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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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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I’m like a crow with shiny objects. Only instead of bits of aluminum foil, dimes, and gum wrappers, I collect weird little obsessions. For example: The Titanic, abandoned amusement parks, bog mummies, and ghost ships. Ghost ships, not to be confused with phantom ships like the infamous Flying Dutchman, are actual physical vessels, found adrift or sometimes even sailing themselves…with no one on board and often no easy explanation for what happened. Imagine this: You and a co-worker are both heading to a conference located several hours out of town. But you are driving separately—he’s bringing his wife and child to make a weekend out of it; you have a few other obligati…
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My obsession with jaw-dropping final twists dates back to an upstate New York middle school classroom in the 1970s, where I first read Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. I remember skidding into the shocking denouement and then promptly backtracking to reread the entire story, looking for clues and marveling at Jackson’s brilliant literary sleight of hand. From then on, I was drawn to any author—screenwriters, included—capable of wrapping up a story with a blindside. Sci-fi novels or films were never my cup of tea back then (or now), but I remain captivated by the chilling final reveal in Planet of the Apes. Browsing library shelves, I gravitated toward modern-day suspense o…
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Miller’s Crossing, the Coen Brothers’ 1920s-era gangster ballad, is full of unbearable wetness—not simply because it is about Prohibition, but also because it is so often about liquid. It’s a film full of rain, tears, phlegm, vomit, blood. Its opening sensations—of scotch being poured over ice cubes in a tumbler, then of those same ice cubes lapping and rattling incessantly in their glass while sweaty Italian gangster Johnny Casper (Jon Polito) delivers a spitty, raspy, gulping monologue—ignite such an unpleasant cacophony of babbling fluids that you might feel sick by the time the scene ends. Miller’s Crossing, which hit theaters in 1990 but has just been re-released as…
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June 1841, Wolffe Hall, Yorkshire, England Wednesday, Nearly Midnight She jerked up in bed, wide awake, breathing hard and fast. The dream—this was the second time she’d had the identical dream. She was herself in the dream, and she was surrounded by a hazy sort of pale light that kept her from seeing anything clearly. It was as if she were in the middle of a long, foggy tunnel with a low humming all around her that slowly changed to a low voice that spoke quietly at first, all around her, then the voice became gradually harsher and louder, yelling at her. Then she came awake, sweating, terrified, and still not understanding what it was all about. The same sounds were i…
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The biggest part of writing is an art—having a point of view and the gift to express it. I’m not sure it can be taught, but it can be encouraged and cajoled and inspired. Another large part of writing is capturing what people are actually like, and I can teach you that right now in one sentence: talk to as many people as you can, and listen, truly listen, when they speak. And then there’s the craft of writing. This can absolutely be taught. I don’t know what they do at fancy writing schools, but I strongly suspect they’re trying to teach the part that can’t be taught and neglecting the part that can. I am going to tell you a few methods to write suspense. I want to tell …
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I follow the Toni Morrison adage, “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I’ve been a mystery fan pretty much my whole life, with a childhood spent watching Perry Mason, Matlock, and Murder, She Wrote with my grandparents and sharing Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown books with my mom. My mom later expanded my crime fiction-loving world by introducing me to Mary Higgins Clark and cozy mysteries. But in all the media I consumed, I couldn’t help but notice the lack of characters who looked like me and worlds that resembled my own. That’s what led me to create my debut cozy mystery series, A Tita Rosie’s Kitchen My…
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Many of us have that one person for whom we are willing to sacrifice. Maybe it’s our child, a parent, a partner, a sibling. But most of us, living our law-abiding lives, would not break the law to protect that person. We would help. We might even wipe out our savings to do so, go into debt, give up a job or work one we hated, but that step from one side of the law to the other for someone else’s sake is difficult. Even impossible for many. What makes these decisions in crime fiction so terribly compelling is we can, kinda, sorta, see how a person may be pushed to go over to the dark side. We might even, in an honest-hearted moment, relate to such a character. In my nove…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Bethany C. Morrow, Cherish Farrah (Dutton) “Morrow returns to adult fiction with a chilling thriller about race, class, and female friendship… The shocking ending to this suspenseful novel with a masterfully drawn narrative voice will leave readers breathless.” Booklist Sara Gran, The Book of the Most Precious Substances (Dreamland Books) “Gran perfectly captures the eccentric world of antiquarian bookselling while portraying a profound and magical reckoning with loss and the possibility of going on. She has outdone herself. ” Publishers Weekly, starred review Mia P. Manansal…
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Tehran, capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran with a population of nearly nine million in the city proper and fifteen million in the greater Tehran region. The second largest city in the Middle East, after Cairo. A city with centuries of history and still a very controversial metropolis. A centre of geo-politics, regional machinations, global concerns. It’s also a city of amazing food, great poetry and many, many writers. As well as being the inspiration for plenty of thrillers and espionage mysteries of late. A great example of excellent writing and descriptive of the Iranian capital is Philip Kaplan’s Night in Tehran (2020), a good place to learn some recent Tehran h…
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Over the course of my life, I’ve read different types of crime fiction and mysteries from innocent cozies to gory thrillers, and while I’ve enjoyed many books along that spectrum, I find that I have liked, and remember, the lighter fare the best—ones that entertain me more than they stress me. That especially is true for books with memorable detectives, as I have attempted to craft in my novel Pignon Scorbion & the Barbershop Detectives. While there are many wonderful mysteries being written today, we should never stop reading classic books by the masters of the genre and experiencing the characters and environments they created. In spite of the twelve authors on my …
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I count my blessings every day because my job as the arts-and-entertainment reporter for the Paducah Sun newspaper in Paducah, Kentucky, didn’t work out. I’d left Los Angeles to take the entry-level job six months earlier, despite my having run newsrooms at previous publications. I needed work, so I packed my trailer and headed for the Quilting Capital of the World, home to the incomparable National Quilt Museum. If the job hadn’t been a disaster, I wouldn’t have written my first novel, Quilt City Murders, which will be published by TouchPoint Press on Feb. 7. As the A&E reporter, I interacted daily with creative people, many of them quilters, and doing so proved to …
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Back in 2011, Saturday Night Live spoofed the Lifetime network’s original movies with a game show for suburban moms of troubled teens called “What’s Wrong with Tanya?” When the host comments that “Mary-Jo-Beth Jo-Jo” from Pleasanttown (Anna Faris) has a perfect life, Mary-Jo-Beth wearily raises a glass of wine and murmurs “Perfect… from the outside.” What used to be a working formula for Lifetime has now become big bucks for publishing, and many of the elements from the SNL skit—suburban setting, a crime that may or may not have happened, amateur sleuthing, alcoholism—reappeared in Paula Hawkins’ 2015 best-seller The Girl on the Train, followed by several subsequent be…
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Is it 2022 already? While I’m still holed up at home (as a native-Floridian-turned-New-Yorker, I don’t emerge from my cozy cocoon until the mercury hits at least forty degrees—celsius, preferably), podcasts are giving me a much-needed dose of true-crime heat. Even if you’re located in more forgiving climes, there’s nothing like curling up with a brand-new (or fresh season of a returning) podcast. Check out these nine ear warmers. Chameleon: Wild Boys (Campside Media) – Premiered January 22 In case you’re thinking this is one of those “what-are-they-up-to-these-days?” pods featuring the “boyz” of a certain mid-aughts MTV spin-off (Steve-O, if you’re reading this, I’…
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Hello, thriller fans, and welcome to deep winter. There is lots to choose from, and I do hope that one of my favorites becomes your next read. If none of these suit you, fear not—the new installment in Stephanie Barren’s Jane Austen series, The Year Without a Summer, was a witty read. If you liked Lola on Fire, Rio Youers is back with No Second Chances. Anna Pitoniak’s Our American Friend is a clever espionage tale, and Japanese crime writer Fuminori Nakamura’s My Annihilation is a stream-of-consciousness novel featuring the thoughts of chickens at a Purdue plant (no it isn’t, but I might read that). Anyway, these five rose to the top: I present your psychological thrille…
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I had always intended to be a writer of adult mysteries. When I conceived of the first novel I would eventually publish, it concerned a murdered hippopotamus at a zoo. I had imagined that one of the zoo’s veterinary staff would discover something suspicious during the autopsy and decide to investigate the crime. But I soon realized (with the help of my literary agent) that this novel might make more sense in the middle grade space, with a tween cracking the case. Now that I was setting out to write a mystery for young readers, I decided to reread the stories of three seminal junior detectives to see what made them successful as both novels and mysteries—ones that appeale…
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There’s just something about Laura Lippman. Some unquantifiable X-factor. A raw power, buzzing beneath the surface of the bestselling author’s laid-back demeanor. When we sat down for our talk, it was getting late, a little past nine. Laura stared back at me through my computer screen almost sleepy-eyed. Glass of red wine in hand, she admitted it was nearing her bedtime. I got straight to it, not wanting to waste the time of an author of over twenty books (including the award-winning Tess Monaghan series). It didn’t take long before I realized exactly what it was I’d seen in Laura from the start, that X-factor I mentioned. The following story sums it up much better tha…
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For years there was an unwritten rule that Reacher’s face should never be shown on the cover of a Lee Child book. It was first broken by his first publisher, New York’s G.P. Putnam Sons, in an act of petty revenge when Child was in the process of switching over to Bantam. Not only did they splash Reacher’s face all over Without Fail: they dressed him in one of big brother Joe’s Treasury suits, with white shirt and tie and Men-in-Black shades. Then came the Hollywood years, with tie-in editions between 2012 and 2016 proclaiming, against all plausibility, “Tom Cruise IS Jack Reacher”. I was present when a new cover image for Never Go Back came through over text: “I said no…
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For years now, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have been making crime films . . . but no one seems to have noticed. This is because the writer-director duo concern themselves primarily with character interiority and psychological development—the kind of thing that wins them Palme D’Or awards—not with guns or heists, nor with cops or tough guys. Their films are typically quiet affairs, stories about people on the fringes, often at odds with larger social structures. But make no mistake, the catalog of films the brothers have helmed are full of crimes and transgressions, illegal acts that figure crucially in the narratives and in the evocation of the larger themes they explo…
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The Big Island of Hawaiʻi is a magical place. Moonscape lava fields and rain forests. Black sand beaches, palm trees, and snow atop Mauna Kea. Ancient kipukas surrounded by new volcanic flows. A lyrical language and an engaging mythological past. Ocean breezes and bubbling lava. Astronomical telescopes to tease out the secrets of the universe. Six of the world’s major climatic zones. Wide ethnic diversity and every faction of political persuasion from far-right to sovereignty activists to agnostic hippie leftovers from the 60s. How could I not fall in love with this place? I was hooked. Over the years, I explored the nooks and crannies of the Big Island. The more I learn…
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Crime fiction reflects the world it is written in. Sherlock Holmes is the first detective. Let’s not count Sergeant Cuff and Dupin. They are policemen. Sherlock Holmes is the first modern detective, the one who sets the template. He is a private man, who follows his own definition of justice, not that of the law. He is brilliant, self-assured, the cleverest man in the room, with his dogged and not quite as bright friend chronicling his adventures. After Arthur Conan Doyle created this pattern, other Victorian detectives followed. Carnacki hunts ghosts, admiringly chronicled by Dodgson. Max Carrados is blind, but rich, and clever. Dr Thorndyke is a doctor, and a lawyer, a…
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Here is a month-by-month breakdown of upcoming mysteries and thrillers by Black authors, because Black History Month comes once a year but we should be reading Black authors all year long. The following list features a wide variety of subgenres and crossovers, including cozies, psychological thrillers, detective novels, historical fiction, romans noirs, dark fantasy, and young adult. This list is intended as both a resource and a reminder: there’s tons of good stuff out there. So let’s all get to reading it. Abby Collette, A Killer Sunday (Berkley, January 4) “A deliciously satisfying new cozy mystery series. It’s got humor, a quirky cast a of characters and ice crea…
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Through the classroom’s grimy windows, Eleonor watches the bushes and trees bend in the stiff breeze as dust is blown along the road. It almost looks like a river is flowing outside the school, murky and silent. The bell rings, and the students gather up their books and notes. Eleonor gets to her feet and follows the others out of the classroom. She watches Jenny Lind button her jacket in front of her locker. Her face and blond hair are reflected in the dented metal. Jenny is pretty, different. She has intense eyes that make Eleonor feel nervous, make her cheeks flush. Jenny is artistic. She likes taking photos, and she also happens to be the only person in school w…
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There’s a huge gulf in Sherlock Holmes’s biography. Backstory. Probably Freud’s fault. Wanting to know whether we were in love with our mothers or had killed our fathers. That is to say, that every character—every modern character—needs a backstory, according to today’s practice, all worked out by a writer (or an actor), even if the details of the backstory are never actually revealed to the audience. Adds depth, don’t you know? It didn’t use to be the case. We’re not concerned with Hamlet’s childhood, or Faust’s, or Quixote’s. And none of them felt the need for 23and me. But those days are gone. Now we want to know a character from the inside out. Now we even want (th…
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The novels of Paul Vidich are far removed from the sheen and opulence of James Bond, and feel more at home with the wry wit and stuff air of John le Carré’s George Smiley. In Vidich’s world, few can be trusted and the double-crosses often become triples, creating a gray, murky world of uncertainty and intrigue that propels his lush prose. Vidich’s latest, The Matchmaker (available February 1, from Pegasus), could very well be his best yet—and it features some unexpected influences. I had the chance to discuss the new novel, Vidich’s views on the spy genre, and what role—if any—comic books play in his literary DNA. ALEX SEGURA: Paul, your latest, THE MATCHMAKER, feels lik…
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