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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We were up in Calgary doing final re-writes on our first movie and staying in a fancy hotel and just doing that screenwriters getting their first movie made/showbiz thing, which feels real nice when it comes along. Now when I say “us,” I mean me and “Golds” aka Michael Goldberg my old writing partner. Golds was a sweet Philly kid with a strange mathematical gift for how stories work. He also had a wild, open face and this red-brown ponytail that made him look like the Jewish Thomas Jefferson. So, as I said, we were up in Calgary on our first movie, and these were exciting times. But our success, though we enjoyed it, had a little shadow over it because I was a heroin add…
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When it comes to classic and traditional mysteries, the old manor house in a remote part of England is a classic of the genre: isolated, often impoverished, and filled with suspicious characters. It’s easy to picture Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot unmasking a murderer in the parlor, surrounded by suspects. In fact, English manors, villages, cities, and boarding schools are fodder for many a modern mystery, with present-day British authors having just as much with the settings as their historical counterparts. But British authors aren’t the only ones who love a creepy moor or crumbling manor house. Authors writing whodunits from the United States seem just as likely t…
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My introduction to the concept of a hitman was in 1972 when I sat in my local New York City grindhouse, The Tapia, and watched The Mechanic starring Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent. Directed by Michael Winner, the film introduced Arthur Bishop, a cold loner who enjoyed classical music, fine art and expensive wines. If it wasn’t for the killing part, he could’ve been just another tasteful bachelor from the Playboy era hanging out in his beautiful home and playing vinyl records on his state-of-the-art system. Over the years, I’ve seen and read more than a few hitman (and hitwoman) movies and novels, but I never thought about writing my own until editor Andy Raus…
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I’ve been reading thrillers and mysteries for as long as I can remember. I’ve made a list of books that have stayed with me, and they’re roughly in the order I read them. These novels not only entertained me, they taught me how to write. I didn’t know that at the time, at least not consciously, but now I can look back and say these are all books that influenced my style, plot, and the dark humor I love so much. The Partner by John Grisham I’ve read a number of Grisham books, but this is the one I’ve reread countless times. Patrick is a lawyer who has stolen a lot of money from a client and now lives in hiding in South America. At the beginning of the book, he’s found.…
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Crime fiction, which we might also call “homicide fiction,” has been popular since the 19th century, with the US and my native Britain dominating the genre. The trend continued even as violent crime rates generally declined and intentionally taking a life became an ever more unusual way for people to break the criminal law. In recent years, alongside invented mysteries and thrillers, we’ve seen the rise and rise of the true crime genre on streaming services and in audio podcasts. It appears everyone wants to know more about the minds of murderers. As it happens, this is my day job; I’ve spent the last 30 years working with violent offenders as a forensic psychiatrist and…
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Non-human animals are among the most vulnerable members of society. Even their inclusion in this term – ‘society’ – is not without controversy, and perhaps unsurprisingly so. We slaughter thousands of them every day to provide food and other products, routinely ignoring the often barbaric conditions they are kept in prior to their deaths. Arbitrary divisions are made between the behaviour of animals deemed consumable or those placed in the category of ‘pet’, while pets themselves – whether beloved or mistreated – are considered mere legal property. Some of the most popular breeds on the planet are created in such a way that limits their ability to breathe. It is interes…
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When crime fiction features multiple members of a family, the protagonist soon learns that to mess with one of them is to mess with more of them than bargained for. This is definitely the case for Lucy Lancaster—my genealogist main character in Fatal Family Ties, the third book in my Ancestry Detective Series—after Lucy is hired by one of her former co-workers and ends up entangled in three branches of her client’s family. Whether the family members in question are in a lighthearted cozy, a dark-and twisty thriller, or within a historical mystery, the more relatives that crop up, the more the action ramps up. The stakes are higher, as is the tension. The lengths to which…
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This summer will mark the 30th anniversary of the discovery of the most gruesome crimes in Milwaukee’s history. No doubt this grim anniversary will spark some reflections on the crimes and will inevitably renew interest in the man responsible for them. But I hope this year will also provide opportunities for us to think about how and why it is that 30 years on, Jeffrey Dahmer remains a household name—a kind of American celebrity, even—when few Americans could tell you the name of just one of the men he murdered. The media made this man famous, but we’ve not done much, if anything, to discourage them. Upon reflection, it’s obvious the case belongs in the long, disturbing t…
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1. We are the Bolan sisters. Calliope, Lorelei, and Serafina. If our names sound like they were plucked from a fairy tale, it’s because they were. Momma wanted, above all things, to live in a fairy tale. We have pale, freckly skin and dark auburn hair, which we refuse to cut. It falls in long jumbles down our backs—thick and wavy for Lorelei and me; wispy curls for Serafina. We are tall for our ages, respectively. We are clumsy. We have mammoth feet and delicate wrists. We see the world with perfect vision. Lorelei and I have green eyes. Serafina’s eyes are brown. When we are together, we collect stares we’d rather return. See? It’s the Bolan girls. The ones who surviv…
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Whenever I receive the tried-and-true question—“Where do you get your ideas?”—I answer honestly: “A lot of the time I steal them from myself.” By this I mean, as a veteran journalist (a decade in newspapers and more than twenty years now with The Associated Press), I have plenty of material at my fingertips. For sure, I often study up on plotlines and scenarios for my mysteries about Andy Hayes, a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator in Columbus, Ohio. But more often than not, I’ve already done much of the preliminary research through my reporting. In my first novel, for example, one of the characters works at a shady healthcare financi…
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One of the favorite sports of mystery critics, historians, and scholars is trying to determine when the mystery genre began, who invented it, and what is the first story or novel in the genre. The other favorite occupation is defining what a mystery is in the first place. I am not eager to get sucked into the first controversy, in which some have claimed the Bible, specifically Cain slaying Abel, as the first murder story, though there’s not much mystery involved. Others point to Shakespeare, notably Macbeth, but murder and puzzlement turn up in other of his plays as well. The first memorable act of pure detection is often credited to Voltaire, when his character Zadi…
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Hot girl/boy/person summer? More like cold case summer! For the next three months, take your ears on a virtual crime-themed vacation (though if you can swing the real thing, might I recommend CrimeCruise?) From France to Indonesia, from the rocky cliffs of Ireland to a former pirate haven in Southern Mexico, and to the not-so-sleepy suburbs of NYC, prepare for chilling, bingeable adventures. Chameleon (Campside Media) – Season 2 premiered June 15 I’ll be the first to admit it. I was a little late to the Chameleon party. Season 1 (Hollywood Con Queen) premiered in October 2020. I didn’t start listening to this offering from Campside Media until after Season 2 (High Rol…
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Place has always been important in the books I write. My new novel, a literary psychological thriller called Fierce Little Thing, is set on a back-to-the-land commune-turned-cult in rural Maine, where a group of children are driven to a terrible, desperate act in a last-ditch attempt to save the only home they’ve ever loved. More than two decades later, the same group of five middle-aged friends are blackmailed back together and onto the land, forced to reconcile how what they did has shaped who they are, and who they will become. I’ve set my three most recent books in fictionalized versions of places I know well. My New York Times bestseller Bittersweet—about a naïve Li…
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There’s nothing quite as relaxing as spending time in the great outdoors, is there? Or… is there? A little over ten years ago, I signed up for a few weeks at the Banff Centre for the Arts, an arts residency high in the Rocky Mountains. It sounds ideal—all that fresh air, and so few distractions! But I’m a city girl. Once I got there, I was surprised and sometimes overwhelmed by the landscape around me, and I wasn’t the only one. You’d think the mountains would give you a feeling of liberty, possibility, wide open space. In reality, I found myself in a bowl, tall peaks on all sides. Instead of feeling on top of the world, I felt crushed by it. It was late October when I…
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San Francisco, San Fran! What a location, what a bridge, what a history of crime and vice. From the legendarily wild Red Light district of the Barbary Coast, born out of the California Gold Rush of 1849, to today’s Silicon Valley, born out entrepreneurship and hi-tech skills (along with a little skulduggery and corporate shenanigans of course). San Francisco has survived earthquake, fire, and epidemic. It’s been city of almost constant physical, social and political fracture. It’s a liminal city—as far as you can go on the US mainland before it becomes Asia. A country that started in the east, ends in the west, pretty much at San Francisco. For those on the run it’s all t…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Samantha Downing, For Your Own Good (Berkley) Just finished reading this wonderfully dark, twisty and compelling thriller set in a prestigious private school. I raced through it, desperate to know how it would end.” –B.A. Paris Owen Matthews, Red Traitor (Doubleday) “Cold War buffs will particularly enjoy the ride, though any reader who appreciates the finer points of espionage and foreign intrigue will also be well satisfied.” –Publisher’s Weekly Daniel Silva, The Cellist (Harper) “Gabriel Allon goes after the deadliest weapon at the Russian president’s disposal—his money…
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As it’s been said lately, Netflix is all either murder or cakes. Our appetite for crime in shows, movies, or books is—and probably has always been—seemingly insatiable. Growing up, my sister was a true-crime buff, and the original Law and Order was a staple in our rotation when we got older, which I realize now is dating me a bit. Crime is everywhere and in seemingly every form: fictional, true, procedural, cerebral, violent, forensic, legal, white-collar, solved, and unsolved. But from what I’ve read and watched, one aspect is largely underrepresented: the victim’s perspective. Though many perpetrators of financial or other white-collar crimes convince themselves that t…
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Crime investigation is a daunting process. It involves numerous hours of tedious and meticulous gathering and analyzing of physical and trace (forensic) evidence, searching for and interviewing witnesses, as well as figuring out the motive, and, in some cases, the mod us operandi. After and only after the evidence is conclusively verified would the offender be tracked down and arrested. Circa 1990, before the World Wide Web (www) was made a public domain and became an integral part of our everyday life, crime was viewed as a tripartite affair. An affair confined between the victim and family, the perpetrator and accomplices and the investigator (police). Some may say, the…
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When I was in high school, a friend invited me for Sunday services at the church where her father was pastor. There was much that intrigued me (including the fact that her mother had been “saved” in this church—and could never again wear pants). It didn’t occur to me to ask what religion they belonged to—I jumped at the chance to visit a place I’d secretly come to associate with belonging and authenticity. You couldn’t really be Black in my all-Black Long Island neighborhood unless you went to church—period. My block formed the north side of a cul-de-sac loop, where the houses were green and evenly-shingled and pleasant; on the south side, the homes seemed shabby and unmo…
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In 2015, American writer Robert Stone passed away in Key West at the age of 77, and the world lost a literary lion. Stone was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, once for the PEN/Faulkner Award and five times for the National Book Award for Fiction. He always let his books do his talking and he rarely sought the spotlight. His passing was noticed by aficionados—Bruce Weber’s obituary in the New York Times was especially good—but, in general, the event made few ripples on the world stage. As a devotee who had read, and re-read, all of Stone’s eight novels, including one that I believe is among the very best American crime novels, I wondered if the great writer’s legac…
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