in June of this year. Eric LaRocca was kind enough to choose CrimeReads for a cover reveal of his new book, and to answer a few questions about his approach towards horror writing. – It seems like there’s not only a horror renaissance, but a queer horror renaissance – would you agree? I wholeheartedly agree. It’s so gratifying to see openly queer authors operating in the horror sphere with such fearlessness and conviction. Not only is it rewarding …
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Much like her novels, Jane Harper is a force of nature. A former newspaper reporter, Harper’s big break came after winning a first-novel contest in 2015. Since then, there’s been no stopping her. Harper’s books have sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide. She’s won numerous awards, including the CWA Gold Dagger, the British Book Awards Crime and Thriller Book of the Year, the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year and the Australian Indie Awards Book of the Year. Needless to say, I was thrilled to talk shop with such a successful and distinguished crime writer. From Jane’s meticulous planning, to the unique restrictions she enforces on her work space,…
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A few days before Christmas, I drove 6 hours from Stockholm to Halland Province to see my family. About 1.5 hours south of Gothenburg and 1.5 hours north of Malmö, and a little in from the coast, there’s a small place called Marbäck. A hundred people live there, spread out over 27 hectares of land. Most are craftsmen, plumbers or carpenters, or old crop or dairy farmers. My father worked his whole life as a car mechanic. To this day, I love repair shops, car dealers, the smell of used tires and gasoline. My mother worked at the local police department, never as an officer but she did pretty much everything else: a 911 dispatcher, an IOA (internal officer assistant), a…
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The action in City Under One Roof, Iris Yamashita’s taut debut novel, plays out against a backdrop of natural splendor and eerie desolation. The fictional Point Mettier, Alaska, is popular with temperate-weather tourists looking for glaciers and mountains. But by the time winter arrives, the only ones left are the town’s 200 or so year-round residents—all of whom live in Davidson Condos, a gloomy apartment building that locals call Dave-Co. There’s just a single road out of town, and come January, snow and ice frequently render it unpassable. The remoteness complicates a criminal probe involving a detective who, at least initially, has more pressing tasks on her agenda. …
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It was a dreary day in October, and the baby that was supposed to have arrived was already late. Maybe that means nothing to you, but to me, it meant that my out-of-office had long ago gone up and instead of holding my new baby, I was Googling the rates of stillbirth for post-term infants and the mortality rate of the women who carried them. Like most people who are afraid of death (theirs and other people’s), I sought solace in crime fiction. There’s something tantalizing about unsolved murders and whodunnit puzzles that, when executed well, can draw even the most anxious among us away from our internal spiraling. As a lifelong reader of mysteries and thrillers, I was l…
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I find the campus to be a perfectly oppressive setting for a thriller. A campus thriller isn’t a traditional closed-room mystery, but it does share some tantalising similarities. No physical enclosure perhaps, but the bubble of the college seems to create a certain terrible claustrophobia, full of simmering discontent and narcissism – this leads to crimes that make for an addictive reading experience. Here are just some of the things I enjoy about campus thrillers, and the books that shine in the genre. The outside world invades… I have to begin with The Secret History. Donna Tartt’s debut novel remains wildly popular three decades after its original release. Reade…
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Listen: Los Angeles is the Great American City. It’s America with the volume turned all the way up, so the speakers blow and your ears hurt – but it’s beautiful too. It might not be the “Real America” of a reactionary’s dreams, but it’s the America of the Real – it’s all cars and real estate and illusions and lies, it’s people of every color, it’s money and poverty, it’s celebrity and pollution. It’s the place where Westward Expansion smacks up against the Pacific Ocean. It’s America with its back to the wall. Noir is one of the great American art forms, so it only follows that LA would be the epicenter of crime fiction. We all know the greats, from Chandler and Hughes t…
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When I started writing my debut novel, Liar, Dreamer, Thief, I knew two things. First, I wanted a mystery to form the novel’s core. Second, it was important to me that at least some of the main revelations—which, in a mystery, often form touchstones for the character’s internal journey—not be entirely rational. The urge for this probably came from not being able to relate to the average mystery protagonist: an intellectually brilliant, cool cucumber whose only weakness usually takes one of two forms: a chemical addiction, like House and his pain pills, or a personality too abrasive to form close relationships (save whoever the Watson stand-in is). Either way, a sleuth’s …
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Caro stared at the cables, at the mind-reading machine, at the e-fMRI. The money being expended staggered her. Her salary was only a miniscule fraction. And she still didn’t know what she was supposed to do to earn it. “Julian, if this facility is conducting clinical trials on brain function, why is it being explained to me by a physicist and a software developer? What exactly is this a research trial of, why are there no other medical personnel here, and what does all of it have to do with ‘proving’ immortality?” Even saying that last made Caro feel ridiculous. “It’s an unusual clinical trial,” Julian said. “In fact, that’s not really the right word for it. It…
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1. THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT-- develop a simple "story statement." In other words, what's the mission of your protagonist? The goal? What must be done? Triggered by threats of losing her granddaughter and being dumped into a senior living facility, unpublished writer Shelby Garrett sinks farther into the fantasy world of her fictional characters who help her keep the past at bay. When intruders arrive to rob her and threaten her life, she is convinced the armed aggressors are her very own fictional characters, ones she can control. Unaware of the true dangers, she challenges the intruders and demands a rewrite. As the early trauma awakens, she spirals o…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Michael Bennett, Better the Blood (Atlantic Monthly) “A stellar series launch set in contemporary New Zealand . . . The narrative moves at a quick pace. Immersed in modern-day technologies and with a keen sensitivity to cultural issues, this is a finely crafted page-turner. Bennett is a writer to watch.” –Publishers Weekly Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows (Mulholland) “Don’t be surprised if this utterly compelling thriller, which builds on timeless themes and brings new shading to an iconic landscape, is the noir of the year.” –Booklist Maria Dong, Liar, Dreamer, Thief (Grand…
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Everyone can agree that honesty is the best policy—especially when it comes to romantic partnerships—but what happens when that honesty completely breaks down, especially when it comes to affairs, long-buried secrets—even murder? My upcoming novel, You Should Have Told Me, follows Janie, a new mother struggling to get by—her new baby won’t sleep, she seems to be insatiably hungry, and a secret from Janie’s past threatens to tear everything apart. When her partner, Max, offers to do their baby’s feedings one night, of course she jumps at the chance. Only she wakes up hours later to her daughter screaming in her bassinet and her partner gone. When a woman is murdered and M…
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Scientist Robert Lanza and science fiction author Nancy Kress have co-written a new thriller grounded in deep scientific principles and guided by the writers’ shared passion for technology and biocentrism. Read a conversation between Lanza and Kress below. Kress: Robert, you’re a pioneer in stem cell research and in addition to writing dozens of textbooks related to the topic, you’ve written three works of nonfiction on biocentrism, the central concept in our novel, OBSERVER. Why now a novel? Lanza: I wanted to introduce the ideas of biocentrism ─ where life is the basis of the universe ─ to a broader audience through storytelling to bring to life the science behind th…
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My favorite thrillers are character studies with a crime hook. They’re books about people’s actions, reactions, behaviors, and emotions set to the backdrop of a suspenseful mystery. They are first about characters and second about crime. Books like Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll (featuring a Columbine-like shooting), Whisper Network by Chandler Baker (featuring #MeToo-like storyline), and The Girls by Emma Cline (featuring a Manson-like cult) are great examples. We fall under the main character or characters’ spell because their voice jumps off the page. We root for them, we hate them, we love them, we want to see them thrive, or want to see them suffer. Either way,…
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When Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in 1991, I was sixteen years old and struggling with my sexuality. I grew up in a small town in southwestern Virginia and attended an all-boys prep school in central Virginia, both places isolated and unsafe to be out. Unlike now, positive examples of gay men like Pete Buttigeig, Dan Levy, or RuPaul weren’t in the media, and certainly gay historical figures weren’t taught in the classrooms. Instead, I had Dahmer, whose criminality the media clumsily and maliciously mingled with his sexuality, implying that there was a relationship between the two. When I heard that Ryan Murphy, the writer, director, and producer best known for the TV show…
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Who among us, crime movie fans, wouldn’t want to see Agnes Moorehead and her sidekick traveling around and solving murders? Who wouldn’t want more of Denzel Washington as Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins? Or follow-ups to “Gone Baby Gone” with more faithful versions of author Dennis Lehane’s complex characters, Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro? That’s the frustrating, never-gonna-happen discussion I’m hoping to draw you into today. Namely, the crime movie series that cried out to exist but do not. Hollywood made four dozen Charlie Chan movies.” Six “Thin Man” movies. Six “Perry Mason” movies in the 1930s alone. And we get one lousy Hoke Moseley movi…
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Diana Gabaldon’s historical time-traveling blockbuster, Outlander, almost didn’t make history, in either the twentieth or eighteenth centuries. Her publisher couldn’t figure out what to do with a novel about a young woman at the end of WWII visiting Inverness, Scotland and accidentally traveling back two centuries in time. Was it adventure, crime, mystery, thriller, or suspense? Or something else? “They sat on it and threatened to cancel the book because they couldn’t figure out how to market it,” she says. “Eventually, they decided to sell it as romance. It wasn’t a romance, but romance made for bigger bestsellers.” Before it was ever decided her novel was going to …
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I spent a year after college teaching English in a quiet little town in Moravia. Without Internet, a television with only two channels (one German, the other Czech), and no friends, I did a lot of reading. My focus during this time was legendary. I flipped the pages through Crime and Punishment as if it were a convenience store bodice-ripper, so taken was I by the tortured young protagonist (23 years old, just like me!) who wondered, in his half-starved, desperate state, if killing someone might be justified—nay, even the ethical thing to do!—if the victim was a bad person. Crime & Punishment isn’t the only dusty old tome that moonlights as a thriller. Of course, the…
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Where it All Began
