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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I’ll never forget the scream coming from the basement the day my mother learned her mother had been murdered by her own husband—or had committed suicide. I often wonder if this was the origin point for my lifelong obsession with horror. My grandmother, Margarite Temple, came from a long line of urban Indians (of Apache, Chickasaw, and Cherokee descent) and suffered much. Without the finances to realize her dream of becoming a blues singer in New York, Annie James, the Chickasaw whorehouse owner grandmother who raised her, arranged a marriage with a much older man. Margarite was 14. He beat her, gave her syphilis, walked up the steps of their house drunk, and kicked her …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jacqueline Bublitz, Before You Knew My Name (Atria/Emily Bestler) “A brave and timely novel which will fuel the debate on women’s rights to walk safely through our streets. I raced through the pages, anxious for resolution, yet at the same time not wanting this beautiful writing to finish.” –Clare Mackintosh Kenneth Johnson, Holmes Coming (Blackstone) “Clever, tight plots, fresh dialogue, and a take on Holmes that should not only be embraced by those delightful fans of Sherlock…but general readers who want a book that they won’t forget are guaranteed to become fans of the Great D…
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My debut cozy, historical mystery, THE SOCIALITE’S GUIDE TO MURDER, started like this: I wanted to write a story that was essentially Eloise at the Plaza all grown up and solving mysteries. Once I got into the nitty gritty of writing, my main character Evelyn became her own person – er, fictional – with her own problems (she’s a little bit agoraphobic) and quirks (she’s got a talent for finding things). But the vibes that were inspired by one of my favorite childhood stories are still there: a fancy hotel in New York, a main character who goes anywhere she likes inside of it, and a general disregard for the sanity of the hotel manager. This got me wondering what other ch…
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On the eve of the parade, Hanna Schröder was asked to have the Allerton sisters ready for the party in under an hour. It would be difficult, given the girls’ general recalcitrance and specific disregard for the help, especially those with whom they lacked any consequential rapport. When Hanna appeared in their bedroom and asked that they please wash and clothe themselves, the children called her a stranger and told her to go away. “I may be unfamiliar, but I’m no stranger,” Hanna said, stepping toward the girls. “I do your laundry every day. We’ve spoken before. You’re Alice, and you’re Rose.” “I’ve honestly never seen you in my life,” the older one, Alice, said, and H…
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I grew up in a small town on the west coast of Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island. In the mid 80’s, Waitara’s short main street had two thriving, independent bookstores, with a well-stocked local library just around the corner. In this rural town of roughly 6,000 people, we were never far from a good book, and I always had a jumbled stack of novels next to my bed. If reading was an accessible, essential part of my childhood, the idea of being a writer was as remote as our geographical location at the bottom of the world. By the time I got to high school, I knew of local women who had become sports stars, politicians, even famous actresses. But, with the exception of Boo…
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Before Geronimo met any white Americans or came to think of them as enemies of the Apaches, he spent years fighting Mexicans. In Geronimo’s youth, the north reaches of Mexico formally encompassed the Arizona homeland of the Apaches. Yet even after Mexico in the 1840s relinquished what became the American Southwest—the region stretching from the Sabine River on the eastern border of Texas to the Pacific coast of California—the Apaches for years encountered Mexicans more often than Americans. The encounters were typically hostile. The Apaches considered Mexican settlements fair game for raiding—for horses and guns, among other things—and the Mexicans fought back, buildin…
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These Names Make Clues is an intriguing detective novel written at a time when its author was establishing herself as one of the leading exponents of the genre. The book was first published in 1937, under the prestigious Collins Crime Club imprint. Remarkably, however, this is one of E. C. R. Lorac’s novels that has been almost forgotten. At the time of writing this introduction, I cannot trace a single copy for sale on the internet—anywhere in the world. Nor have I been able to discover any critical commentary about the novel in reference books. Quite a mystery. This neglect is all the more surprising given that, of all the Lorac books I have read, These Names Make Clue…
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Thrillers, those beloved and highly consumable escapist pleasures, are often mistaken for immoral fluff. I’d like to suggest the opposite. Where fiction draws wavy lines toward “morally-correct” conclusions, thrillers fling straight and piercing arrows into the heart of morality itself. How? By displaying catastrophic consequences for “bad” behavior. This is what I call the morality of immorality. Bad behavior shapes the heart of many popular thrillers. A character makes a crucial mistake or commits a crime and the result is a shocking, over-the-top, often violent or deadly outcome. It’s the “scare ‘em straight” teaching method. Consider the Fatal Attraction screenplay …
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Turning points are incredibly important landmarks in crime fiction. They are the peak or series of peaks we climb to, where everything shifts inside the story. These moments are when we realize nothing is what it seems. Once we reach them, whether it is the climax of the book or an earlier point of change, we have new information. At the start of a book, a sleuth walks into a situation with no idea of what has created it. Who has “the scene” been set for? Who has carefully crafted lies in order to create an impression? A turning point occurs when critical information is revealed. While reading a work of seventeen-nineties fiction, I discovered that the turning point lit…
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In my literature classes, I often asked students to investigate literary texts for their representation of contemporary social issues. What, for example, does Franz Kafka’s The Trial say about the absurdity of life and the legal system in the early twentieth century? Or, how does a natural disaster reveal a crisis of the social order in Heinrich von Kleist’s 1807 “The Earthquake in Chile”? This probing of human truths is an exercise often applied to literary fiction, but less so to genre. And yet, crime, like other examples of literature, holds a magnifying glass to the vices and virtues of the human condition. The first time I spoke with my editor, he asked me, why, as …
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The job du jour in thrillers is the influencer, an unfortunate but accurate reflection of life. Time was a beautiful, fashionable woman would be a model, or an actress, or a waitress who wants to be a model or an actress and sometimes teaches yoga too. Or meditation. Anything where she can be photographed in enviable scenic locations doing something Insta worthy: headstands! Jet skiing! Joking with some native children! She’s plugging several athleisure companies, a pop-up that makes pure beeswax candles infused with exotic oils, and a new and better bottled water. Lots to cover this month. Stay tuned for the aforementioned influencers, an extreme prepper, a tech whiz, …
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When I set out to write my first Christie Bookshop Mystery, I did what fiction writers do. I made stuff up. A cozy setting, loosely based on my favorite Colorado ski towns. A family bookshop in a historic chalet, complete with a friendly cat, a maze of shelves, and fireside reading. Two bookseller sisters named Christie, sadly no relation to their favorite author. Then, murder strikes. The Christie sisters leap into action. They summon their inner Miss Marples and call on all they’ve learned from reading Agatha Christie. I realized I’d have to act too. My protagonists knew way more than I did about Agatha Christie. Sure, I thought I knew her, but I was no expert, no …
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Am I a murderer? Many Republican lawmakers would claim that I am. Since the U. S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, already 18 states have criminalized abortion and elected leaders in over half the states are attempting to do so. “Personhood” laws in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, and Texas make an embryo eligible for child support and tax credits. Many in our government acknowledge no distinction between a human toddler and fetal matter, attached by an umbilical cord to someone else’s uterus. Abortion, these lawmakers insist, is homicide. In the spring of 2010, I had an abortion eight weeks into an unwanted pregnancy. I was a healthy 25-year-o…
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The two most common questions I’ve been asked about my new book, Uncanny Times, is “why historical fantasy” and “why this particular time period?” The answers are distinct, but also inevitably intertwined. History – specifically American social history – has always fascinated me, from childhood through my college years, culminating in a B.A. that would do me absolutely no good in my chosen career – or would it? Dear Mom and Dad: you’ll be pleased to know I am, in fact, making use of my college education. For Uncanny Times, I wanted to write an adventure about a brother and sister (and their hound) taking down things that lurked dangerously in the shadows. Rosemary and A…
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I remember my first editor asked if I worked in social work, psychiatry or the law. In fact, I have no direct experience in any of these fields but I continue to return to the complexity of these overlapping professional areas in my novels. My books shine a light on dark corners and are often described as ‘why-dunnits’ rather than ‘who-dunnits’. My stories are about characters trying to come to terms with what they have done or what has been done to them. Every novel I have written is an attempt to understand. The central story at the heart of my new novel, The Innocent One is about a young man trying to make his way in the world, after being tried as a child for the mur…
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Rescue work has always been near and dear to my heart. My mother took in nearly every stray that crossed her path. She helped some find homes elsewhere and some stayed with us their entire lives. It didn’t matter what species either. She rescued opossums, a stray emu, a potbellied pig, a litter of skunks, horses, and too many dogs and cats to count. Rescue work is in my blood. That’s why I love a book that deals with the complex emotions and unique challenges that go along with rescue work, and when that book also combines that with a good mystery, I’m in Heaven. Most of our current animal residents have come to us as rescues. Taking in animals that have seen some of th…
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“I’m still proud of that book. It convinced me I could write a book. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for that book.” That book, My Darkest Prayer, Shawn “S.A.” Cosby’s first thriller, was published in 2019 by a small Maryland publisher and few noticed. It got some nice reviews, but every book signing was sparsely attended. Not unusual for a first-time crime novelist. Cosby, as every fan of crime fiction now knows, then went on to blow up the genre. His next two books, Blacktop Wasteland, and especially Razorblade Tears, rocketed up the best seller lists with movie rights in the wings, changing forever Cosby’s relatively quiet life in rural Gloucester, Virgin…
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Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Booker-nominated novel Case Study is a crime story in search of a crime. It takes the form of a set of notebooks written by a nameless young woman in early-1960s London who is convinced that a charismatic, countercultural psychotherapist named A. Collins Braithwaite has murdered her sister, Veronica, by convincing her to commit suicide. Burnet intersperses the notebooks with a pseudo-biographical account of Braithwaite’s life, gradually making clear that, although Braithwaite is in many ways a repugnant figure, he did not kill Veronica. The notebook writer’s sleuthing—which leads her to enter therapy under an entirely assumed identity—is in vain. I…
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Here’s a mystery. At the end of the war, as exiles, soldiers, and refugees return to their liberated country, one man leaves, flees to America for safety. His reasons for leaving are unclear; his story changes over time. He leaves behind a shadow of himself, a brother who has also fled and assumed another identity, and innuendos and rumors that will tarnish his reputation. Who could solve this mystery? Inspector Maigret maybe; his creator, Georges Simenon, is the man at the center, when he fled Europe in September 1945. Readers and biographers have debated ever since why Simenon left France, where he had spent almost a quarter of a century. Biographer Patrick Marnham quo…
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This year marks the tenth anniversary of Wild, the memoir by Cheryl Strayed that captivated readers across the globe, was selected as an Oprah Winfrey Book Club pick, and later became a film starring Reese Witherspoon. Wild opens with a scene that I—as a suspense author—admired intensely the moment I read it: a lone protagonist on the edge of a cliff, exhausted, blistered, and depleted, 38 days into her 1,100-mile hike covering the Pacific Crest Trail. She stops to rest her feet, and one of her hiking boots goes sailing off the cliff into the abyss. Dumbstruck, she ponders her situation for a moment and then launches the other boot after it… leaving herself alone and bare…
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Ann Woodward had resolved to live a quiet life in Europe, where she could mourn her late husband, Billy Woodward, far from the madding crowd of the American press, the town of Saint Moritz, high in the Swiss Alps, was certainly an unusual place to retreat to. Renowned for its winter sports, popular as a spa hamlet, and exclusive as a community where entertainers, celebrities, and assorted socialites gathered, Saint Moritz was a lesser European sun around which various society moons revolved. While summer tourism was popular, it was in winter that this small city shined. Luminaries descended in head-to-toe furs in the daytime and flashy jewels at night, their diamonds and …
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My new novel, Neom, started off with the simple image of a robot and a rose. The robot goes to the market in the city of Neom and buys a flower. It then takes the rose into the desert and leaves it in the sand… Why? I wrote the rest of the book just to find out. The truth is, I love robots. They are science fiction’s oldest, most reliable friends, though they have gone much out of fashion these days with their odd humanoid ways. Real robots build cars or fight wars. They don’t look like humans. Back in 2019 I visited a robotics lab in China and watched in fascination dragonfly robots and tapeworm robots and even a lobster robot. They didn’t look like people, though som…
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“Women who kill,” I reply, time and again, when people ask me what my book is about. “I’m researching cases of women who kill.” And each time, as if part of a script, the same scene plays out in front of me. Men and women alike furrow their brows, wince, and then nod their heads in approval of my decision to tackle such a pressing, awful, and all-too-common problem in Latin America. It’s my turn: the moment when I must correct their mistake, word by word, and watch as their understanding becomes disapproval and suspicion. Where they should have heard the words “women killers,” a strange mental lapse made them hear the opposite: “women who have been killed.” Once I got ov…
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As the holidays approach, we’re all looking forward to those big family gatherings. You know what I mean, right? When your large, adoring, boisterous family gets together in love and good will, and it’s all laughter, acceptance, and joyful support. Oh, wait. What’s that? Your family gatherings aren’t like that? They’re fraught with dysfunction, seething with buried secrets and lies, and hidden rivalries? Well – join the club. When we first meet the Maroni clan at the beginning of my twentieth novel SECLUDED CABIN SLEEPS SIX, on the surface everything is glittering and idyllic. Wealthy and successful Hannah and Mako have the perfect sibling relationship, loving and suppor…
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Hello esteemed readers! Continuing our coverage of all things Rian Johnson, I am back to inform you that the full trailer (apparently, the final trailer) for Glass Onion, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel, has arrived! Johnson tweeted it out himself, this morning, and, based on the trailer, promises to be a puzzling, whirlwind meta-mystery. (The trailer also contains Benoit Blanc’s thoughts about the board game “Clue,” which is essential information.) The film releases on Netflix in December, but it opens in select theaters for one week starting Wednesday November 23rd. See you there! View the full article
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