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’ve always had a weakness for stories that defy categorization, especially if they happen to include fantasy and romance. Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars is an excellent example; Tamsyn Muir’s captivating and beautifully strange Gideon the Ninth is another; Naomi Novik’s fabulous Scholomance series is a third. When I began writing Payback’s a Witch, I originally intended it to read as a more traditional rom-com, primarily a romance that just happened to revolve around two bisexual witches falling in love in a magical, Salem-inspired Halloweentown. The magic was initially intended to be a background element rather than a focal point of the plot. Something to add a little s…
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As the title of our new historical thriller The Lawless Land suggests, plenty of crimes are committed in the story. Since our book takes place in 1351—not long after the worst of the Black Plague and during the Hundred Years’ War between France and England—lawlessness reigned over wide swaths of Europe where civilization had been pushed to the brink, so the title is well-earned. It’s fascinating (and rather appalling in some cases) that human nature never really changes. Even though our book takes place more than 670 years ago, many of the crimes we featured in the plot are just as relevant today: murder, kidnapping, embezzlement, bribery, price-gouging, and theft by cut…
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Screenwriters are taught: “Do not write what you cannot see.” And this is why, after a career of writing screenplays and directing films, I wrote a crime novel. A screenplay is a blue print, drawn with action and dialogue, something that exists in a slippery space, to inspire a director to film, to suggest actors fulfill characters, for a production designer to envision set dressings and costumes and hair designs that likely were not even on the page. You can’t write about what’s inside someone’s head because, well, you can’t see that. You learn to write only what people say, and what they do. Don’t direct the movie by suggesting how someone is sipping tea while loading…
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This month’s international titles are sultry, atmospheric, and thrilling. From sex workers in Brazil, to language students in Beijing, from the working class districts of Casablanca to the vineyards of South Africa, let May’s best international crime novels show you a different version of the world than the ones in travel brochures. Camila Sosa Villada, Bad Girls Translated by Kit Maude (Other Press) Like Fiona Mosley’s Hot Stew, Bad Girls is more of a book about found family and societal othering than a book about sex workers (because sex workers are people and have all the complexities of ordinary lives, ok). Camila Sosa Villada has written a beautiful, queer, mag…
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I know this veers perilously close to ‘what are you wearing?’ territory, but please, bear with me—What do you wear to sleep at night? Flannel pjs? Pyjama shorts set? Night gown? Adult onesie? Growing up in Canada within a lower-class immigrant family, the only pyjama sets I ever got were gifts. I mean, I knew what they were, of course I did. I watched TV. I’d even worn at least one set, when I was maybe two years old. I’ve seen the photo. The before times, when I lived in Hong Kong. Maybe, if my family had stayed, I’d have grown up with sets upon sets of coordinated tops and bottoms, all properly matched together for the sole innocuous purpose of being slept in. As it …
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Christopher Nolan is one of those writer-directors who critics like to accuse of being too “cerebral,” even “chilly.” Nearly all of his films are puzzle-boxes, playing with time and space and memory, and these commentators argue a good deal of human warmth is lost in the plots’ coolly whirring components. Such were the criticisms leveled against his most recent film, “Tenet,” which proved especially challenging for audiences to embrace—but if you give its complexities a chance (and a second viewing), you might find it one of his better works. “Tenet” has the foundation of a globe-trotting espionage movie, but the relatively standard-issue spy-vs.-oligarch plotline is …
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Zarqa Nawaz is as smart as she’s funny, and that’s saying something, since she’s very funny. Nawaz first became known for her hilarious and heartwarming sitcom, Little Mosque on the Prairie, and now she’s embraced fiction writing with her new novel, Jameela Green Ruins Everything, in which a woman prays for a book deal, accepts a mission from an imam to perform a good deed, and somehow finds herself in conflict with the CIA. Zarqa Nawaz was kind enough to answer a few questions over email. Molly Odintz: The premise for this novel is wildly inventive. What was your inspiration? Zarqa Nawaz: When my memoir, Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, didn’t make it to the New Yo…
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Frank McGonigle was 26 when he left his midwestern home on June 7, 1982. His family never heard from him again. They spent nine years searching and hoping for his safe return. Seven days after he disappeared, an unidentified body was found in some woods 1,200 miles away on the coast of South Carolina. The small-town sheriff and coroner had only a few circumstantial leads to go on. They spent nine years trying to identify this body they referred to as “The boy in the woods.” An unlikely series of events eventually brought Frank’s family some answers and some semblance of peace. When I set out to write Ripple: A Long Strange Search for a Killer, I didn’t intend to work mys…
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Like a good mystery, the alley was both hidden and obvious. You could walk right by it and never see it. A gap by design. My secret smoking lounge. And, that day, my front-row seat to the crime that would change everything, the first rip of the unraveling. I had no money for cigarettes, of course, but smoking what I confiscated from my students was fair game. Students aren’t allowed to smoke at Saint Sebastian’s—it was my duty to step in. And Sister Honor says waste is a sin. So, there I was on my stoop in the alley on Sunday night, minding my own business, roasting in the delirious heat that never ceased, not even at dusk. Django Reinhardt guitar spilled from a car some…
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I was named after a crime novel. My parents chose my nickname, Polly, after Dorothy Sayers’s Lady Mary Wimsey, a rebellious aristocrat who defies her upper-class family and sometimes assists her brother, Lord Peter, in solving crimes. When I was growing up, my mom relaxed each night after dinner with a glass of Chardonnay, a pack of Virginia Slims, and a paperback mystery by Ngaio Marsh or Colin Dexter. I remember thinking how great it would be to write a book that someone could disappear into like that. What was it about crime fiction that she loved so much? How did these writers keep her attention, and how could I do the same thing? When I became a novelist, I formulat…
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I’m an apocalypse junkie. Not because I love seeing the world all jacked up (except, okay, I do) but because of how powerful and versatile the apocalypse is as a narrative device. Apocalypses can be fun! They’re a chance to sweep away all the annoying quotidian bullshit and live life pared down to just your favorite tools and your wits, a camping trip that never ends. Or they can be a handy crucible, a way to boil off everything until only the hardiest emotional truths remain. At their most wretched, the apocalypse gives authors and readers a place to see how dark the human soul can get and why. I set my own forthcoming novel, City of Orange, in a post-apocalypse. That’s …
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With one short sentence – ‘There shall continue to be a Secret Intelligence Service’ – the British government acknowledged for the first time that it engaged in spying. Baked into these nine words from the 1994 Intelligence Services’ Act are all sorts of wonderful things: impeccable self-control, a very British restraint, but also world-class chutzpah, a sense that such an admission, rather than being long overdue, is in fact below one’s dignity. If Lord Downton (or whatever he’s called) were forced to make an admission to Lady Downton, I imagine he would use similar language. ‘I shall continue to have an affair with the chambermaid’, or ‘I shall continue to squander my f…
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Ever since my adolescent days when I, like every other kid I knew, had unlimited access to HBO and Cinemax After Dark, I’ve been hooked on salacious thrillers. The more Adrian Lyne-esque the better. There’s something about the themes of obsession, infidelity, betrayal, seduction, and murder that set my inner wicked heart a thrumming. Bold women making devious—and sometimes dangerous choices—so-called “unlikable” female characters acting in unapologetic ways. The more salacious, the better. I think of Diane Lane in Lyne film, “Unfaithful” and how she strays from a perfect marriage into the arms of a dashing, torrid fling. And how perfectly subversive that is. Here’s a fem…
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It may be the fact that this CrimeReads editor moved back to Texas, but did anyone else feel like summer started months ago?!? Or maybe I just felt that way because I started reading for the summer preview back in February, to make sure I dedicated plenty of time to picking out the cleverest, twistiest, most puzzling and pulse-pounding mysteries I could find for your poolside consumption over the next few months. Let’s see which is higher—this year’s record temperatures, or the number of books on your to-read list after scrolling through the following. (Also because this preview was assembled by a former bookseller, the old joke about booksellers recommending emotionally …
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James Lee Burke’s new novel, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, is, perhaps, his most personal. The 85-year-old titan of American literature claims the worst imaginable impetus for the book – the death of his daughter, Pamala. In his fascinating and deeply moving Introduction to Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, he pays beautiful tribute to his late daughter, and also explains how he returned to his Holland family series of novels to update the story of protagonist, Aaron Holland. Every Cloak Rolled in Blood finds Holland, himself a novelist in his 80s, living in Burke’s adopted home state of Montana, grieving the unexpected loss of his daughter. Every Cloak Rolled in Blood provid…
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Adolf Eichmann’s superior officer, the man he tried so hard to please, was Reinhard Heydrich; and with Heydrich at last, we arrive at some-one with character and responsibility comparable to his terrible power. Heydrich was the official custodian of the new morality. Neither his career nor his personality could be described as banal; in fact, so many elements of social significance collided at his desk that one historian has labeled him “a symbol and perhaps the representative figure of the Third Reich at the peak of its internal and external power.” It is easy to see why: if ever a man killed in cold blood, that man was Reinhard Heydrich; if ever a man lived his life wi…
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There’s been lot of talk about unlikeable characters, in particular female ones, who seem to be given a much harder time than their male counterparts (I know this because I’ve written a fair few). Women protagonists can be strong but not bitchy. Harsh but they must still display a softer side. And for goodness’ sake, beware of making them know-it-alls. For a long time, it appeared the consensus was unlikeable female characters still needed to be, well, likeable. Recently, I’ve noticed a shift toward a wider acceptance of the fact female protagonists can be as evil and Machiavellian as male ones, and that’s a good thing because it makes for much more interesting stories (…
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As soon as Agneta’s daughters had left, everything became urgent. She grabbed a rucksack from the hall and hurried upstairs. Way back when, the bathroom had felt like the safest place—for three reasons. You could lock yourself in, there was no way to see in, and no one would ask what you were up to inside. And the many visi- tors to the house always used the toilets downstairs. Burying things in the garden or heading off into the woods might seem smart in the heat of the moment, but when the equip- ment came to be needed, it might not be possible to retrieve it at once. She’d got that far in her thoughts, even back then. Now she didn’t have much time. Naturally, there …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Lee Burke, Every Cloak Rolled in Blood (Simon and Schuster) “Burke rolls together the driving themes that have dominated his work—the inescapable presence of evil, the restorative power of love, the desecration of the planet, humanity’s long slouch toward Armageddon—into an intensely, heartrendingly personal exploration of grief.” –Booklist, starred review Kiersten White, Hide (Del Rey) “The suspenseful plot combines elements of Thomas Tryon’s classic Harvest Home, Netflix’s Squid Game, and the social commentary of Jordan Peele’s film oeuvre and mixes these with a revelator…
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In the early twenty-tens, I read Albert Camus’ The Plague. Due to its allegorical treatment of the French Resistance to Nazi occupation during WWII, it reminded me of the current gentrification resistance movements popping up all over Los Angeles. At the time, I lived in South Central, although urban planners and city leaders attempted to rebrand it as South Los Angeles in order to liberate it from the negative stigma it developed in the 80s and 90s in relation to: the crack epidemic, gangster rap, street gangs, graffiti, and social-realist urban films. But of course, a simple name change cannot delete a region’s past. Yet, in a city like Los Angeles, where culture is dri…
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The age old conundrum of which came first, the chicken or the egg, can definitely be applied to author branding and the genres across which an author writes. While many authors establish a brand based on the books they write, others write books (especially non-fiction) inspired by an existing brand. Since what we want to write and who we are as people can evolve over time, it becomes hard to tell which came first or which is leading our literary evolution. We might ask ourselves… Do we write in a specific genre because it aligns with our interests, personality, and expertise? Do we limit ourselves to a specific genre because we have already established it as our brand? D…
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Cassie Pérez: “You still think this is the best place in the world to live?” Detective Inspector Jimmy Pérez: “Yep. Of course I do. I mean to say, on a clear day, you can see Norway over that way.” Cassie Pérez: “There is that.” Detective Inspector Jimmy Pérez: “And . . . you can see Iceland over that way.” Cassie Pérez: “What about shops?” Detective Inspector Jimmy Pérez: “I forgot. We don’t have any of them. . . . We’ve got the sky and the sea, and razorbills and kittiwakes. What more do you want?” —From Shetland, Season 1, Episode 2 “Shetland has always been a place of sanctuary for me. I visited when I dropped out of university, and I just loved it from the …
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That evening, Professor Wang’s flavour—but not his likeness, which was gone—remained with Sam, a lingering aftertaste as he, Tianliang, and Auntie sat around a chaffing dish full of skewered fish balls, thinly sliced meats, and vegetables, simmering in a spicy sour broth. ‘I ate the other day at Yu Chun, the Northeastern restaurant in the West of the campus,’ Auntie said. ‘I’m surprised I didn’t run into you there.’ From the time she opened the door, Auntie intermittently offered Sam words of welcome and entreatments to guilty for having returned to Beijing without visiting her. Sam felt embarrassed but kept silent in the absence of anything redeeming to say. He had bre…
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Whether it’s movies like The Game and Ready or Not, dystopian science fiction like Ready Player One, or thrillers like the ones listed below, there’s something fascinating about stories where a game turns deadly. Bit of advice for any character in a book like this: If someone asks if you want to play a game, your go-to answer should be “definitely not.” In my sophomore thriller Blood Will Tell, the six friends gathered near a Northern California ghost town don’t heed that advice. When the alpha in the group suggests they play a drinking game, the others go along with it, despite their misgivings. As often happens, it goes badly. Only five of the friends return home, and …
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Ever since travelers first bought their place by the fire with accounts of distant lands, stories have served to transport us into worlds beyond our own experience. One may live a thousand lives through fiction, gathering the wisdom of experience with only the flick of a page. And it doesn’t matter if perspectives shift: wry observations of the world as it is become, for future generations, records of what once had been, and the familiarity of the here and now becomes an exotic fantasy. As a child in sultry, tropical Singapore, Agatha Christie was my escape to the cooler climate of the United Kingdom. We had no expansive country houses—or if we did, I certainly wasn’t pr…
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