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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The internet used to come in the mail. You’d get those AOL sample CDs, load them on your bulky desktop, wait for your sister to get off the phone, suffer an endless stream of scree-oops and static, and boom, twenty minutes later, you were connected: a world of GeoCities and LiveJournals at your fingertips. Ah, the good old days. Being a teenage girl online in the 90s and early 00s was wild. We had embarrassing screennames and bedazzled profiles with cheesy inspirational quotes, most likely surrounded by a collection of stars and swoopy digital symbols. We organized our buddy lists into meticulous friend groups—a hierarchy determined by who we were speaking to the most …
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Everyone loves an underdog—an outcast who must fight to belong to a friendship group. But what happens when this takes a dark turn, when the underdog either fights back or finds themselves complicit in the worst crimes? It is a question which has produced some of the most gripping thrillers—as well as some of the most heart-rending novels I can remember. In my novel Circus of Wonders, I wanted to look at this dark side of belonging. The circus itself—itinerant, close-knit, typically a place of society’s misfits—became a cult with Jasper Jupiter as its leader. Every character longs to belong and excel. But what happens when a young performer called Nell begins to eclipse …
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For decades, journalist and novelist Wayne Hoffman had heard the story of how his great grandmother, Sarah Feinstein, was murdered in Winnipeg, Canada in 1913. A Russian Jewish immigrant, Feinstein, so the family story went, had been shot by a drive by shooter while sitting on her porch nursing her youngest daughter. It was a crime that was never solved. While Hoffman’s grandmother (Feinstein’s daughter who was only three at the time of her mother’s death) and his mother, Susan, had recounted this story as fact, he always had a suspicion about the truth of Sarah’s death. Those suspicions would eventually turn into his own investigation, taking him into the archives and t…
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It’s been nearly two years since a new acronym entered the mainstream lexicon: WFH. (Dictionary entry: Abbr. Working from home; work from home. See also WTF?). Millions of office workers around the world swapped out their nerve-jangling commutes for the stupefaction of endless Zoom calls. They gave up constricting neckties and high heels for soft pants and Ring lights. They said good-bye to power lunches and hello to sourdough bread. In the parlance of mystery writers, the office thriller gave way to domestic suspense. But now, with the world maybe, hopefully, about to slouch toward normality, it’s time to ask: How thrilling is your office, or how thrilled are you to ret…
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One of my favorite movie scenes ever is at the beginning of Hitchcock’s “Marnie”. It’s a montage of a young woman, shot from behind or from the neck down, lingering on everything except the face as she makes her way along the platform of a train station, down a hotel corridor, and into her room. We follow her as she repacks her suitcase, discarding anything worn or frumpy, choosing only the new and perfect. Using a nail file, she pries open a compact, revealing a stash of hidden Social Security cards. She flips through them all, choosing one to put into her wallet before tucking the rest securely away. Then she goes into the bathroom for a shampoo, rinsing out the dark, n…
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When elegant Nora Charles, trailing her dog Asta, trips and sends herself and her bundle of Christmas gifts sprawling to the speakeasy floor in a perfect stroke of comedic timing, The Thin Man shifts from a movie with all the hallmarks of a hard-boiled detective drama to something a bit more frothy and fun. Murder is still at the heart of the story. But with the addition of the glamourous leading lady, a cute wire-haired terrier, witty banter between Nora and her retired-detective husband Nick, and cocktails… lots of cocktails… the 1934 film becomes, dare I say it, almost cozy. I was struck during a recent re-watching of the classic film by how much it blends elements of…
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Many people are fans of the noir genre, but there is often debate as to what it actually is. What exactly is the lasting appeal behind a noir style story or film? Is it the dangerous urban setting? The stark moody black and white lighting, the wised-up hard-boiled dialogue? Perhaps one way to try to understand noir stories is to consider who it was that first created them and the times in which many of them were written. Looking at the genre from the perspective of its originators and their times, noir in essence seems to be simply highly stylized human drama with a Great Depression to post WWII era blue-collar American setting and attitude. It started when non- “to-th…
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It’s not often that the most memorable lines in crime movies are about love. In fact, the most memorable lines in crime movies usually seem to be about crime. But it’s Valentine’s Day, so here at CrimeReads, we decided to put together a fun quiz to spice up your day, one which merges both those things: romance and crime. The objective is very simple: try to name the crime movie that each romantic quote comes from. “Romantic” is defined slightly loosely, because of the genre we’re playing in, but “crime” is not. There are no war films, no fantasy movies, no action-adventure flicks on here. These quotes are from movies where a “crime” is a very important part. If a line is…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Bonnie Kistler, The Cage (Harper) “[An] absolutely spellbinding thriller. . . . An utterly engrossing and thoroughly entertaining story.” Booklist, starred review Anna Pitoniak, Our American Friend (Simon and Schuster) “An enthralling journey into the life of one of the most powerful women in the world….Exploring interpersonal loyalties and the difference between cowardice and patience, the well-researched and twist-filled Our American Friend is a natural next-read for fans of Curtis Sittenfeld, A. Natasha Joukovsky, and Stacey Swann.”—Booklist, starred review Ben Mezrich, The…
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Out of the gate, let me define a term you are likely to have not seen before: Quozy. When coining the name of this sub-genre of mystery, I intended it to be self-evident. So far, most readers and reviewers understand that Quozy is the simple blending of Queer and Cozy. Sidenote: I prefer the term “queer” over “gay” in this context as it is—to many within the LBGTQ+ community—a more expansive term. As for cozy, we all know that is a sub-genre of mystery featuring an amateur sleuth romping through a story free of profanity, gratuitous violence, and graphic sex. IS THERE A MARKET FOR QUOZIES? Instead of rushing to answer with a cheerleader’s enthusiastic “Yes!,” this is a …
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I love domestic thrillers, wine, and Kristen Bell with bangs, so you can imagine how excited I was to watch The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, a send-up of all the tropes that delight me the most in books and movies. But part way through the first episode, something felt off to me. In The Show with the Ridiculously Long Title (part of the joke, of course), Bell plays Anna, who’s entombed in grief over the death of her daughter three years earlier and the subsequent breakup of her marriage. She spends most of her days reading a book—The Woman Across the Lake—in her wine-soaked chair with a comically large glass of red, as she spies on th…
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In the long process from initial idea to final publication, books can go through a number of titles. Dog Rose Dirt—before it eventually became Dog Rose Dirt—gathered quite a few different names, but its very first title was The Barghest. Even in the early stages of the novel I knew that I would be, in part, describing the genesis of a monster, and naming it after another kind of monster was irresistible—and the Barghest was especially appropriate. The Barghest is a monstrous black dog and an omen of disaster that particularly haunted the north of England. If you saw even just a glimpse of the creature, it was said that you would die shortly afterwards. The human monster a…
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There are a lot of great movies that feature very believable romantic (and sexual) chemistry. In the Mood for Love! Moulin Rouge! Brokeback Mountain! Before Sunrise! Love and Basketball! Titanic! Anything with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks! Anything, honestly, with Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson. But as I must keep reminding myself, this is a crime website, so please allow me to present to you a list of the THIRTY-SOMETHING best romantic chemistries in crime cinema. It was a tough list, and I tried to define the categories as broadly as I could without making any controversial claims about crime-movie categorization. (IS While You Were Sleeping, a movie with *unreal* chemi…
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Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile comes out today. The film will likely be criticized (what Christie adaptation isn’t, among us die-hard fans?) for deviating from the book (in no universe is Poirot’s mustache meant to look like that.) While I don’t personally believe that a Christie adaptation must be strictly faithful in order to be good, I hope the film’s release will lead people to read the source text, because Death on the Nile is one of her best detective novels. It has a diabolical, ingenious murder, but it is also one of her most heartfelt and emotional books. It is one of Christie’s keenest investigations of psychology and mo…
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It was 2006. Heartbeats by The Knife was raging through the plastic pores of our computer speakers as we thrust our legs into our American Apparel tights. My best friend Emily and I were preparing to go to Lit Lounge in the East Village. Emily was deliriously beautiful with long blonde hair and outrageously big eyes like one of those 80’s kitsch paintings. I was in art school. Emily was modeling, mostly paid in clothes which she’d pawn at Tokyo 7 for cash. It didn’t take long before she became a nightlife micro-celebrity. And each night we’d go out I’d hover in the background providing a chunk of shoulder or a blur of skin to frame her, watching as her image was sliced aw…
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Since Agatha Christie introduced Hercule Poirot in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), the brilliantly mustachioed detective has been a mainstay of whodunnit TV and film. It doesn’t take a sleuth to figure out why: Christie wrote Poirot into 33 novels, two plays, and more than 50 short stories, meaning there’s never been a shortage of source material for Hollywood to adapt. Poirot’s latest cinematic case is Death on the Nile, the sequel to 2017’s middling Murder on the Orient Express. Once again helmed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, Death on the Nile mimics many of the same beats of Christie’s 1937 book of the same name, right down to the Karnak, the luxury steamer…
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Steven Torres arrived on the crime fiction scene in 2002 with Precinct Puerto Rico, first in a series of five books (and several short stories) featuring Sheriff Luis Gonzalo. Kirkus Reviews called Torres’s debut a “top-notch police procedural whose engrossing details create an authentic feel.” In 2007, he won a Derringer Award for his short story “Elena Speaks of the City, Under Siege,” and, while his first books were published traditionally, he decided to self-publish several others, including two story collections and the thriller Lucy Cruz and the Chupacabra Killings. This month, he launches a new series with a new publisher, the pulpy revenge tale Vengeance Is Mine (…
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From the first season of The Wire, I had a love/hate relationship with the HBO series some critics and fans anointed “the greatest ever made.” Baltimore had been my adopted hometown since 1978, when I moved there from Harlem with my mom and younger brother. It’s a city known for crabs, sports teams, and White women who call people “hon.” Baltimore has long been the perfect setting for crime narratives, and The Wire’s creator, David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, has been behind a few of them. Simon and his producing partner, ex-cop/schoolteacher Ed Burns, crafted five seasons of The Wire, filled with brutal storylines that focused on the dog-eat-dog world of the …
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I was tired at work the next day, because I’d stayed up later than I should have, working on the Book of Cold Cases. The bus had been ten minutes late, I’d dropped my bus pass, and I’d gotten to work out of sorts. I was on autopilot. Our office was in downtown Claire Lake, and our patients were mostly rich, or at least well-to-do—Claire Lake on the whole was well-to-do, a town of chic kitchen specialty stores and French bistros laid out along the ocean shore. The spectacle I saw from the safety behind my Plexiglas was never that of people digging their nails in for survival, doing their best to get through every day. Instead it was of- ten the foibles of the rich, the on…
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Not everyone is spending Valentine’s Day with their significant other, playing into the romantic consumerist fantasy that is modern Valentine’s Day. Many are, instead, just having sex. Or reading about sex. Or even maybe just thinking about sex. After all, quarantine left a lot of people (can I say this?) horny AF. And if any of this applies to you, then the following books, featuring lots of great sex and terrible relationships, may make for perfect Valentine’s Weekend reading. Couples Wanted by Briana Cole Let’s start things off with last year’s sexiest romantic thriller. Briana Cole has crafted a sultry masterpiece informed by her own career as a sex educator (she’…
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Strychnine is a grand tonic, Kemp, to take the flabbiness out of a man. —H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man, 1897 It would seem bizarre that a drug such as strychnine, so entrenched in the mind as a deadly poison, would ever be seen as a tonic and pick-me-up, yet that is precisely how it was viewed until the beginning of the twentieth century. The title character, Dr. Griffin, in H. G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man, “found strychnine to be immensely beneficial,” as Wells writes: “Griffin had a little breakdown. He started to have nightmares and was no longer interested in his work. But he took some strychnine and felt energized.” The benefits of strychnine seemed endles…
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New Zealand / Aotearoa (as it was named by Maori, the first settlers, ‘The Land of the Long White Cloud’). The general perception, encouraged by travel agencies’ websites and brochures, is of a peaceful and beautiful country. Two long islands and a smaller rounded one below; a slightly broken exclamation mark at the bottom of the South Pacific. The adjectives most used are pure, spectacular, unpopulated. And the people? Kiwis (as the approximately five million of us living down here are affectionately nicknamed) are usually described as being friendly, welcoming, easy going. I think that is why many readers, especially those living outside this country, have been shocked…
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The story of Stephanie’s life is a game of connect-the-dots. It just takes me time to connect them, and the hues and shades of who she was start to fill into a complete portrait, even though it’s still only in two dimensions. It is her murder that will ultimately define her—that will set her apart, that will draw attention to her life. But the story of her murder is a rabbit warren, a maze with a hundred dead ends. In my quest to understand my stepsister, I become a detective too, looking for meaning, for truth. For anything. When I first started writing about Stephanie back in 2009, aimlessly trying to make sense of her dominion of my mind, my mom gave me a big canvas…
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As a suspense writer, I’m often diving headfirst into the less-palatable parts of the human psyche. Give me a manipulative genius or a villainous heartthrob any day. A social climber with a slightly-malicious agenda? Yes, please. This is the kind of stuff my debut novel, The Night She Went Missing, is made of. I don’t often have the opportunity to teach contemporary thrillers in my classroom, so instead, I teach my seniors the importance of tilting a text on its axis, of examining characters from numerous angles, of using critical lenses to parse out the layers of a text. Through this process of turning texts upside down, I’ve found darkness lurking in some of the most u…
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To work with words in their hundreds and thousands in a world increasingly obsessed with brevity is not easy. Stubborn, we continue in the face of a new hierarchy of posts, tweets, tik-toks that amplify the bon-mot not the thesis. We resist despite the crushing efficiency of a brief text message of less than ten words to demonstrate that the game might be lost. And such texts usually are about loss, potential or realized. There have been many in the past two years – ‘He’s ill,’ ‘It’s bad,’ ‘She’s gone,’ ‘I’m sorry’—and we are all sorry for that. The most economic use of words to transmit immediate information, style an unnecessary companion to brutal fact. I received suc…
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