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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Murder in the Basement was published in 1932, at a time when the author, whose full name was Anthony Berkeley Cox, had reached the height of his powers. Writing as Anthony Berkeley, he had established himself as one of the leading detective novelists of his generation. In the same year that this book appeared, he also published his second outstanding novel of psychological suspense, wholly different in content and style from this Berkeley novel. Before the Fact was published under another pen-name, Francis Iles, and later filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Suspicion. In Murder in the Basement, not for the first time, Berkeley broke fresh ground as a crime writer. At the time …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Elyse Friedman, The Opportunist (MIRA) “This perfectly paced novel mixes intrigue, drama, and mystery. Each reveal is timed to keep readers glued to the pages, and no character is safe from the others’ lies. With so many appealing factors, this book will be popular with a wide range of patrons.” –Booklist Josh Haven, Fake Money, Blue Smoke (Mysterious Press) “Keeps the suspense high without sacrificing plausibility. [A] promising new talent.” –Publishers Weekly Tessa Wegert, The Kind to Kill (Severn House) “Considering who the bogeyman clearly is and remains, Wegert does a…
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As the leaves fall from the trees and the days grow colder, the thought of curling up with a good book becomes more enticing than ever. Although I love reading (and writing) cozy mysteries at any time of the year, there’s something about the cooler weather that makes the genre even more appealing, and I love to have a stack of fall-themed cozies ready to read when autumn arrives. In my mind, there’s nothing better than being pulled right into the fall atmosphere of a cozy mystery so I can almost smell the hint of wood smoke in the chilly air and hear the crunch of leaves underfoot. As a writer, I hope to provide that same experience for my readers. The fifth installment …
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“I have a gun in my head.” My mother used to say that. When I was very little, I didn’t know what she meant, but soon enough it became clear. The asshole in the BMW who jumped his turn at the four-way stop? Blam. The incompetent male colleague who took credit for her ideas? Pop pop pop. The xenophobic neighbour asked her why she married a “greeny”? Right between the eyes. What my mother knew, and what I recently discovered as I wrote my first crime novel, is that it’s extremely satisfying to kill people in your imagination. Especially rotten people. Prior to penning The Opportunist, I had written three novels and a novella. They had plots that amused me: a broke artist s…
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Some people’s gateway drug into crime fiction is Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock stories. Others credit (or blame) Agatha Christie, or Ed McBain, or Raymond Chandler, or Sue Grafton for their addiction to books with a body count. My origin story is a passion for Edgar Allan Poe that has only grown deeper and richer than memorizing “The Raven” or watching the great Vincent Price/Roger Corman movies based on Poe’s tales, like “The Tomb Of Ligeia” and “The House of Usher.” I studied Poe in graduate school where the difference between his output and aspirations and those of other writers of his time is stark: he was not religious like Ralph Waldo Emerson; well-born like Nat…
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We spend a lot of time on this site recommending the dark and brooding, but as the weather grows chillier, I find myself drawn to the more light-hearted thrillers and mysteries. There’s quite a few extremely entertaining reads out this year and next year, and I’ve assembled 12 of them to keep you reading, laughing, and cheering throughout the dark months ahead. Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age (Berkley) As the tag-line for this incredible series launch reminds us, women of a certain age may be invisible to society, but sometimes, that’s their greatest asset. As Killers of a Certain Age begins, four trained assassins are readying for their retirement after fo…
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It’s time to revisit the scene of the crime. Witnesses to this particular crime call it one of the most horrifying things they’ve ever seen, destroying forever their sense of what’s right and wrong in this cruel world. Others have forgotten the crime happened at all. We’re talking, of course, about the second season of “True Detective,” which, despite airing in ye olden days of 2015, is still capable of sparking intense discussion among noir aficionados. Those eight episodes have their fans, but so many more people seem to think it was an unholy mess, if not a high crime against art itself. But was it really that bad? A quick refresher: The first season of “True Dete…
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Culinary cozy mysteries have become a larger slice of the crime fiction market in the last two decades, mirroring the popularity of cooking shows on TV and YouTube. Most such books feature sleuths with food-related jobs. Among them are chefs, caterers, bakers, restaurateurs, food writers, and shopkeepers who sell ingredients, books, or tools for cooking. In my latest book, Bake Offed, which takes place at a mystery fan fest, a book vendor explains why culinary cozies sell well: “Readers want to know, not just whodunit, but what to eat for dinner.” The recipes appended to cozy mysteries serve that purpose. But years before culinary cozies became a mystery subgenre, cookboo…
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Both of your novels are grounded in your legal background; how did your experience as a lawyer influence your writing? Working as a lawyer has influenced my work in several ways. In both my books, I try to explore the ways the legal system can impact our everyday lives—both good and bad. Whether it’s examining a corporate organization fraught with discriminatory practices to the inequity of the American justice system to a societal structure that prevents full and fair access to the voting polls. So much of my professional working career was spent in the legal arena, it was bound to seep into my creative endeavors. From a craft perspective, I believe most lawyers are sto…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Jane Smiley, A Dangerous Business (Knopf) In this Poe-influenced tale (the first of two on this list), Eliza Ripple, a young widow and sex worker, becomes concerned when vulnerable women start vanishing from the brothels of Monterey and no one among the authorities appears to much care. Eliza is also rather curious, and reads quite a bit of detective fiction, so she and her close friend embark on their own investigation. Eliza Ripple and her merry coterie are the kind of characters that feel both true to their age and perfectly at ease in ours, a rare feat for an hi…
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As the end of the year draws nigh, my international selections grow more brooding (although surprisingly not more Scandinavian). This month’s offerings-in-translation include an Alpine gothic, a Turkish social drama, a Soviet thriller, and a quiet Japanese mystery. Keep an eye on the site over the next few weeks for our best international crime picks of the year! Johanne Lykke Holm, Strega Translated by Saskia Vogel (Riverhead) From the very first page, Strega uses the images of crime stories to tell a deeper story of women’s bodies and trespassed boundaries: “I knew a woman’s life could at any point be turned into a crime scene. I had yet to understand that the cri…
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It was a winter night, cold and snow-sparkled and far from the marquee’s glittering Marvels over the suburban multiplexes. Instead, in this patinaed, one-screen arthouse downtown, the film festival showed Baichwal, Pencier, and Burtynsky’s stunning film, “The Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene is a concept from the 1930’s and suggested an age when human reason and development will influence the entire biosphere. More recently, and frequently, it’s being applied as an epoch, wherein the physical, lasting evidence of human presence is imprinted upon the geologic record. In the film, such impacts were affectingly illustrated. Watching massive mining operations, the orogenesis…
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Man versus nature. It’s one of the core external conflicts of storytelling: pitting a person or persons against the forces of nature, be it a hurricane, blizzard, or killing drought. In some thrillers, this may be the main conflict; in many, it comprises a secondary conflict to the larger clash of man versus man. Often, the wilderness plays a part in this struggle, adding an extra layer of isolation, an unfamiliar stressor for many in a society interconnected by constant and instantaneous communication. A wilderness can provide the most beautiful of landscapes that beckon exploration, but that beauty can hide the most treacherous of dangers—elemental nature, exposing who …
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I traveled halfway down into Staten Island to see Bones and All, Luca Guadagnino’s emotional teenage-cannibal fairytale, during the New York Film Festival, and I’d wander farther and longer if I had to, if that’s the only way I could see it a second time. The film, based on the 2015 novel by Camille DeAngelis, is a haunting, heartrending movie about two teenage runaways who meet and travel through the impoverished backwaters of 1980s Midwest America together, trying to find a shred of community after feeling alienated from mainstream society, and dealing with the loneliness, guilt, and self-loathing that has long eaten them up inside. The two—Maren (Taylor Russell) and L…
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This month brings some big highlights, including a new season of Slow Horses, a long-awaited adaptation of Louise Penny’s novels, and Helen Mirren engaging in ranch-based violence. Not to mention a few more spy thrillers, one of them from Doug Limon. Should keep us all busy in between Christmas specials and the World Cup. Irreverent (Peacock / Premieres Nov. 30th) Colin Donnell plays a Chicago-based criminal who goes on the run after a heist turns sour. He washes up in Australia, posing as a small-town minister. Expect a lot of oddball and distrustful townsfolk, some culture clash, and lessons learned. Looks like this one has some charming qualities, especially if y…
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Romances are Having A Moment. Well, they’ve been having a moment all through the pandemic, as we turn to more cheerful fare in a bleak world, and yearn for connection more than ever. We don’t cover much in the way of romance on this site, but there were so many good new and upcoming novels combining romance with crime or gothic fiction that I had to do a roundup. In the following books, a woman starts a romance with Death, spies fall in love, queer romance blossoms during an investigation, con artists find attraction in mutual admiration, and Victorian ladies speculate wildly about Frankenstein’s penis. Sally Thorne, Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match (Avon) Ange…
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One of the conundrums a mystery series author deals with before beginning every book is where to set the crime that engages the protagonist. Does it take place in the familiar setting of the sleuth’s current place of residence? How many murders has the leading character already solved there? If he or she lives in a small town—think Jessica Fletcher of Cabot’s Cove, Maine—the reader begins to wonder why residents haven’t noticed that murders in their usually bucolic surroundings are as common as dandelions. A large city such as New York, where Prudence MacKenzie and Geoffrey Hunter pursue some really nasty criminals in the Gilded Age Mysteries, of which DEATH AT THE FALL…
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Nena Octubre 1837 It was often said that a strange kind of magic ran in the water of Rancho Los Ojuelos, the kind that made the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca go mad, the kind that made mustangs swift and the land rich. Nena knew, even as a child, that magic was a turn of phrase. A way that adults talked about bounty and blessings: with reverence, and perhaps a bit of fear, for when you had much, you never knew how much of it could be lost. She and Néstor were thirteen that year. She knew that magic, in as many words, was not real. But as summer’s heat stretched thin and reached into fall, there was something she sensed whenever she set her palms to the soil of the he…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Craig Henderson, Welcome to the Game (Atlantic Monthly Press) A widowed Englishman with a past as a rally driver gets caught up in a Detroit gangster’s dreams of one last job in this intricate and fast-paced debut from Craig Henderson. Welcome to the Game will give you plenty of hair-raising thrills, but the quiet moments and thoughtful characterization will have this story lingering in your mind for a long time after the last page is turned. –DM Blair Braverman, Small Game (Ecco) In this quiet survivalist thriller, a game show in the woods becomes the real deal when…
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Unconsciously searching for my own humanity I discovered Super Hero comic books on a metal rack in a neighborhood supermarket in the very early 1960s. The bright colors and derring-do gave my mind the potential first to imagine having superior powers and then, second, to wonder what to do, what was right and wrong to do with that power. I say Super Hero comics because earlier on I used to read children’s comic books about friendly ghosts, playful child-devils, and variously charactered adolescents. These children’s comics were more about my identity but the latter Super Heroes were something else – they were about making a difference in the world. The first Super Heroes…
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There’s a line roughly 45 minutes into the first episode of “Three Pines,” Amazon’s new adaptation of Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books, that so incensed Penny she denounced it on her Facebook page when the show’s trailer was first released. The crabby old poet, Ruth Zardo, tells Gamache, a homicide investigator with Canada’s Sûreté police force, probing the murder of a hated neighbor, “This village is the most welcoming place on Earth. But if you don’t belong here, Three Pines will find you out and chase you one way or another.” In her social media post, Penny told fans she asked for the line to be cut but lost the fight. She wrote, “It makes me wonder if they und…
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I thought I’d come to the wrong office: The entrance foyer to the publishing company was the color of a hospital waiting room in a second-tier city. As I slid my resume under the pane of glass at the front desk—like the ones ubiquitous then in Chinese restaurants, when crime in New York City was off the charts—I felt more like a heroine in a noir novel than an aspiring member of the literati. I chose to overlook the fact that my way to the publishing office, I passed a corpse, a drunk sprawled out on a park bench, stiff with the winter cold. I didn’t know the job of book editor existed until I moved to New York with my then-husband. All I knew was that no one in my pref…
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It was in Boston’s most notorious neighborhood that Professor William Douglas met sex worker Robin Benedict. Their stormy relationship, and the terrible crime that occurred, made national headlines. The irony is that they wouldn’t have met if not for the Combat Zone, a neighborhood that served as a magnet for the city’s most desperate and depraved. Douglas had probably heard about the Combat Zone dating back to his days at Brown University in nearby Providence. The neighborhood was already known on a national level as a rough, dangerous place, having earned its name in the 1950s when brawls between local biker gangs and sailors frequently spilled out of the bars along l…
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One of the elements in cozies that can be lots of fun for authors to create is the main character’s occupation. As you peruse titles you find the genre offers bakers, librarians, booksellers, crafters, teachers, pet shop owners, chefs, and the list goes on. The challenge for me in creating the Paint by Murder mysteries was finding something unique and entertaining for my character to do when she wasn’t busy chasing clues to solve murders. My process in choosing what I want to include in my stories is influenced by personal experiences. In the case of the Paint by Murder mysteries, the setting of a small lakeshore town along New York’s Chautauqua Lake seemed a perfect cho…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities (Minotaur) “Another superb achievement… Penny weaves together all these narratives―the series of modern-day killings, the decade-old bludgeoning murder and the haunting artwork that has remained shrouded in mystery across the centuries―with a master’s deft hand.” –BookPage Rae Meadows, Winterland (Henry Holt) “Meadows skillfully articulates the risks and rewards of high-level competition, the divine feeling of being chosen to represent one’s country and the fragility of the human body… Winterland is a historic look back at a generation of Sovi…
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