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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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new crime fiction. * Kellye Garrett, Like a Sister (Mulholland) Kellye Garrett’s Like a Sister is an early contender for breakout novel of the year, with Garrett delivering a twisty, compelling gut-punch of a story. After the body of a reality TV star is found in the Bronx, everyone seems content with the explanation of an overdose, except the deceased’s estranged sister, who goes on a personal odyssey in search of the truth about what really happened that fateful night. Garrett is an immensely talented rising star in the world of crime fiction, and with Like a Sister she’s delivered a deeply searching, deeply felt …
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In 1974, just two years after the FBI Academy opened, Patrick Mullany and Howard Teten were up to their elbows in bizarre cases. They were wading around in the blood let by freakish psychopaths like Ed Kemper, a family-killing necrophiliac who screwed the severed heads of his victims and slept with their bodies. Each case added to their understanding of criminal minds, but more and more research and interviewing criminals meant less and less time for helping fellow agents and local cops. The two agents had started to see a direct link between specific mental disorders and certain crimes: A true psychopath could commit any crime at any time and possessed a bottomles…
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Author D.C. Taylor traces three real-life Los Angeles crime stories that were transformed into books and movies. Los Angeles – Wednesday January 15, 1947: The naked corpse of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short lay in the weeds of a vacant lot on Norton Avenue, her body drained of blood her face beaten, her mouth slashed ear to ear in a grotesque smile. She had been neatly cut in half just below the navel. Short was one of the thousands of young women who flooded into L.A. with the hope of finding fame as a movie star. Dead, as the Black Dahlia, she became more famous than most of them. The case was never solved. John Gregory Dunne wrote True Confessions in 1977. In 1981 it b…
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You’re five hundred miles from home, working a hundred hours a week, can’t afford cable, and have one scratchy broadcast channel. So what do you do when you have a couple of precious hours of downtime? Well, if you were me, in Springfield, Vermont, in my first on-air news job, a couple decades ago, you went to the library. That wasn’t a revelation in itself; I’d basically lived at the library in college. During my gopher (go-fer my coffee, kid!) time at KDKA Radio, Pittsburgh’s magnificent main Carnegie Library was my happy place. But the Springfield library was different. It reminded me of home. I grew up in a similar small town in western Pennsylvania, only with a l…
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Two months after my father died, in September 2002, my son, Davis, was born. I started a college fund for Davis that week. I wasn’t going to put him through what I’d gone through to pay for college, working a full-time job yet still graduating with huge amounts of debt. I didn’t want him to be unable to go out for pizza because he was broke. And I wanted him to be free to pursue a career as an artist (or anything he wanted) without having to worry about how he would pay his rent. By this point the ruse was providing a powerful stream of revenue. From 2002 to 2008, my annual income increased rapidly—from $204,000 to $352,000 to $498,000 to $916,000 to well over $1 millio…
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The following is excerpted from the first chapter of Sarah Weinman’s new book Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free, published by Ecco on February 22, 2022. ___________________________________ First, Vickie. She was the Zielinskis’ second child. Mary Faye was the eldest, given the same first name as her mother and grandmother. Victoria Ann arrived three years after her sister, born on September 6, 1941. Then came Myrna, two years later, and finally, a couple of years after that, Anthony, Jr. The Zielinskis met, married, and started their family in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, an…
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In the history of the American West, few historical figures have captured the public imagination like the outlaw. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the exploits of Jesse James, Pearl Starr, Billy the Kid, and numerous others filled newspapers and spilled over into dime novels. Their legacy continues to this day, cemented by Hollywood’s technicolor Westerns and the grittier reimaginings of more recent years. In these stories, outlaws who cut a swath of violence across the high plains are struck down by the hand of justice. Alternatively, if the narrative suits, they are permitted a last-minute escape or tragic end defending others, perhaps against crooke…
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In the opening scene of my newest book, The Heights, lighting designer Ellen Saint looks out of the window of a client’s apartment in the Tower Bridge district of London and can’t believe her eyes: on the roof terrace of the building opposite stands a man who really shouldn’t be there, a man she knows for a fact to be dead. And thus reignites a nightmare she had every reason to believe she’d put to rest. It’s a classic, some might say well-worn, device, the accidental sighting of a person of interest – or indeed the witnessing of a crime – from an apartment window up high, but no one can deny that it’s a brilliantly direct way of getting the protagonist’s adrenaline flow…
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Is it possible to write a contemporary spy novel that lives up to the Cold War classics? This may seem an odd idea for someone in my line of work to entertain, let alone allow through the front door, but it keeps coming back like an uninvited guest. At times it wants to sit by the fire, put its feet up and talk about the past: did the Cold War give rise to a set of conditions uniquely favourable to spy writers? At other times it rolls up its sleeves and gets straight down to business: what ingredients are required to create a modern classic? In the middle of the night it jabs an accusing finger: you’re wasting your time, it says. Well? Am I? The Cold War had it all, or s…
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Bios can be tricky. As a writer of literary thrillers, I wrestle with whether or not to mention my decade of standup and sketch comedy, those ten years I abandoned writing longform (anything) for the fun, heartbreak, and terror of standing on stage and telling jokes. Publicists tell me this part of my past makes me interesting; my instincts tell me it makes me confusing. It certainly makes me ponder, What does comedy have to do with writing heart-pounding thrillers? To bring the reader a deep sense of place—the smells, sounds, sights, feels of where a novel is set—I’ve had to deal with a lot of fear. For The River at Night, I ventured—mace handy—deep into the remote for…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Rosie Walsh, The Love of My Life (Pamela Dorman) “Walsh masterfully shows both [protagonists’] points of view while maintaining an intoxicating air of mystery…a propulsive thriller with heart that will keep readers guessing.” Kirkus, starred review Jo Harkin, Tell Me an Ending (Scribner) “This high-concept debut asks an interesting question: What if we could edit our memories? . . . Harkin builds a picture of a world radically altered by a controversial technology and of people who are learning that you can’t change the past without impacting the present. An intellectuall…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Rob Hart, The Paradox Hotel (Ballantine) “While there are enough science-fiction elements here to make this a novel that comfortably fits into that genre, the many crime fiction elements present make it a hybrid narrative that instead inhabits the interstitial space between science fiction and crime … This wildly entertaining combination, along with Hart’s relentless pacing, make this a rare hybrid that has something for everyone. Hart’s preoccupation with the future, which he started exploring in The Warehouse, his previous novel, takes center stage here, and the result is a tale of lo…
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My first novel, Dust and Shadow, is subtitled An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson. In it, Sherlock Holmes tries with every ounce of his sinewy being to both apprehend London’s most notorious serial killer and to prevent further graphic slaughter of innocent (so to speak) women. I wrote this because I have read the Sherlock Holmes mysteries so many times since I was ten that I wouldn’t be surprised if an ocular specialist found “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” emblazoned in tiny script on my retinas. While heavily historically researched, by definition Dust and Shadow is completely derivative. It’s an ode to the Great Detective and the Good Doctor…
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Writing novels is an excuse to immerse myself in my obsessions. Research is my favorite part of writing prep, and I am one-hundred-percent guilty of continuing to read and take notes long after I know a subject backward and forward. My second novel, This Might Hurt, is about a cult, and I pursued this topic with typical gusto. These unusual communities have always enthralled me. I didn’t know it at the time, but whenever I picked up a cult novel, I was trying to figure out two things: why would someone start a cult? Perhaps more importantly, why would someone join one? The more cult novels I read, the less I felt these questions were being answered. Often the cult was m…
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Crime! Mystery! Suspense! Oh, my! If this were Oz, crime/mystery/suspense writers would have paved the yellow brick road with vivid descriptions bathed in subtleties; they would have released clues as needed to move the story forward; they would have built in a side path or two that led to a blind alley; and, in the end, they would have lifted the curtain to reveal the Wizard hiding in Emerald City. Pulling back that curtain exposed hidden truths in L. Frank Baum’s story. Yes, truths! Oh, my! Packaged in many ways, truth is the backbone of every story that satisfies the reader, no matter if we write murder mysteries, thrillers with its many subgroups, historical suspense…
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