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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Is there that big a difference between falling in love and solving a murder? Um, yes, there is, especially when writing about love and murder. For me, it’s not just about content but about the craft and process of writing in those separate genres. I find it fascinating that although I’ve been writing for over twenty years, my beginning process for writing cozy mysteries is vastly different than it is for writing in the romance genre. I started writing romances because I love to read them. It’s not a billion dollar industry for nothing! Comprised of formulaic and original plots, as well as a guaranteed happily ever after (HEA,) the genre breeds voracious readers who wa…
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Tamron Hall is an Emmy-Award-winning talk show host who is also an advocate for domestic violence awareness. She brings all this impressive experience to her debut psychological thriller, As the Wicked Watch (now in paperback from William Morrow), the story of a crime reporter who becomes consumed with her need to bring attention to the murder of a Black teenage girl, the kind of victim who never gets their fair due in the news. As the Wicked Watch eviscerates the news industry as the home of Missing White Woman Syndrome, and combines a driving narrative with a fierce main character for a novel that will keep you turning pages well into the night. Thanks to Tamron Hall fo…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Kathleen Hale, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls (Grove) “Searing . . . As the first researcher into the case to draw extensively from transcripts of vital records, Hale has produced what stands as the most accurate account to date of this horrifying episode. This is a must for true crime fans.” –Publishers Weekly Catherine Ryan Howard, Run Time (Blackstone) “Howard makes her lead’s experiences feel fresh and immediate as she breathes new life into tired horror tropes. Riley Sager fans will be riveted.” –Publishers Weekly …
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Usually if I get a book way out of the perimeter of my admittedly scattered interests, I put it in the Little Free Library pile. But Flung Out of Space was such a cool idea: a graphic (as in with pictures, not with smut) biography of Patricia Highsmith focused on the time when she sold Strangers on a Train and felt like she could quit her day job working in comics and become a legitimate writer. Thus the story of Highsmith’s quest for legitimacy is not just about her sex life, it’s also about her career; not a word applied to women in her time, but the right word nevertheless). There is also a same-sex love story evocative of Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, a romance betwe…
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My writer’s group gets together weekly at a local winery. There’s as much drinking and catching up as there is putting words on the page, but we’ve convinced it’s productive since it “sustains our art”. A frequent topic of conversation is the crime fiction TV series each of us is streaming, where mysteries take center stage. Recently, I noticed that as different as our styles of writing are, we seem to be watching the same shows, including Mare of Easttown and Only Murders in the Building, and when we go old-school, Midsummer Murders and Miss Marple. I thought it would be fun to check out what we might be missing. After viewing a dozen streaming mystery series, below…
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SUZUKI LOOKING OUT AT THE CITY, Suzuki thinks about insects. It’s night but the scene is ablaze with gaudy neon and streetlamps. People everywhere. Like a writhing mass of luridly colored insects. It unsettles him, and he thinks back to what his college professor once said: ‘Most animals don’t live on top of each other in such great numbers. In some ways, humans are less like mammals and closer to insects.’ His professor had seemed pleased with the conclusion. ‘Like ants, or locusts.’ ‘I’ve seen photos of penguins living in groups all bunched together,’ Suzuki had responded, gently needling. ‘Are penguins like insects too?’ His professor flushed. ‘Penguins have nothing …
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Music composer Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978), who as Edmund Crispin wrote eight glitteringly witty and amusing detective novels between 1944 and 1951 (as well as, with Geoffrey Bush, a fellow composer and the alleged son of detective novelist Christopher Bush, the classic short story “Who Killed Baker?”) is the subject of a now fifteen-year-old biography by David Whittle, Director of Music at Leicester Grammar School, Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A Life in Music and Books (2007). Every admirer of Crispin’s mystery fiction (and Montgomery’s music) should read this biography, although affordable copies are hard to find—the publisher, Ashgate, lists it at $155. It took me…
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Bullet Train, directed by David Leitch and adapted by Zak Olkewicz from Kōtarō Isaka’s novel of the same name, promises a perfectly-contained, hurtling premise: a handful of assassins with vague ties to one another all find themselves, seemingly randomly, executing conflicting missions on a speed train bound for Kyoto. Even without knowing anything else about it, that should be enough to make you buckle up. Brad Pitt plays “Ladybug” (a nickname given to him by his witty handler, whom he talks to via earpiece). He is a cheerful but unlucky small-time operative sent to the bullet train to steal a suitcase from the baggage area. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry ar…
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2022 has been a banner year for true crime and critical nonfiction, and it was difficult to narrow it down to just the top 10 —and that’s just so far! August in particular has been a great month for new true crime, and you’ll see the month overrepresented in the following selections, but I promise that isn’t recency bias—it’s just a really great month for true crime. The selections on the list below run the gamut for the true crime genre, including an impassioned take-down of junk science, an erudite history of jazz and the underworld, a deeply empathetic examining of a sensational true crime case, a riveting account of a bizarre historical crime, ethnographic encounters …
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On September 5th, 1965, the Courier of Waterloo, Iowa ran an article concerning the scourge of juvenile delinquency. The juvenile caseload was “small but involved,” the headline read, presided over by a judge who “can’t reach youngsters.” 20 juvenile cases had been tried in the neighboring city of Cedar Falls across the past nine months, and though this number fell well below the number of adult cases that made their way through the courts, these situations were far more complex. In some cases, so-called delinquents appeared before the judge not because they’d broken the law but rather at “the request of parents who find their children ungovernable.” “They are the ‘shook…
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My debut novel, The Awoken, is a different kind of science fiction in that it is actually about an absence of science. Despite the story being set a century into our future, most scientific and medical innovation has been halted, and in some cases even made illegal. The story is centered around a young woman who dies and then is brought back to life from cryogenic preservation a century later. The issue is, in this future world, it is illegal to be a resurrected person. The technology to resurrect humans from preservation has been discovered, but the science has been criminalized due to society’s fear of wielding such a Godlike power. The result is that the millions of pe…
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“What about that one?” My sister whispers into the phone as though anyone but me can hear her. She’s excited, and I feel my own heart starting to race at the prospect of what’s about to come. I’ve only helped identify the mark before. I’ve never picked one for myself. I’m sitting alone in a booth at the roadside diner, cradling a lukewarm cup of black coffee. It’s Saturday and there’s a lunch rush. Forks and plates and laughter all around me. A little girl keeps turning in her booth to smile at me. She holds up the drawing she’s made on her paper placemat and I flash her a thumbs up. She giggles and turns back to her family. “Which?” I ask. My Bluetooth headset is hidd…
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Metafiction is the ultimate analog binge-reading experience, and we love literary inception in our reading diet, and a lot of it. As unapologetically obsessive bookworms, we will take all of the stories we can get stuffed into a single volume. And nesting doll stories about writers and writing, the horrors of the creative process, and the mental toll of making shit up for a living (or stealing it) is so rife with satisfying plot twists and questionable character behavior, we find ourselves returning to the proverbial well time and time again. In our latest novel, The Rule of Three, we had a blast crafting our own contribution to this category. In our case, the story fea…
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Between the ages of twelve and thirteen I read the entire Agatha Christie oeuvre in under a year. They were like crack for me, my first addiction, I couldn’t get enough of them. I read four a week, under the bedcovers, by torchlight. Then I discovered indie music and that became my next obsession and I forgot about reading books entirely. I rediscovered reading in my early twenties when I read widely and eclectically, but oddly, given my earlier predilection for Agatha Christie’s detective novels, one thing I did not read was crime. I did not read Raymond Chandler, PD James, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Cornell, Patricia Highsmith or Elmore Leonard. I did not read Lee Child, …
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Musical theater and crime aren’t typically thought of as concepts that go hand-in-hand, outside of dad jokes about Broadway ticket prices. But the two have been interwoven for longer than you might guess. For centuries, the theater scene was considered separate from polite society, a refuge where groups like queer people, sex workers and people of color were frequently creative pioneers and, if still not all the way accepted, more accepted than they’d be in the light of day. Less importantly, but more importantly for the purposes of this article, the musical genre in its varied splendor has given us a wealth of great crime stories. Here are six of the best, as well as whe…
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Like a horoscope, everybody has a trope. For you, there’s a word, a phrase, a trope that makes you pick up a book every time. “Unreliable narrator.” “Death in a locked room.” “Gaslighting.” “Madman on the loose.” “Unjustly accused.” You know what works for you, and it doesn’t matter how often you read it, you love seeing how a skilled author crafts the time-worn trope into a new, fresh story. As a writer, the fun comes in my current release, POINT LAST SEEN, when I shuffle tropes like a tarot deck. On a wild, rugged Big Sur California beach a woman washes in on a wave, not breathing, no heartbeat, a ring of bruises around her throat. She’s revived by a “tortured protagon…
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If I can pinpoint the moment when I knew that writing a novel with Michael Mann was different than working on one solo, it’s the day I got on the phone with a bank robber. Michael and I were doing research for our thriller Heat 2. Heat 2 is Michael’s first novel, my first time collaborating on a book, and this was my first experience asking a retired robber how to pull off a bank tunnel job. I’ve written more than a dozen thrillers. I’ve done extensive research for every one. But nowhere close to this. I was diving into the Michael Mann world, exploring this story, these characters, and his way of working, alongside him. Daunting? Michael is my favorite filmmaker, …
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This month is chock full of it—whatever you want, it’s here. There are elaborate, several day long weddings. There are tense family reunions in gloomy mansions where the tide cuts off access to the estate for hours. There’s a Groundhog Day–Memento-time twister. There’s a taut thriller by a real up-and-comer named Joyce Carol Oates. And finally, there’s Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, fictionalized. Amanda Jayatissa, You’re Invited (Berkley) My Sweet Girl was a smart debut, and Jayatissa has raised the stakes with her second novel. Amaya is surprised to be invited to her former best friend’s wedding in Sri Lanka, and even more surprised to find out the groom is her …
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There are two godfathers of modern crime writing, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. For my money Hammett was the better writer. Even if Chandler had the gaudier patter. Chandler was a superb analyst of the genre. I’ve taken what he said about Hammett—in ordinary paragraph form—and turned it into a list. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons … with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it w…
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At its heart, the cozy mystery is the story of a woman—usually—determined to restore the social order in her community after a crime—murder, usually—tears it apart. Driven by a deep sense of injustice and armed with her wits, her knowledge of the community, and her belief that one passionate individual can make a difference, she dives in. She puts herself in harm’s way. She asks questions only an insider can ask and sees connections only someone with a stake in the matter can see. Because she understands the community and the people within it, she can look beneath the surface and identify the true conflicts, relationships, and motivations between the victim, witnesses, an…
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I never wanted to come back home. Reachwood Forest still waits here over a decade later. Trees cut through the suburb, growing too close together in the steep ravine. Tangled branches cast shadows deep enough and dark enough to make me shiver and roll up my window. Nothing has really changed. The streets still bear the same names, leading up to the opulent houses at the top of the hill. The same wealthy families still live there, overlooking the neighborhood and the forest below. “Are we going to be there soon?” Marjorie fidgets with the sleeves of her jacket. Nearly fourteen-and-a-half years old, but she hasn’t learned how to be patient. “We’ll reach it in a few minut…
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A man in a suit enters a darkened, empty house. He sets his gun and keys on the table and walks over to the windows overlooking the ocean. He stares into the watery void, lost in his thoughts. That’s an iconic scene—among many—from Michael Mann’s “Heat,” which is widely regarded as a masterpiece 27 years after its release. Critics and cinephiles love picking apart the movie’s expertly choreographed robberies and gun battles, but it’s the quiet moments that provide the texture: Robber Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) at their most introspective, staring off into the L.A. night. “Heat 2,” the newly released novel by Michael Ma…
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There’s nothing more ironic than thrillers set at weddings. You take something typically romantic where everyone is expecting a happily ever after, and turn it around so you wish you’d never RSVPd in the first place! It’s this very contrast (and slight obsession with watching Say Yes To The Dress) that led me to write my own wedding thriller—You’re Invited. It has all the elements for wedded bliss— a lavish Sri Lankan wedding at the stunning, beachside Mt Lavinia Hotel, an instagram-worthy bride from an affluent Colombo family, and a handsome, successful groom. Oh, and murder, of course. Here are a few more thrillers set at weddings that I think you’ll enjoy. The Gues…
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My brother, John, is an actor. A few years ago, he was cast in an independent Irish horror movie called Beyond the Woods. Filming took place in a secluded house in the Cork countryside in the dead of winter, mostly at night, over the course of a couple of weeks, with the small cast and skeletal crew staying onsite. Before shooting could begin, the director had to visit the local Garda (police) station to say that if they got a report in the middle of the night of blood-curdling screams coming from the woods, it wasn’t someone getting murdered. It was just them, shooting their horror movie. It’s a hazard of my job (crime writer; yes, spare a thought for our parents but th…
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Slow cookin’, slow dancing, I’m a big fan. Slow first chapters, you’re probably going to lose me. You see, I’m a big believer in launching your first chapter with a major bang. Ever seen a James Bond movie? Before you’ve had your popcorn good old Bond is zooming along the Autobahn in his Aston Martin where—kaboom!—he gets shot at and skids into a ditch. Undaunted, 007 dons a pair of skis, schusses down a glacier, and ends up piloting a Russian MiG while heat-seeking missiles buzz around him like errant mosquitos. Now that’s what I call a thrilling, reach-out-and-grab-ya opening. And I truly appreciate that same type of nail-biting excitement in the opening chapters of the…
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