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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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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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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