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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What is happening in Ukraine is a timely reminder of the way the truth gets blurred in time of war. And so it was in Berlin in 1939. For many Germans, it seemed that the war, which had begun in September, was already over. Poland had been crushed. With that there was no longer any reason for France and Britain to fight since there was no longer any chance of saving Poland. It was merely a question of time before the enemy grasped the futility of prolonging the war, it was believed. It seemed that Hitler’s strategic vision had been proven once again. Others were not so sure. They understood the Fuhrer’s inexhaustible ambition and knew that Poland would never be enough. I c…
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Prologue “Do you hear that?” her uncle whispered. “Hear what?” she said, refraining from taking a big bite of the caramel apple she’d made. “The rustling. Over there. In the bushes.” Her ears strained. The fire burning in the pit between their lawn chairs popped, sending up orange embers that failed to alleviate the encompassing darkness. She shook her head and lifted the apple to the corner of her mouth where she still had teeth capable of piercing the hard flesh; adult incisors had yet to fill the holes in her smile. “Listen,” he hissed, once more stopping her from taking a bite. “I don’t hear any—” The rustle of leaves sounded from far off in the yard, back where…
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The word “romance” evokes something different in all of us. For some, it’s a cozy Hallmark movie about an undercover billionaire who saves a small-town bookstore and falls in love with the shop owner in the process. For others, it’s the song they danced to at their wedding, or a painting that reminds them of a faraway place to which they’d like to escape. And for so many of us, romance defines an idea. A lifestyle we’ve never experienced, friends we can only dream of having, or a luxury hotel we can visit but never live in forever. The following is a list of books that cover all aspects of romance, and so many of the ways that they can turn bad. So much romance and beaut…
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The 2008 documentary Have You Seen Andy? is, sadly, not a unique true crime story. An unsolved mystery, a missing child, a devastating family tragedy… it fits neatly into the seemingly endless list of heartbreaking disappearances that leave families lost and broken. What snagged the fabric of my attention in this tale was the narrator: the filmmaker, Melanie Perkins, had been Andy’s childhood friend when he disappeared at age 10. His disappearance was written into her being, and she couldn’t leave Andy behind. She was a nine-year-old girl when her best friend went missing, and I’m sure her part of the story was remembered by her parents, and perhaps Andy’s mother thought …
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Ah, gaslighting: when someone in your life tries to convince you that you’re going crazy, usually for their own gain. It’s normally a spouse or a partner acting as the villain, but that’s not always the case—and especially not for this list. I’ve always found gaslighting scary, but especially during the time when a woman could be put away for nothing more than being “hysterical,” which is why I chose it as a theme for my third Jane Wunderly novel, DANGER ON THE ATLANTIC. So let’s take a look at some classic gaslighting films. Gaslight, 1944 We couldn’t have this list without it! In fact, this is one of the places that the term originates from. (Remembering that this i…
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Stories about settling old scores thrive in the thriller genre, and in literature generally. As humans, we are hard-wired to feel revenge—it’s a primal emotion arising from a place of pain and suffering. There’s an element of proportionality involved, a sense of wanting to restore balance by meting out an equal level of suffering to the person responsible for causing this pain. Fantasising about how we will ‘get our own back’ on someone who has wronged us activates the brain’s reward center and offers a degree of relief from the intensity of our emotions. This ‘relief’ is, of course, illusory. By focussing on revenge, all we’re really doing is keeping the emotional wound …
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When a novelist is inspired by a real-world crime, what can you expect from the resulting book? More than who committed the act, more than exactly how it happened, we long for something beyond the basic facts. Because a fiction writer also has to bring the reader into the experience, immerse them in the story, and give them a reason to keep reading. I found inspiration for my thriller You Can Never Tell from the way in which Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were caught when they tried to involve Hindley’s brother-in-law, who spent hours assisting them before returning home, hiding with his wife and baby, then calling the police. I had so many questions—why the murderers felt s…
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When you think of mysteries and thrillers set in institutions of learning, no doubt you think first of all the terrific novels that take place in universities and elite boarding schools in New England and the British countryside. These novels, known collectively as the “Dark Academy” sub-genre, have a gothic quality—with turreted buildings, eccentric teachers, overly smart students, secret societies, and classical languages. The perfect archetype of this genre is Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, although my own favorite is Tana French’s The Secret Place (does any other crime writer pack as much into a single sentence as French?). There are old classics such as Dorothy Sa…
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My favorite thrillers revolve around the complexities of female relationships, twisted family dynamics, and unreliable, often unlikeable female characters. There is nothing more satisfying than a thriller layered with juicy secrets. But these characters are also notoriously difficult to craft. Readers are naturally drawn to sympathetic protagonists. And from a larger societal standpoint, there is more pressure for women to handle the weight of the world with grace than men. For example, the alcoholic male detective is a very common trope in crime fiction, and the detective is generally portrayed and received as sympathetic—he’s got a difficult job, after all. We understan…
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Any list of Gothic castles must begin with the origins of the Gothic. The first Gothic novel has been attributed to both Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, so I’ll begin with them. The Castle of Otranto. (1764) by Horace Walpole This strange and atmospheric little novel influenced many Gothic novels to follow. Walpole was fascinated with Gothic architecture, and so the Gothic novel sprang from both the Gothic structure and Walpole’s fertile imagination. One of Walpole’s many archetypes was the mystery of secret passages and chambers: “The lower part of the castle was hollowed into several intricate cloisters; and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find t…
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Having decided I wanted to write about a young female spy in London on the brink of World War Two, I knew I’d be taking a deep dive into research for the project. This ‘work’ (though, happily, it never really felt like that) took me to London, Oxford and other sites in the UK, visiting archives, museums, houses, pubs and parks. As I immersed myself in these places, conjuring character, events and the specific historical era, I read some influential novels to lend flavour to my journey and add inspiration to the writing process. William Boyd’s Restless This novel inspired me to really plumb the depths of the psyche of a female spy. Boyd’s enigmatic Eva is a Russian rec…
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In seventh grade I was bedridden with the flu for two or three days, and my mother bought me some paperbacks to read while I recovered. One of them was Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean. I was hooked from the first page, where a mysterious narrator named Carpenter, a British doctor, is trying to talk his way onto an American nuclear submarine that is preparing for a rescue mission in the Arctic. Drift Ice Station Zebra, a British meteorological outpost, has suffered a catastrophic fire, leaving the survivors with little shelter or food, and this submarine is the only ship that could possibly reach the men before they perish in the savage winter above the Arctic Circle…
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Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by stories about nomadic people, or those who are otherwise living off the beaten path: grifters, circus performers, con artists. If the character is doing life in a nonconformist, unstructured way, I want to read about it. I don’t think my interest is unusual; just look at the performance of books like On the Road; Eat, Pray, Love; and Wild. We love to believe that it’s possible for the most normcore among us to get off this hamster wheel and fling themselves into the great unknown. Like Frodo exiting the Shire, we envision ourselves unencumbered by the shackles of our 9-5s—our mortgages—our monthly expenses—the need to make dinner…
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Mom-friends. If you are a woman with children, then you’ve probably found yourself in this particular kind of circumstantial friendship. Would you be friends were it not for the same baby-and-me schedule during those long, tedious infant months? Or if your children hadn’t started school at the same year in the same neighborhood, each of them wailing at the drop-off gate for the first three weeks of school? Perhaps not, but this is what makes mom-friends such interesting territory for (cynical) domestic suspense writers like me: these new friendships can look like lifelines on the surface, but underneath there is just enough room to plant the toxicities we love best—lies! …
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There’s nothing more delicious than a good scandal, and the best scandals are practically a cottage industry, spawning books, movies, even the odd opera or two. Here are six of my favorite scandals and the novels that bring them to life. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes Oh, how they must have gossiped when the original Real Housewife of Sparta ran off with a younger man! I’m talking, of course, about one of the most legendary scandals in history—Helen and Paris. It’s often referred to as an abduction, but most versions show Helen an active participant, throwing off her arranged marriage for an elopement with a sexy Trojan prince. We don’t know if it was historical o…
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As a girl, I believed in fairies. Did you? Did you believe in ghosts and goblins? There was a house in a forest near me that my friends and I were certain was inhabited by a witch. She had at least thirteen cats, and, for sure, I thought her cats—as well as my own—had mental powers beyond the human realm. Needless to say, as a child, I had an actively creative life. I loved making up stories. I didn’t need my parents or friends as an audience. I usually dug into my imagination to entertain myself. One of my favorite holidays of the year was Halloween, where I could dress up and “be” whatever magical creature I imagined. I was a genie. A mermaid. A witch. A fairy. Did y…
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John Hunter, a notable 18th century surgeon, wrote a case study about an unnamed doctor who carefully, intentionally nicked his genitals with a scalpel, then bandaged the cut with matter taken from the sores of one of his patients, a man with gonorrhea. The unnamed doctor then developed symptoms of gonorrhea and syphilis, so he concluded that they were one disease. He was wrong. The patient had both. Modern readers, blessed by the benefits of elementary school sex education, know that gonorrhea and syphilis are caused by different bacteria with different symptomologies, but this knowledge couldn’t have come to us without medical pioneers like John Hunter. One can also g…
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I’ve always loved my science fiction/fantasy and romance with a touch of suspense—and lots of action. Those are the types of stories I gravitate towards in the books I read and the movies I watch, and they’re the stories I have the most fun writing. When I first thought about the GhostWalker series, I knew I wanted it to revolve around a group of soldiers who have super-human abilities as the result of a secret experiment. From telekinesis to DNA modifications, the GhostWalkers have seen a lot of paranormal activity, and most of the science fiction is based on real science somewhere along the way—including the seventeenth installment in the series, out this March, Lightni…
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Musical theater and crime aren’t typically thought of as concepts that go hand-in-hand, outside of dad jokes about Broadway ticket prices. But the two have been interwoven for longer than you might guess. For centuries, the theater scene was considered separate from polite society, a refuge where groups like queer people, sex workers and people of color were frequently creative pioneers and, if still not all the way accepted, more accepted than they’d be in the light of day. Less importantly, but more importantly for the purposes of this article, the musical genre in its varied splendor has given us a wealth of great crime stories. Here are six of the best, as well as whe…
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I’ve always avoided writing a book with multiple characters, as I worried about keeping up with the various personalities and timelines it would incur. In fact, I initially pitched The Guilt Trip as a holiday gone wrong between two couples. To which my publishers said, ‘We love it, but how about throwing in a few more people to really mix it up?’ The mere thought induced a cold sweat, yet as soon as I started writing, I quickly realized that the additional cast members gave me more freedom and flexibility within the plot, moving the story forward at a pace that may not have happened with just my original ensemble. Even more surprising was that my six characters naturally…
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One of the most valuable qualities of books is their ability to introduce readers to perspectives very different from their own. Some authors play with that ability in unusual ways, taking on perspectives that are particularly strange or unfamiliar. In my novel Reptile Memoirs, part of the story is told from the perspective of a pet Burmese python. Here is a list of six other novels told from an unusual perspective. Ian McEwan, Nutshell Nutshell by Ian McEwan builds on the story of Hamlet but with a highly original twist. Trudy is married to Johnand is carrying his child, but she is secretly meeting with Claude with whom she is plotting to kill her husband. What they …
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Women have been in the workforce since practically the beginning of time, but it was never more apparent than during World War II. With a good portion of young men joining the military or being drafted, women came out in force to do their part for the war effort. Whether working for newspapers like my protagonist Irene Ingram in Front Page Murder, or working in factories manufacturing equipment for the war, they gave their all. When most people think about the women working during the war, the first thing that pops into their minds is that iconic poster of Rosie the Riveter. Rosie showed that women could do anything men could do. My mother wasn’t a Rosie, but she did wo…
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The soaring popularity of shows like Succession, White Lotus, and Gossip Girl is a testament to our insatiable appetite for stories set in the glamorous, high-stakes world of the wealthy elite. From dramatic power struggles to indulgent excess, we’re fascinated by the lives of the one percent of the one percent. But for thriller authors, the rarified world is also a treasure trove of danger and intrigue. The ultra-rich are a notoriously private bunch and their penchant for concealing skeletons in their curated closets only adds to the allure. Throw in the assumption that money can make problems (and sometimes people) disappear, and we’re itching to know more about what go…
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My wife and I completed our family through adoption, so perhaps it was inevitable that my debut novel, Other People’s Children, tells the story of an adoption gone awry. Our son and our daughter both came home without much drama, but we weren’t spared the endless waiting, the razor’s-edge uncertainty, and the flood of love when we first met our children. Adoption is such an emotional and sometimes fraught experience for everyone involved—the birth parents, the adoptive parents, and as they grow up, the children. When things go well, when everyone cooperates in good faith, it just changes everyone’s life forever. When things go wrong, when circumstances slide toward the gr…
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I have always loved period pieces. When I set out to write Dead Dead Girls, I knew it was because I wanted to challenge myself and write something about which I was very passionate. The idea of time travel has always appealed to me, and the best way I could do that was by reading period pieces. The thing about period pieces is that the worldbuilding, or as I like to call it, the vibes, has got to be impeccable, or I’m not going to believe it. I immersed myself in the 1920s, the clothes, shoes, and dance moves, to make Louise’s world real. I’m a very finicky and detailed reader, but I like my vibes. While doing my research for Dead Dead Girls, I spent a lot of time readi…
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