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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In March 2013, a c-suite executive with a large Mexican corporation traveled with his family to their home in Miami, and later to New York City. On Friday, the 29th, they visited the Metropolitan Museum where he attempted to take a 19th century Islamic rosewater/perfume sprinkler from its case in the Damascus Room. Fortunately, a specifically designed mount secured the eleven-inch-tall object’s base and a wire held its top. The museum visitor walked away but returned twenty minutes later and snapped the carved red coral lid and silver stopper off and, after looking lovingly at it, put it in his pocket. The act was recorded on video and because his daughter had used a cred…
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There is much to say about Glass Onion, the long-awaited sequel to Rian Johnson’s 2019 whodunnit Knives Out, and I will say much more shortly. But for now, let me assure you that Glass Onion is a treat in its own right—a well-written, well-acted, multi-layered mystery extravaganza. This is a mini-review, spoiler-free and vague by design, existing merely to confer enthusiastic approval so that as many of you who want to see it in theaters can know if it is worth your time doing so. In short: it is. See, following several successful film festival screenings, Glass Onion has a limited theatrical release in 600 theaters across America this Thanksgiving week before it goes b…
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In January 1958, Elijah Muhammad sent a cablegram to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of the United Arab Republic, on the occasion of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference hosted by the Egyptian government in Cairo. Elijah, who had been taught by Master Fard that Blacks in America were an “Asiatic” race, had already formally endorsed Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal in public statements and his newspaper columns. In Nasser’s stand against the British, French, and Israelis, the Nation saw a reflection of its own fight against white supremacy in America. In his letter, Elijah wanted Nasser to recognize these parallels too. “As-Salaam-Alikum.” He began the lett…
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Like so many others, my interest in true crime podcasts started with Serial, the award-winning 2014 production that investigated the murder of Hae Min Lee. I was captivated by the twisty narrative and the complicated question of a killer’s guilt, which culminated in Adnan Syed’s release from prison in 2022. In the years since, Serial launched a tide of true crime podcasts that cover a range of formats and narrative structures. Popular weekly podcasts such as Crime Junkie and My Favorite Murder highlight different cases each week, while other shows use ten or more episodes to explore a single case, similar to the Serial format. Then there’s Dateline NBC, the most popula…
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“Hello?” Red called, her voice hollow, her eyes alive, sorting through shadows. Perfect. This was the absolute worst way to die. Mid–squat-pissing behind a tree while Maddy’s axe-murderer charged at her from the front. Dignified till the end. No, the worst way to die must be suffocating, no, no, actually, the worst was on your knees, two shots to the back of the—all right, all right, let’s finish up here. There wasn’t anyone in the trees. Red knew that. She did. The only people were the ones she knew of, behind her on the scrubland. It was just a rat, or a bat, or a raccoon, or maybe a vampire. But it didn’t matter because she was finished. Her legs shook as she strai…
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I was for several years Chair of judges for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger for first novels, and was struck how many new authors of talent were increasingly emerging from diverse backgrounds—not just in Britain but all over the English-speaking world. This became the inspiration for putting together ‘The Perfect Crime’ anthology. Once I had brought my fellow CWA board member Vaseem Khan on board, it became evident we should look as far as we could to reflect that wonderful diversity. We cast our net far and wide and invited not just pioneers amongst authors of color, but also writers of Asian, African, and indigenous descent from all over the world. In this respe…
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Hello CrimeReaders! It’s the Holiday season, which, according to all my local stores’ playlist designers, begins right after Halloween. It’s also Black Friday, which, according to all the internet stores having sales, is actually eight days long. But that’s okay! As usual, I have been in charge of putting together this year’s CrimeReads Holiday Gift Guide, and I am positively chuffed. Shopping for cute mystery-ish items to curate this list is one of the highlights of my work-year. Most of the items on this list are not books. Most. We have another gift guide releasing for just that purpose, but I did sneak a few special books on here. Because, you know. Like always, I’…
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This is normally the column where I recommend some international thrillers to get you through the weekend, but since we have an extra long holiday weekend coming up in the States, I thought I’d do something special, focusing on adaptations of le Carré novels, something of a passion of mine. In particular I want to hone in on a few of the lesser heralded selections. Really, this was just an excuse to recommend The Russia House: “Spying is waiting. Spying is worrying. Spying is being yourself but more so.” If you love peace…and Sean Connery’s dissolute charms… The Russia House (1990, dir. Fred Schepisi) I’ve been somewhat insistently telling people this is the most und…
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One Sunday, like any other, I drove my beat-up Volkswagen Bug with no brakes to the Alpha Beta supermarket to buy bread and pasta, and to treat myself to a bruised, purple, manager’s special chuck steak. It didn’t seem like it then, but it was the day that changed my life and set me on the course I would pursue for the next fifty years. I had finished shopping and was waiting around bored in the line at the check-out stand when I noticed a little circular book display. As I spun it around, something caught my eye, a book with a colorful Modigliani painting on the cover. It was Fake! by Clifford Irving. I picked it up and, as people streamed past me, I started reading, …
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The Allure of the Arsenic Squad: Why I Write about 19th Century Women Serial Killers
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One day in the early 20th century, a man called Andrew Helgelien received a letter from a woman he had corresponded with for a while. The woman was a land-owning widow of means, based in Indiana, but of Norwegian descent like himself. Andrew had first written to her after seeing her personal ad in a newspaper for Scandinavian immigrants. The two of them had hit it off, and were already planning their future together. Enclosed with the letter was a dried four-leaf clover for luck. Little did Andrew know on that day that the woman he was so enamored with would later come to be known as one of the most prolific women serial killers in American history, and that he was to bec…
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I’m not a historian, just a novelist who happens to be a history fanatic. So when I write a spy novel set during World War II, fake history is unacceptable. Even though my protagonist Alexsi and the situations he finds himself in may be fictional, the story has to be set within the context of real locations, real historical characters portrayed accurately, and an actual historical timeline. As a history fanatic I feel obligated to offer my readers history that they may not necessarily be familiar with. My previous novel, A Single Spy, was set among the German exile colonies of Azerbaijan, Stalin’s Russia, Nazi Germany, Iran, and a German plot to assassinate Roosevelt, Ch…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Camilla Bruce, All the Blood We Share (Berkley) “This bone-chilling story unfolds in different voices filled with depravity and dread…Fans of fictionalized stories of notorious murderers will be enthralled.” –Booklist Richard Stratton, Defending Alice (HarperVia) “Gripping courtroom drama and social commentary…the story flows well…[the author is] masterful in building suspense.” –Kirkus Reviews Shahan Mufti, American Caliph: The True Story of a Muslim Mystic, a Hollywood Epic, and the 1977 Siege of Washington, DC (FSG) “[A] gripping, meticulously researched history . . . Ex…
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“I’m so on board with this. Because this is how I’m gonna fill the rest of my days with hobbies, and my hobby is solving murders.” — Charles-Haden Savage, Only Murders in the Building. In the future, those of us who lived through the dark times of the 2020-2022 pandemic will measure those years in what we watched while we tried to mentally disconnect from the virus and the world. Binging streaming TV series was a balm for our stressed souls. We started, of course, with Tiger King, a docu-series about troublingly strange people who were obsessed with big cats. Some of us sampled the sexy-yet-mind-numbingly dumb 365 Days, if only because the main characters were beautifu…
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In Mystery at Windswept Farm, the third book in my mystery series, Rosalie Hart has been surprised with the opportunity to study with an Italian chef. While researching Italian food and culture, something I could do all day every day, I came upon an Italian saying: Il Dolce Far Niente. Translation: the sweetness of doing nothing. Further research revealed that Italians embrace this concept in all aspects of their lives: friends and family, food, even their work. I was intrigued. Writers have a particularly odd way of viewing what we do. Although we refer to our job as a craft, an art, we often bemoan how difficult it is. We talk of writer’s block, attention deficits, is…
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The best journalism movies emphasize dogged research and writerly integrity, with “Truth” clearly framed as the guiding principle and ultimate purpose of such investigations, and “justice” as its primary effect. She Said follows suit, but it also develops a highly personal and empathetic tone—more social and compassionate and intimate, more Spotlight and less All the President’s Men or The Post. The film, directed by Maria Schrader, is about how two New York Times reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, broke the story about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long pattern of abusing and assaulting his female employees and colleagues. Essential to the film’s t…
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What is it about the sea that has made it a literary obsession since The Odyssey? For me, it’s the mystery, the thrill of adventure, the fear of the horrible beasts lurking under the waves, and the dangerous men lying in wait just over the horizon. It’s the visceral feel of the wind and the waves, the raw smells of saltwater mixed with fuel and fish and fear, where the weather is a capricious character, and the ships are lonely fortresses against the unknown. But I find the strongest appeal in how the sea shapes and reveals a person’s character; it can raise men and women to the heights of courage or plunge them into the depths of madness. Who doesn’t know their names: …
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In 2013, I applied to join the Los Angeles Police Department for many reasons. Far too many to explore in this piece, but most notably, I wanted to be a positive force within a flawed department and maybe, hopefully, impart change. I spent six months preparing to enter the police academy. I exercised and got into peak physical shape, and I read everything I could on police work, the history of Los Angeles, and memoirs written by retired officers. When I received word that I was accepted into Class 7-14, I thought the worst part of training would be the brutal summer heat, but halfway into my training, I injured my lower back and was forced to resign. I was sent home, wher…
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In 2013/14, my wife and I became fearful of a phenomenon that might have led to a civilizational collapse, and so we started ‘prepping’. ‘Preppers’ or ‘Doomsday Preppers’ are essentially any people who take it into their own hands to prepare for the survival of their group or family in the face of a predicted life-threatening catastrophic event. We were amateurs, but nonetheless, with prepper manuals in hand, we bought a tiny shack in the middle of nowhere and tried to grow food we could eat so that we wouldn’t have to rely on stores, aka civilisation. After a year our garden failed to become self-sustaining but the novel How to Survive Everything was born and we learne…
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Wes can’t get the song out of his head. It plays on a loop, over and over, until he finds himself humming it out loud. So addictive, and he doesn’t have a clue who sings it. The music doesn’t stop until an alert pops up on his phone. His famous quotes app sends daily words of wisdom. Love is a serious mental disease. -Plato Wes swipes it away. Love is the last thing on his mind, especially today. The only thing that matters is time. His calendar is a wall of meetings, back to back to back without a single break. Wes has to leave the office by five-thirty, drive home, shower, shave, dress, and get back out of the house by six forty-five. Assuming he wants to be on tim…
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Although the word “Blaxploitation” has become an acceptable one to describe African-American films released from the early-to-late 1970s, many of the actors and directors never liked the term. Still, that was the era when any movie with more melanin was tossed on the Blaxploitation pile. Recently watching a ReelBlack interview with the actor/director Ivan Dixon, whose directorial debut Trouble Man celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, he referred to the film as an “action/adventure” before sarcastically using the dreaded term. In the film Robert Hooks plays Mr. T, a neighborhood fixer in South Central, Los Angeles who is also a private detective. Like Phillip Marlow…
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Have you ever cared about an issue so much that you marched for it? Maybe you organized an activist group or volunteered or donated money to a non-profit. Perhaps you wrote letters to your representatives. Or maybe you just felt overwhelmed and weren’t sure you could even make a difference and instead were bogged down by inaction. One valuable tool writers have to address an issue or champion a cause is our pens. We can not only write those letters to government officials or create clever blog entries, tweets, and posts, we can use the world of our writing to present the issue and even inspire people to act. One option a writer has when addressing an issue is to write a…
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“It made you want to resign as a member of the human race.”—Edna Ferber on the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. The trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping and death of Charles Lindbergh Jr. was a national spectacle. Media flooded the New Jersey town of Flemington. Hordes of sightseers arrived, trying to get inside the courthouse or waiting outside for a glimpse of Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh. Naturally, the local businesses did quite well. Hotels were full. Restaurants offered ice cream sundaes called Lindys. People sold fake autographed pictures of the famous aviator. Other souvenirs included tiny ladders on green ribbon. One man sold bags of blond curls, c…
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In 1992, two of the year’s most memorable independent films depicted gay men committing murder. Gregg Araki’s The Living End and Tom Kalin’s Swoon arrived at the peak of what critic B. Ruby Rich coined the “New Queer Cinema”, an informal movement of transgressive, formally inventive films from young queer filmmakers, usually with a political or historical bent. Araki and Kalin’s films were representative of one of the major strains of New Queer Cinema—centralizing queer villains from a queer point of view. The Living End is a jagged, Godard-esque lovers-on-the-run film with an HIV-positive couple at its center. While The Living End raged at contemporary oppression, Swoon …
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I fell in love with reading and mysteries at the same time through Trixie Belden mysteries. While our lives had nothing in common, I identified with Trixie over our curly hair. It would be decades before I felt that moment of identity with a character again. I learned to avoid mysteries with Native American characters after sampling several written by non-Natives. They depicted Native characters with the same stereotypes as TV Indians, which represented no one I knew. Tony Hillerman changed that. I discovered Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee while reading Hillerman’s Thief of Time in 1988. Though written by a non-Native, Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee series opened my eyes to…
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Many of the clichés from the detective stories of the Golden Age of Mystery Writing and the old black and white films of the 1940s pop up in Murder at Black Oaks, the latest entry in my Robin Lockwood series. But you have to go back in time to my days in elementary school to learn why I put them and many others in a contemporary legal thriller. I have been a voracious reader, devouring two to three books a week, since elementary school. The books I liked the most were the fair play mysteries of Ellery Queen, with their bizarre murders and clues you could use to figure out whodunnit, and Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason courtroom thrillers. Perry inspired my twenty-fiv…
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
What should you accept as credible?
Where it All Began
