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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No city has been a deeper well for espionage fiction than Berlin. There is a long and growing list of novels that contribute to the city’s image as a hotbed of spies and conspirators. The fifty-one years bookended by Kristallnacht in 1938 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provide the rich historical dramas that continue to excite writers’ imaginations. Berlin has preserved the iconic symbols of those years in the Stasi museum and at Checkpoint Charlie’s hop-on, hop-off tourist bus stop, but it is the canon of Berlin spy fiction that excites the popular imagination. Two novelists, Joseph Kanon and Paul Vidich, have published Cold War novels this month and both are se…
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Being trans means that you compare a lot of things to being trans. Getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, for example— that feeling, “nobody is ever going to mention me or study my medical outcomes,” is so familiar that I sometimes have to remind myself that cis people also got the J&J vax. Fanfic, moving in fan circles, is similar: “I know how you talk about us when you think we’re not around.” Despite a lot of progress on this issue—Publishers Weekly wrote that my new novel, Dead Collections, “charmingly evokes the fanfic genre,” and you’d better believe that I’m carving that on my gravestone along with “***Starred Review***”—it’s still easy to dismiss a work o…
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I remember when I first learned that Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their toes and heels so their feet would fit the glass slipper. Or the first time I read Bluebeard and discovered—alongside his bride—what hid behind the closet door. I realized that many of the fairy tales I grew up on had been altered to hide their claws and teeth and gruesome violence. And yet how our society is built upon such tales. We hunger for them, just as the fairytales are built on hunger—for food, for love, for power, for vengeance. When I was gathering research for my fantasy novel, A River Enchanted, I sifted through pages of Scottish fairy lore, fascinated by the old folktales as well as…
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Most crime writers in the English language—plenty outside it, too—will, if asked, promptly cite Sherlock Holmes and the varied works of Agatha Christie as foundational literature, the stock in their soup. (This novelist is no exception.) But I find myself reliably interested in those other ingredients, those unexpected seasonings: which authors, and which books, have nourished today’s storytellers? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (indeed I’ve said that before—and I’ll say it again): were it not for David Handler, the Edgar-winning author of more than two dozen delectably clever, smoothly written, surprisingly poignant, altogether sparkling mysteries, I wouldn…
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In the early 1900’s, physicist Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity. While the intricacies of Einstein’s theory of relativity might seem daunting, at its core it is actually quite simple: There is no absolute reference point for time and space. Rather, we measure everything in relation to something else. Did one specific point in time come before or after another specific point in time? Where does a particular space sit relative to other spaces? What does it mean for a space to change over relative points in time? To me the real-world connection of space and time is nowhere more apparent than in preserved historical properties. When I was a young child livi…
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After spending his weekend in bed, Michael woke up Monday morning with a throat full of glass shards. He had just pulled the comforter up around his fever-laden head and decided to call in sick, when his wife came in to stand at the foot of the bed, crossing her arms and giving him that look. Michael got up. After all, she was right. His job as crane operator at the incineration plant was still new, and he couldn’t risk making a bad first impression. Pumped up on a mixture of Tylenol and black coffee, he drove out to Copenhagen’s industrial island, Refshaleøen, the car radio alternating between soft hits and crisp commercials, and gradually he started to feel better. He…
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In a pivotal scene from David Lynch’s baroque opus Inland Empire (2006), the director of the film-within-a-film reveals a disturbing bit of trivia about the project to his lead actors: the script from which they’re working is, in fact, a remake of an previously unfinished picture, the original production of which was halted after the original leads “discovered something inside the story” and were subsequently murdered. According to rumor, the story, and by extension, the film itself, is cursed. When it comes to discussing his own work, Lynch has always been one of our cagiest directors. It would therefore be wrong to conclude that this scene was directly inspired by own …
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It was the summer between elementary and high school. That space between childhood and adolescence; the long days when we were too young to have jobs but old enough to have the freedom to be out on our bikes every day, riding four abreast on empty country roads, speeding up to get past the dogs (the country kind who roam free and chase trucks), and then coasting with our legs stuck straight out, eyes closed, blind and free. Every day was the same. But then my friend, S., told us about the Octagon House, hidden nearby but away from the road, behind trees. Abandoned, unguarded. Waiting in secret. It was a dare we couldn’t refuse. As we biked there, we made up our own ghos…
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Trust your gut. Even if your gut is telling you to write a weird time travel story with robots and dinosaurs. Let’s start over. Apropos, considering we’re going to talk about time travel. In 2018 I signed a book deal that changed my life; The Warehouse sold in a pre-empt to Crown, then in more than 20 languages, and was optioned for film by Ron Howard. I’d written five books prior to that, about an amateur private investigator, which came out from a small press. Granted, it was a small press that punched well above its weight, getting solid distribution and media hits. But The Warehouse let me quit my day job and write full-time. It opened a lot of doors. All this fr…
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I used to think I was different from other children, outcast in my views, alone on an island where the flora was black and twisted, and the theme music always sinister. As I got older and more insightful, I realized that there was nothing unique or rebellious about me – that my foible is, in fact, shared by fiction and movie enthusiasts the world over. If you’re reading this, I’d bet dollars to donuts you feel the same way. I love a good villain. Whether I was watching Doctor Who or Star Wars, it was the antagonist, not the hero, that stole my attention. Same deal with comic books and novels. I’d leap up and down in my seat as the Caped Crusader kicked ungodly amounts o…
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After her second pastis, Marie-Jeanne started to grow impatient. The idea that she had come all this way for nothing drove her crazy. She needed to work, at least enough to pay for her gas, and in the end she fell back on Rose. “Come on, I’ll trim your ends. Half-price.” “No, no way.” “Seriously, look, they’re splitting.” “Leave my hair alone. I don’t want you wrecking it with your scissors.” “Just a quick trim. It’ll only take a few seconds.” Rose kept saying no, but soon she found herself sitting in the middle of the room facing a full-length mirror that Marie-Jeanne lugged around with her everywhere she went, a towel over her shoulders, while her friend’s hands f…
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Someday, I will write all this down. For now, I prefer it in my head, where it’s mutable and fresh as clay. I prefer to remember this story between one bright moment and the next of an increasingly crowded life. It’s not an old story yet, and I am still figuring out what it means. I used to be an archivist at the Historical Society of Northern California. The society is in the basement of a building on Market Street, a basement whose generous toilet was always on the edge of overflowing, and which had mice but not rats. The rooms were really designed to be storerooms. I had an office, by virtue of my seniority, which was just off the main workroom and fifty feet from the…
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One of the oldest myths in American history is the notion that racism and discrimination toward newcomers is hypocritical in a country “founded on immigration.” In the United States, paranoia-fueled anti-immigrant violence is rooted in the country’s establishment as a predominantly white Protestant nation, a process made possible only through the genocide of Indigenous people and the mass enslavement of Africans kidnapped from their homelands and their descendants. Fears of demographic change are imbued by racism, and those fears are embedded in the country’s DNA. Even before the establishment of the United States, colonial settlers, including those who later founded the…
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One of the knocks on science fiction is that it’s a literature focused on ideas rather than people. While it’s true that at the heart of every science fiction story there’s a key conceit, it’s not necessarily true that this has to be the focus of the action. In many cases, it’s more like an undercurrent adding flavor to a piece that could otherwise almost be contemporary fiction. My newest book, Mickey7, is much more the latter than the former. Sure, it’s set a thousand years in the future, but despite that it’s at least as much about character and plot as it is about the science. Still, though, Mickey7 is science fiction, and the idea is there. Specifically, this book’s…
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What is it about the familiar doomed-hotel trope: arrive excited for your stay and never check out? It gets me every time. In fact, when done right, hotels are so much more than background settings in novels. They are characters in their own right. They breathe. They move. They whisper. Be they quaint inns, tropical resorts, cheap motels or grand chateaus, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been enchanted by hotels. I even spent half a year working in a giftshop in a five-star luxury hotel to pay for grad school, and it was one of the best jobs in my life—a treasure trove of inspiration that informed my novel, The Hitman’s Daughter. Writers often reference airports for …
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February’s best international fiction includes Ecuadorian horror, Scandinavian thrillers, and French and Japanese noir. You’ll find one title on the list below that came out in January, since we missed our regular installment of this series in January. For more international crime fiction recommendations, check out Paul French’s Crime and the City series. Mónica Ojeda, Jawbone Translated by Sarah Booker Coffee House Press What a strange and beautiful book! In the world of Ojeda’s Jawbone, a group of girls attending an exclusive Catholic academy begin to play dangerous games in an abandoned house nearby. Perfect for those who like their psychological thrillers with a…
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Some of the best foods are made with batter. Am I right? Think cake. Cupcakes. Brownies. Waffles and pancakes. Fritters and donuts. And then we have savory foods cooked in batter. Tempura. Batter-fried chicken and fish. Beer-battered chicken-fried steak. Onion rings! In my newest Country Store Mystery, Batter Off Dead, pancakes aren’t the only foods made with batter. Chef Robbie Jordan serves up crêpes one morning, both sweet and savory, in her southern Indiana restaurant. Previous books in this long-running series have featured catfish, waffles, and Southern Jam Cake, and she and Abe O’Neill enjoyed three flavors of cupcakes at their wedding in the previous installment,…
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In Dark Music, a murder investigation pairs unlikely allies in a race to uncover a shadowy international conspiracy. The novel is the latest from David Lagercrantz, the bestselling author of The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Today we reveal the novel’s cover and ask Lagercrantz a few questions about his new endeavor and his continuation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. Can you identify a particular moment that sparked the idea for Dark Music? When I published my last Millennium novel, The Girl Who Lived Twice, in 2019, there was another whirlwind of publicity: interviews, TV appearances, filmings, signings, and I seemed to be endlessly repeating myself. So when a jou…
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Rob Hart hit the bookish bigtime with 2019’s The Warehouse, a dystopian thriller that exposes the seamy underside of late-stage capitalism. Prior to that, he penned the terrific five-book series about PI Ash McKenna. But all this time, Hart knew he had a time-travel book in him. In the just-published The Paradox Hotel, it’s 2072, and January Cole heads security at the government-run hotel, where tourists stay before their journeys to Ancient Egypt, the Renaissance, or the Battle of Gettysburg via the Einstein Intercentury Timeport. January used to be a time-traveling detective for the Time Enforcement Agency, but it turns out that too much professional mucking about in th…
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So you’re probably aware of the most common fiction genres—fantasy, science fiction, and horror on the speculative side, the entire mystery umbrella (covering crime, thrillers, cozies, noir, etc.), as well as literary fiction as a whole. But for me, somebody who has been writing professionally for the last 14 years, it’s the subgenres that hold my attention, the fringe stories and tales on the periphery that really get me excited to sit down and write, as well as read. Here are some of my favorite subgenres, and the aspects of them that I find to be original, compelling, and enticing. As a reader, and viewer, of contemporary dark stories, I’m most drawn to work that does…
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When Death Comes Stealing, the first of my nine Tamara Hayle mysteries, came out in 1994, Nelson Mandela had just been sworn in as president of South Africa. Whitney Houston, sweet and innocent, was free of drugs and Bobby Brown, and Netscape Navigator was everyone’s favorite browser. A Fatal Glow, my latest mystery and the second of my Odessa Jones cozy series, is coming out this year, nearly thirty years later. It’s hard to believe I’ve been writing for so long, that so much time has passed—until I catch of glimpse of myself in all my gray-haired glory passing by a mirror. I’m old enough to remember some of the Black female mystery writers who wrote during my early year…
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If one were to apply a filter to my family for certain Texan features, we come off sounding like a cliché. Oil business? Both grandfathers were in the oil business. Raised cattle and grew pecans, too. Did I go to rodeos? Sure, and my brother did competitive cutting and my cousin was a champion barrel racer. Did I have a live longhorn steer photo booth at my wedding? Well, yes. Yes, I did. Do I swoon to the sound of boots scuffing against a gritty dance floor while George Strait sings “Amarillo by Morning”? Hell, yeah. But, I’m here to tell you what, there’s more to me than bluebonnets and cowboy boots. And there’s plenty more to Texas. The following is an incomplete list …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Rob Hart, The Paradox Hotel (Ballantine) “Stellar. The twists keep coming . . . in this impressive melding of creative plotting and three-dimensional characters. Hart remains a writer to watch.” Publishers Weekly, starred review Mia P. Manansala, Homicide and Halo-Halo (Berkley) “While the follow-up to Arsenic and Adobo is a cozy mystery, it’s darker, dealing with PTSD, predatory behavior, dismissive attitudes toward mental health, and other issues. Filipino American food and culture, as well as family and community, remain essential elements in the story.” Library Journal, star…
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OK – here’s the rules, the “Moscow Rules” if you like. All books below are set in the Russian capital but are not about spooks and espionage. Moscow and spy novels are a whole other, very long, and admittedly fascinating, shelf. But this is Crime and the City, so we’re sticking with cops and robbers, killers and detectives. And so, let’s start with one of the best crime novels of the twentieth century, now forty years old but, if you’ve never read it, still as fresh as a daisy. I submit for your perusal Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park (1981) and the debut of Moscow Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko in the dying days of the Soviet Union. Three corpses in Moscow’s Gorky Pa…
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The New York City subway system has remained relatively unchanged since the 1970s. This an easy initial takeaway of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a 1974 film about a subway train hijacking that might have aged into an interesting relic of an earlier, analog time in New York City’s history if so much about the film didn’t feel very aesthetically, even emotionally, familiar. A sleek 2009 remake starring Denzel Washington and John Travolta insisted that a technological gulf separated the post-millennium city from its 1970s counterpart, but even following the MTA’s inclusion of sophisticated telecommunication systems (such as the Communications-Based Train Control, or …
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