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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My latest novel, Velvet Was the Night, is a noir set in the Mexico City of the 1970s. This is a changing world, beset by political and social turmoil, and a space where different forces are violently clashing. To me, it seemed like the perfect decade for a noir, but when I told people what I was working on, they tended to be surprised I was writing a book set in 1971. Most of them associated the word ‘noir’ with the 1950s. Noir has always had a close relationship with film and it is no wonder that when we think of noir, we tend to harken back to iconic images inspired by Golden Age Hollywood rather than more modern proposals. But noir did not vanish once people traded…
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The Rue Morgue In the spring of 1841, at the age of thirty-two, Edgar Allan Poe decided to write a new kind of short story. At the time, Poe was best known for a magazine column on cryptography in which he dared readers to send him a code he couldn’t crack. He received nearly a hundred secret messages from all over the country. Poe solved them all, except for one. And that coded message he proved to be “an imposition,” a jumble of “random characters having no meaning whatever.” Unfortunately for Poe, his column only paid a few dollars a page. As his editor observed, “The character of Poe’s mind was of such an order, as not to be very widely in demand.” Poe’s desperate…
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There was the time I was in the hospital and my dad called to tell me that he’d just spoken with the sheriff of Desolation Valley; unbeknownst to us, my sister was missing—one of several backpackers who’d gotten waylaid by a snow storm in the Sierra Nevada. There was the time my family went backpacking in the Grand Canyon and for a period of hours we were each alone in the dark; my sister and I spent the night together, clueless as to where our parents were. There was the time my sister and I went camping in the Finger Lakes at the tail end of hurricane Ike; we laugh about it now, but it was a harrowing night in a tiny tent with constant ferocious winds. There was the …
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Married couples are a staple of the crime-fiction world, where husbands and wives are forever realizing that the person they thought they knew best is effectively a stranger they didn’t know at all. In many an opening chapter, cracks are starting to show in a hitherto happy union. Dark secrets simmer beneath a delicate surface tension, threatening to boil over and break through. At least one half of the couple knows something is terribly wrong, but doesn’t know quite what it is yet. The fun for the reader is in finding out not only what the thing is, but how it could have been hidden from the one person with whom you’re supposed to share the most. I’m thinking of everythi…
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Sometimes, when I walk my neighborhood at night, I glance at the lit-up windows, watch dark silhouettes move behind curtains, wonder at the words spoken, the secrets shared or hidden, the dynamics at play behind those closed doors. More often than not, my mind will craft an unsettling narrative for the people inside—not because I wish them harm or unhappiness, but because in my own life, I am constantly writing about deeply dysfunctional families. Take my latest thriller, The Family Plot, which features the Lighthouses, a true crime obsessed family who gathers to bury their patriarch only to find the remains of their long-missing brother already in his grave. The Lightho…
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She hailed me on East 62nd Street, not far from Bloomingdale’s. She was an attractive girl, wearing big-lensed sunglasses against the June glare, and carrying two plaid suitcases, one of which she waggled at me as I rolled down the street. “Say ‘Kennedy,’ ” I whispered, and eased the cab to a stop. Opening the rear door, she shoved the suitcases in first, then followed, slammed the door, shoved the sunglasses up on top of her head, and said, “Kennedy.” “You got it,” I said, and started the meter with a smile. Not only is the long expensive run from Manhattan out to John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens one of the joys of a cabby’s life, but there’s no pleasant…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Velvet Was the Night (Del Rey) “It’s hard to describe how much fun this novel is—Moreno-Garcia, whose Mexican Gothic (2020) gripped readers last year, proves to be just as good at noir as she is at horror. The novel features memorable characters, taut pacing, an intricate plot, and antiheroes you can’t help but root for. A noir masterpiece.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Jonathan Santlofer, The Last Mona Lisa (Sourcebooks) “The Last Mona Lisa brings together past and present, seasons it with intriguing characters, and brushes it with plot twists that you d…
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James Lee Burke occupies a small room in the world of American literature. Joined by only a few contemporaries and predecessors, he writes books that provide entertainment and suspense, but also possess the rare capacity to alter the reader’s perception of art, history, and the most intractable mysteries of life itself. As the author of more than 40 books, he is astoundingly prolific. Readers around the world have fallen in love with his tales of detective Dave Robicheaux, who solves homicides in New Iberia, Louisiana. Far more than mere police procedurals, Robicheaux’s cases, in large part due to the Milton-esque poetic prose of Burke, have a grand philosophical and the…
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A housewife moonlighting as a hitwoman for hire. Baking cakes in the morning, ending lives in the dark of night. Trading the spatula for the shotgun. That was what I wanted the protagonist in my new historical fiction book, A Woman of Intelligence to do. I didn’t want to write her this way because I’ve made a career writing shoot ‘em up thrillers. I wanted murder because I was dealing with post-partum anger and I needed her to be violent for me. I had two children eighteen months apart, and while I’d been career/kid juggling for a few years, the delusion that I was doing okay was disappearing. I felt like the old me had burst into flames and I was not a fan of the new m…
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“Often in literary criticism, writers are told that a character isn’t likable, as if a character’s likability is directly proportional to the quality of a novel’s writing.” ― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist If there’s anything I’ve learned from my experience as both a lawyer and a human (while the two are not mutually exclusive, I am unwilling to say that they’re completely overlapping Venn circles) even truly decent people tend not to act their best under extreme duress. Good and kind folks can be selfish, defensive, and lash out when pushed too far. That doesn’t prove them bad as much as it shows them to be, well, people, albeit perhaps unlikeable in that moment. Someone …
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The telephone rang, waking Captain Marianne Augresse with a start. For a brief instant, her eyes remained fixed on her cold, naked skin, then she removed her arm from the bath where she had been dozing for the past hour and picked up the phone. Her forearm knocked the little tray of toys balanced on the laundry basket and plastic boats, wind-up dolphins and small fluorescent fish scattered over the surface of the water. “Shit!” Number unknown. “Shit!” the captain repeated. She had been hoping it was one of her lieutenants: JB, Papy, or one of the other duty cops at Le Havre police station. She had been waiting for a call since the previous day, when Timo Soler was spo…
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Recently Naomi Hirahara and I, fully vaccinated, met up at a local soda fountain. In between discussion of pandemic tragedies and the bright spot of MariNaomi’s stop AAPI hate mural, the first AAPI public artwork in the San Gabriel Valley, we found we were co-contributors to the upcoming Akashic Noir South Central edited by Gary Phillips. We chatted about her stunningly prolific life as a writer, and her groundbreaking novel, Clark and Division. Set in 1944 Chicago, her latest novel tackles Japanese American life post incarceration in US concentration camps. This interview has been condensed for clarity and space. Désirée Zamorano: I always want to know, when an author w…
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These were lean years for National Socialism. The party would poll just 2.6 percent of the vote in the elections of May 1928. Hitler spent much of his time reorganizing the movement, growing the membership, expanding the ranks of the paramilitaries, and establishing absolute control. Under the Führerprinzip (leadership principle), he was the physical embodiment of National Socialism, its demigod and supreme commander. His personality hadn’t much changed since the Vienna days—Kubizek would have recognized the “coffee-house tirades,” “distaste for systematic work,” and “paranoid outbursts of hatred” Putzi Hanfstaengl described in these years—but his following had. His word …
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The absence of a goodwill communiqué from America to the All African People’s Conference in Accra had been noted with regret by the delegates. Then, just before the final session, a message arrived from Vice President Nixon. He had been advised of the bad impression created by America’s silence and was seeking to put this right. Even so, one of the American delegates described the telegram as ‘a lukewarm statement quite out of keeping with the spirit of the conference’. In any case, his telegram arrived too late: the hardworking committees did not have time to read it out. However, the US had, in fact, been well represented throughout the conference— in covert and unfores…
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Every once in a while, a story appears in the media about a “time capsule” in the form of the contents of an apartment, unchanged in all the years a recently departed tenant lived there, or a house left vacant while ownership has been tied up on the courts, sometimes for decades, that has finally been awarded to an heir. Many an old house is sold with some of the original owner’s possessions still stored in the attic—a treasure trove for the inquisitive buyer to explore. My own time capsule story, Murder, She Edited, grew out of a fascination with such tales, combined with the traditional question writers ask themselves: “What if . . . ?” My senior sleuth, Mikki Lincoln…
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Eric Powell—the legendary creator of comics like The Goon and Hillbilly—and Harold Schechter—the author of true crime classics including Deviant and The Serial Killer Files—are collaborating on an ambitious new graphic novel about one of the most notoriously deranged murderers in American history, Ed Gein. Powell and Schechter are co-writing Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?, an all new, 200-page, original graphic novel illustrated by Powell that delves into the twisted history of the Gein family and the notorious violence that inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Painstakingly researched and illustrated, Schechter and Powell’s tru…
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Long before I became a writer of foodie mysteries, I fell in love with reading them. It started with Diane Mott Davidson’s series about a Boulder-based caterer who couldn’t help solving mysteries on the side. Davidson didn’t merely dump descriptions of meal preparation onto the pages, food was woven into her story. As the reader, I wanted to be friends with caterer Goldy, sitting in her kitchen, tasting her food. When Goldy finally remarried—this time to a cop, many crimes were dissected in their kitchen as they cooked. Readers knew that Goldy’s husband Tom was a good guy, because he cooked incredible comfort food for her. And made amazing coffee. Food can do more than p…
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It was a Monday morning in September, on the beach, when it all began. It is called the beach, for want of a better term, even though nobody can swim there on account of the reefs and the tide, nor relax on it because it is made up of rough, sharp volcanic shingle. The Old Woman walked there every day. The Old Woman was the former teacher. Everyone on the island had passed through her class. She knows all the families. She was born here and she will die here. No one has ever seen her smile. They scarcely know her age. Probably not very far off eighty. Five years previously, she had been obliged to give up the class. From then on she took her daily walk early in the morni…
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BEATRIZ Septiembre 1823 Two months earlier The carriage door creaked as Rodolfo opened it. I blinked, adjusting to the light that spilled across my skirts and face, and took the hand Rodolfo offered me as gracefully as I could. Hours of imprisonment in the carriage over rough country roads left me wanting to claw my way out of that stuffy box and suck in a lungful of fresh air, but I restrained myself. I knew my role as delicate, docile wife. Playing that role had already swept me away from the capital, far from the torment of my uncle’s house, into the valley of Apan. It brought me here and left me standing before a high dark wooden door set deep in white stucco wall…
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Shop Talk: Steph Cha Writes Yelp Reviews, Works Jigsaw Puzzles, and Always Has a Blanket
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Steph Cha is the author of the Juniper Song crime trilogy, and most recently, Your House Will Pay, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award. She’s also a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology. What you may not know, however, is that Steph is also an avid dissectologist. So deep is her love for jigsaw puzzles, she actually tackled a 5,000-piece puzzle while under quarantine due to the pandemic. Naturally, that seemed like the perfect place to start our “Shop Talk.” Steph Cha: Oh, yeah. I lo…
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I’ll say upfront that there is nothing quite like the firm economy of Die Hard, a Christmas-set movie about how German terrorists commandeer a fancy Los Angeles high-rise, hold hostage all the people currently attending their office holiday party inside, and are slowly picked off by the one partygoer who had managed to stay hidden during the initial raid: a scrappy NYC cop named John McClane (a Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis). Although it is now thought of as a quintessential action movie, with a big-budget franchise in its wake, I like the first Die Hard for the—when you think about it—tightness of its conceit. The Nakatomi Plaza building is locked-down, and so the movie …
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“A girl dies today at 3 p.m.” —Posted on Facebook, January 14, 2012 at 1:04 p.m. *** Joyce Hau had her whole life ahead of her. Known to everyone as “Winsie,” she had a smile that lit up her face, and she wasn’t afraid to show it. An attractive and outgoing fifteen-year-old, she enjoyed the kinds of things other young people her age enjoyed: hanging out with friends, going to parties, chatting on social media. Winsie also maintained close ties with other young people in the Chinese Dutch community and often attended Asian cultural events. Always into the latest fashions, she sported a piercing beneath her lower lip. She danced and played the piano and was even skilled …
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Once I watched a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and it put a knot in my brain. The director, Franco Zeffirelli, was universally lauded for his naturalistic translations of important works of the western canon into masterpieces of film. Among his early triumphs were both The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet. I was a fan. My expectations were high. The performances were strong, the production values top notch, and the cutting of the play captured the heart of the story. Still, something left me deeply unsatisfied. It felt wrong. From my reading of Hamlet, the tension in the play arises from the young prince of Denmark’s indecision over action versus inac…
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It’s no accident that some of the most iconic detectives in literary history are beer lovers. Beer lubricates the gears and gets the mind humming. Nero Wolfe does some of his best thinking with a delicately poured glass of Remmers, and John Rebus has contemplated many a mystery over countless pints of Deuchars IPA in his favorite pub, the Oxford Bar in Edinburgh. And what would Harry Bosch do without a cold bottle of Fat Tire? Or Robert B. Parker’s Spenser without a Sam Adams, or a Blue Moon, or a Rolling Rock, or tall can of Budweiser? (Spenser may be the most beer obsessed private eye out there.) Robert Crais’ yoga loving gumshoe Elvis Cole even gives beer to his cat. …
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__________________________________________________ Excerpted from the book MEADOWLARK: A COMING-OF-AGE CRIME STORY by Greg Ruth and Ethan Hawke. Copyright © 2021 by Ethan Hawke and Greg Ruth. Illustrations © 2021 by Greg Ruth. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. View the full article
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