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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The path from Sherlock Holmes to modern baking cozies may not seem like a direct route, but there are plenty of ways that Sherlock set the stage for our current iterations of beloved bakeshop heroines. The moment John Watson meets Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, the famous detective has taken over a university lab and is perfecting a chemical concoction for identifying the presence of blood. Holmes, a master observer, understands clearly that some results require careful composition and attention to detail. This scene being the point where we, as readers, first meet Holmes alongside Watson is important in that it shows us there is more to Holmes than simply a sha…
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“Didn’t you once cause quite a stir by challenging heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali to a fight?” Black Belt magazine asked Jim Kelly in an interview. It was even more unbelievable than that! On December 16, 1973, UPI reported that the stars of the upcoming feature Three the Hard Way—Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, and Kelly—had challenged Ali, George Forman, and Joe Frazier to a fight. This wasn’t a publicity stunt for the still-shooting movie, nor was it a staged event for charity. This appeared to be a good, old-fashioned street challenge, woof tickets being sold to three boxing champions by two former football players and a karate expert. And what woof tickets the…
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During my three-year quest to rediscover a “lost lady” of detective fiction, Carolyn Wells, another mysterious woman appeared in the margins of Carolyn’s backstory. She is referred to as the “Unknown Woman,” the unidentified victim of a Victorian murder in Rahway, New Jersey, where both women are buried within walking distance of each other. Wells never wrote about her, but I have a hunch the cold case inspired Wells’s decades-long career as a mystery author. In May of 2021, I took a field trip to Wells’s hometown, checking out her former home, the building where she had once worked as a librarian, and her gravesite. It was less “research” and more communion with spiri…
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CrimeReads editors make their selections for the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Jenny Hollander, Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead (Minotaur) A young woman with an enviable media job and a seemingly perfect relationship goes into survival mode when an old classmate reappears, making a big movie about events that she would rather not be dredged up again. Hollander parcels out the truth about what really happened in their grad school days with a perfect sense of pacing and enough twists to keep readers on the edge of their seats. –DM Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, A Fire So Wild (Harper) Ruiz-Grossman’s ambitious debut is set in Berkeley, C…
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Like little wreaths of funeral flowers, death crowns mark the passing of a loved one. But death crowns – seen as comforting to some, ominous and otherworldly to others – are not ordered up from a florist shop. Just where death crowns do come from is a mystery, and an unsettling one at that. If you’ve never seen a death crown, or angel crown for the more religiously inclined … well, that tracks. I’ve only ever seen a few and those were behind glass in an exhibit of death and funeral folklore at the Museum of Appalachia north of Knoxville. There’s no entry for death crowns in the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, which at 1,864 pages is the most authoritative source on Appalac…
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As we’ve long been proclaiming on this website, we are in a Whodunnit Renaissance. Smart, clever mystery series are popping up left and right, and they are giving us the opportunity to see many delightful actors in the role of “detective.” I’m not an actor, but even I know that performers are on the lookout for roles that feel definitive and original. Creating a detective character allows an actor to make an indelible contribution to entertainment in a way that few other genres permit. How often do we acknowledge the perfection, the irreplaceibility of performers like Peter Falk as Columbo, or Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, or Tony Shalhoub as Monk? At this rate, I …
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What really happened? That question lies at the heart of so many crime novels, and yet the answer, that very truth, can often depend on who’s telling the story and the truth they believe. Authors employ various story structures to dole out information in a way that keeps the questions coming and the answers satisfying. When those truths don’t quite mesh, conflict and tension ensue. I love stories that play with perspective, and how different people interpret the same events, so that question—what really happened?—lies at the heart of my latest novel, Who to Believe. The story takes place over the course of a single night, as a group of friends gather in the wake of a br…
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Recently, one of my favorite authors—who I am also lucky to call a friend—published her first work of crime fiction for adults after putting out seven young adult mysteries and thrillers. I devoured Kara Thomas’s Out of the Ashes last spring, and with the upcoming release of my own debut adult thriller, The Split, after publishing five young adult thrillers myself, I was eager to talk to Kara about making the leap to the adult space after years of writing for a teen audience. I wrote—but didn’t sell—my first thriller for adults in 2017, when my first YA novel was under contract but not yet published. Writing in both spaces has always been a career goal of mine, and I had…
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I didn’t realize I’d written a crime novel until after I’d signed a book deal. How does that happen, you might ask? Surely a writer has his or her genre well and truly mapped out before they pick up the pen, right? In my case, not so much. It was only once I began whipping the manuscript into shape with my wonderful editor at Text and seeing some early ideas for cover designs that it began to dawn on me: Paper Cage, my sketch of life in small-town Aotearoa / New Zealand, was a crime novel. It would eventually find a home in the crime section of my favorite book shops back home, just before Agatha Christie and SA Cosby. It would be featured at the Harrogate Crime Writing…
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The weather had turned dark and cold; no snow, but a pelting of quick-freezing rain that made roads impassable. Schools everywhere cancelled and I—at fifteen—was tasked with keeping the woodfire burning as our only means of heating the underground house we called home. Living in the middle of abandoned coal lands, closer to the cemetery than to town, we had no cable and no internet. I, however, rejoiced. I’d just purchased the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I didn’t realize I’d also purchased entrée to the world I now primarily inhabit—one of forensic and scientific research, historical puzzles, and thick plots. I’m not the only myst…
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Those of us who write series novels generally spend a lot of time thinking about our characters’ background—where do they come from, what is their education, their taste in food and music, what jobs have they held? Some writers work out entire biographies of the characters, filled with details that may never make it into a story, but that feel necessary for their creator to know. How can our characters be vivid, we wonder, how can they move and talk and appear in three dimensions, if there are parts of their history that even their author doesn’t know? Thirty years ago, I published The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the first episode in what became the Mary Russell & Sherlo…
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Having traveled fairly extensively in my life, I’ve garnered quite a slew of past tristes with destinations. Some I ditched after the first date—cutting a trip short as soon as I realized we weren’t compatible—others turned into more long-term connections, even prompting me to move for a few months or, in one case, over a year. But just like any list of past relationships, there’s the ‘one that got away.’ For me, that place is a tiny, secluded island in the Gulf of Thailand. If you’ve seen the 2000 film The Beach, adapted from Alex Garland’s novel of the same name, you can easily picture it: turquoise blue waters, lush mountains that erupt almost directly out of the b…
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I first saw Sliding Doors on VHS in 1999, the year after it released in theaters. I was eighteen and seeking my way back from my first real heartbreak. Mere days after an amicable split with my boyfriend, a slow drifting apart that was more bittersweet than painfully acute, he had called me up to say he was seeing someone new—my best friend. Then the pain rushed in. I slid the tape into my VCR expecting the kind of romantic comedy that would feel bad and good at the same time, like pressing on a bruise. (As it turned out, Sliding Doors was not a typical rom-com, something I’ll return to in a moment.) But it did resonate in unexpected ways. In the opening sequence of the …
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This month’s psychological thrillers are divided between white-knuckle tension and laugh-out-loud social commentary. Some are close to horror in their high stakes and visceral violence; others use murder as a jumping off point to explore ordinary emotions in a dramatic environment. You’ll see old favorites mixed in with new and rising voices, each worthy of your appreciation as they contribute to a subgenre at the peak of its popularity, and showing no sign of slowing down any time soon. Tracy Sierra, Nightwatching (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking) Tracy Sierra has done the impossible: changed my mind about the home invasion thriller. In Nightwatching, a young widow is sh…
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May 1932 Charlie Chaplin was visiting Japan with a group that included his brother Sydney Chaplin, and Chaplin’s Japanese personal secretary, Toraichi Kono. Chaplin had been to Japan a decade earlier for work, when he and Fatty Arbuckle performed in a silent comedy show. This time, the purpose of the trip was purely pleasure. The group spent their time in Japan seeing traditional Japanese art, attending performances of Japanese dance, observing traditional craftsmen at work, and viewing the natural beauty of locations such as Miyanoshita and Mount Fuji. Japan’s prime minister, Tsuyoshi Inukai, had arranged for his son to take Chaplin and his party to watch a sumo wres…
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I was fifteen when I was introduced to my first serial killer. It was 1991 and I was sneaking into the cinema to watch The Silence of the Lambs. I was already obsessed with all things FBI, having binged on cult classic, Twin Peaks, but it wasn’t until I was watching Harris’s terrifyingly charismatic Hannibal Lecter do his dance with Agent Starling that I started to understand such ‘monsters’ existed in real life, and there were real people dedicated to hunting them down. That movie sparked in me a curiosity into the dark side of human nature, and I spent my teens gorging on true crime and thrillers. I was born in the UK in 1975 and grew up with the gruesome headlines a…
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Mickey Cohen walked under the drooping fronds of a large palm tree toward the Clover Club at 8477 Sunset Boulevard with a shotgun tucked under his coat. The place was owned by restaurateur Eddie Nealis, and its management catered to film studio executives and Hollywood’s top stars. The Clover Club was located along a sparse stretch of the road, just beyond Los Angeles’s city limits. From the street, the place looked uninviting and fortress-like. Inside, however, the Clover Club was outfitted with hidden gambling rooms where celebrities could bet against the house. Producers like David O. Selznick lost vast amounts of money on a weekly basis. The club also had one-way mi…
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Aya de Leon interviews Breanne McIvor about her debut novel, The God of Good Looks, which has recently been nominated for an NAACP Image Award. The God of Good Looks features a rivals-to-lovers romance between two beauty influencers against the backdrop of shenanigans and high-jinks in the Trinidadian fashion industry. McIvor’s lush descriptions are informed by her background as a professionally trained makeup artist. Aya de Leon: Although The God of Good Looks is positioned as a literary novel, and the writing has all the lovely craft a reader desires in literary fiction, I also see it as part of the conversation in crime fiction. Do you see the book in connection with …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Ochs, The Resort (Sourcebooks) “An escapist up-all-night thriller that holds you under and doesn’t let you surface for air.” –Lucy Clarke Brandy Schillace, The Framed Women of Ardemore House (Hanover Square) “Twisty, engaging, and thoroughly unexpected, The Framed Women of Ardemore House is a must-read for any mystery lover. Featuring a unique cast of characters and a village full of dirty little secrets, this book delivers a fresh take on the English cozy.” –Deanna Raybourn Kit Frick, The Split (Atria/Emily Bestler) “A knotty Sliding Doors–esque thriller about two s…
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This isn’t exactly the hottest take you’ll come across today…but crime is bad. Even experiencing a minor crime is pretty terrible. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it! No wait, I said that wrong. That sucks. Sorry. Let me start over. So much of crime fiction can be a grim wasteland of humorless men hellbent on spilling blood, and we should… Okay, I just reread that sentence, and that actually sounds like a kickass movie, probably starring someone like Jon Bernthal, and now I want to see it. What I’m trying to say is that, although crime and violence are often horrific, and writers have a duty to convey that seriousness, there’s an importance to letting th…
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Imagine yourself stepping back in time a hundred years, traveling to London. North of the Thames, the wealth lived amid the beautiful gardens, fancy department stores, and night clubs. South of the winding waterway that divides London in two, the neighborhoods weren’t so posh. Lambeth, Southwark, and the Elephant & Castle neighborhoods brought shuttered munitions factories leftover from the first world war. Brothels abounded. Trash blew down the unwashed streets, and grungy hovels and falling down apartment buildings populated nearly every block. Tenants were migratory, running out on their rent because they simply couldn’t afford it. Poverty had reached new heights, …
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Mary Shelley did not grow up with a mother; she grew up with a dead mother. Her mother, the eighteenth-century writer Mary Wollstonecraft, had died giving birth to her in August 1797. Her father, the writer William Godwin, was so brokenhearted that he found it hard to be around young Mary. As a child, she spent much of her time at her mother’s gravestone in Saint Pancras’s Churchyard in Camden. Muriel Spark has written about how Mary would go there alone to read, to think. Reportedly, she learned how to write her own name by tracing her mother’s tombstone. She would read her mother’s books furiously, studying them under the grave. As Sandra Gilbert wrote, Mary’s “only re…
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When it finally happens, they’re too nervous to enjoy the upcoming crash. This is what they wanted, the onset of symptoms. It’s like meeting someone new. There’s fear there, folding into every action. They worry and they wonder what might happen. Olivia wakes up around 7 in the morning feeling dehydrated. She rushes into the kitchen, shouting Will’s name until he stirs, roused to notice. “I think it’s happening!” Will seems jealous, “Really?” The thermometer hangs in her mouth. “Here, your turn,” Olivia says, handing him the thermometer. “99.7F.” He feels fine but uses it anyway. Beep, the verdict is… 98.4F. “It might take more time for you,” she says, trying to ma…
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This year’s crop of excellent upcoming horror novels includes folk horror, wilderness thrillers, slashers in space, serial killers in the city, and a wide variety of supernatural entities. There’s plenty of queer romance and some well-earned queer vengeance. The gothic continues to reign supreme, but splattergore makes a respectably bloody showing. Amusingly, there are also two different novels on this list about Americans renting haunted Italian villas…I know, the list is going up in February, but I included January titles anyway. Jenny Kiefer, This Wretched Valley (Quirk, January 16) A group of climbers heads to a remote valley to scale an impossible cliff in this …
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Research is an important part of the writer’s life — especially for writers like me who haven’t worked in any of my characters professions. My general rule-of-thumb is if a fact is plot critical, I will strive to get that detail right. Such as, if a body is discovered in the woods, I won’t describe it as skeletal unless the environment and time passage would result in a skeleton. Or if the killer uses a poison, I need to at least understand how that poison works, the symptoms, and how quickly it can kill someone. But research is not just about forensic details — albeit, they are important in crime fiction. Research is also about people and society. Some is subjective — a…
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