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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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Alma Katsu, The Fervor (Putnam) Alma Katsu’s latest historical horror thriller takes us into the internment camps of WWII, where Meiko Briggs and her daughter Aiko wait for news of her husband at war, and find themselves at the center of a strange new pestilence, and in confrontation with folkloric monsters. No one does historical gothic horror better than Katsu, and I can’t wait to immerse myself in this very creepy tale. –MO Gary Phillips, One Shot Harry (Soho) Phillips’ vision of Los Angeles in 1963 comes to vivid life in the form of Har…
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Ever since my husband died, I had been drawn to true crime as a way to process trauma. Hearing dark, tragic stories made me feel less alone. I started with Dateline, watching episode after episode, sometimes for hours, alone in my flat in London. Then I heard about True Crime podcasts. There was something so intimate about these—smart, funny women journeying into the world’s darkest places to make order out of chaos. I became addicted, listening to every episode, attending live events where I met incredibly kind, open people. I became immersed in the True Crime fandom. In my novel, If I Disappear, my protagonist Sera is obsessed with true crime podcasts. It gives her a s…
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At long last, December is upon us, and so, too, are the slow, creeping days of winter, ready to be filled with crafting, mulled wine, and of course, mystery novels. Few novels are released in December, so this is always a nice month to draw attention to subgenres we don’t as often explore, including supernatural thrillers and some sexy, sexy suspense. Get ready to wait out the rest of the holiday season/surge with these 10 entertaining and moving takes on the crime genre. Robert Justice, They Can’t Take Your Name (Crooked Lane) In this moving race-against-time thriller, an innocent man faces his impending judicial murder by a state that refuses to examine new evidenc…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Caroline Kepnes, You Love Me (Random House) Kepnes keeps turning up the intensity with each new installment of the Joe Goldberg series, this time sending her protagonist-villain to an island in the Pacific Northwest, where he finds work, naturally enough for Joe, at a local library, and of course trains his attention (and delusions) on one of the librarians. In the past, Joe has been very much a creature and observer of cities, first New York and then Los Angeles. The move to a small-town adds a special, terrible intimacy to his crimes, not to men…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Benjamin Wood, A Station on the Path to Something Better (Europa) Benjamin Wood’s emotional noir about a young boy taken on a desperate road trip by his estranged father is as beautifully written as its title is long. The father promises to take his son to the set of a popular TV series he claims to work on, but the journey turns into anything but, as the father’s untruths catch up with him and he resorts to violence to salvage his self-worth. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor Melissa Ginsburg, The House Uptown (Flatiron) In The Hous…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Stephen Mack Jones, Dead of Winter (Soho) Stephen Mack Jones’s August Snow series has been a true revelation for detective fiction, and in this, the third installment, the world just keeps getting richer and more nuanced and the writing more incisive. Here, Snow is approached by the head of a local institution, Authentico Foods, who is being strong-armed by an anonymous antagonist. Snow decides to help, and the investigation soon takes in a shadowy real estate operation and the attempted gentrification of Detroit’s Mexicantown. This is a crime n…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * S.A. Cosby, Razorblade Tears (Flatiron) S.A. Cosby blew us away with last year’s searing heist thriller/rural noir Blacktop Wasteland, and with Razorblade Tears he’s done it again. In a heartbreaking tale of love, murder, vengeance, and acceptance, two ex-cons, one Black and one white, team up to find those responsible for the death of their sons, who were married to each other. Both fathers are grieving not only for their lost loved ones, but for their inability to overcome their own homophobia while their sons were still alive. And as they seek…
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CrimeReads editors select the best new crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers coming out in October. * Hannah Morrissey, Hello, Transcriber (Minotaur) I’ve been looking forward to Hello, Transcriber for months, just based on the cover design alone, but the plot is just as compelling. Hazel Greenlee works the graveyard shift as a police transcriber in Black Harbor, Wisconsin, a rustbelt city plagued by addiction and hopelessness. Her days are filled with her husband’s hunting exploits, and her nights are taken over by clinically precise descriptions of lurid crime scenes. She tries to keep her emotional distance, but one case in particular—and the mysterious detectiv…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new novels. * Wanda M. Morris, Anywhere You Run (William Morrow) Wanda Morris burst onto the scene last year with her impeccably plotted legal thriller, All Her Little Secrets, and her new novel keeps a legally-minded heroine as one of its leads but takes us back to 1964. When Violet Richards is raped by a white man, she takes her revenge, then goes on the run, soon followed by her sister Marigold, who aspires to be a lawyer but first must make a decision about her unwanted pregnancy. A southern setting where voting and abortion are both increasingly restricted feels…rather like today, if I’m honest. Wanda Morris, too, …
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The CrimeReads editors select their favorite books of the month. * Kelly J. Ford, Real Bad Things (Thomas & Mercer) Ford’s 2017 novel, Cottonmouths, remains a standout in the suspense category, and she’s back this year with a powerful story of a young woman who confesses to the murder of her stepfather. Rather than going to jail, she carries on with her life, moves away, starts over—because the police never actually found the body. Two decades later, the corpse turns up, and she’s forced to return to her hometown in Arkansas to reckon with her past and what’s left of her family. –DM Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety (Doubleday) What could be better than a ne…
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Everyone knows that horror novels are meant to be read on a winter’s evening, curled up in the dark while the wind howls and rain drums the windows. We’re supposed to imagine the ghosts breathing down our necks as chill drafts leak through door frames and night descends earlier with each passing day. But I relish the experience of rising dread under the glare of the summer sun. To look up from the page – distressed, wary, pulse racing – and encounter the world in neon reality. I love reading horror in the summer, I love the contrast of being sucked into a dark, spooky story during the bright cheer of a sunny afternoon. Not very Goth of me, I know, but try it for yourself …
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Given the enduring passion of the reading public for Christmas murder mysteries, I am prompted to ask, What is it about Christmas and crime? It can’t just be the alliteration (although I love me some good alliteration, as will become obvious as you read on). No, I’m convinced it has something to do with that moment we’ve all had at least once when, at a holiday gathering, you think, “I wish someone would put us out of our misery and just kill Great-Uncle Albert/Cousin Bertha/[insert family member’s name here].” What? You’ve never felt that way? Well, then, this essay isn’t for you. But for the rest of us normal people, there is something wonderfully satisfying about a boo…
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Spring is here, summer is coming, and June is Pride Month. What does this mean? Lots of great new queer mysteries and thrillers to read on the beach or at the park on a lazy Sunday. This season, many beloved characters return: Katrina Carrasco’s queer 19th-century outlaw Alma Rosales, John Copenhaver’s 1950s crime-solving (and—committing) lesbian duo Judy Nightingale and Philippa Watson, Dharma Kelleher’s goth tattoo artist and vigilante Avery Byrne, and Robyn Gigl’s passionate trans defense attorney, Erin McCabe. New characters and scenarios also abound: Leslie Karst and Jack Ori begin a new series set in beautiful Hawaii and on an ominous college campus, respectively. A…
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One of my favourite scary movies is The Changeling. George C. Scott stars as a famous composer who relocates from New York to a small town after his wife and daughter die in a tragic car accident. Desperate to remove anything from his life that reminds him of his family, he rents a turn-of-the-century Victorian manor. The move is eventless, until he comes across his daughter’s favorite ball; it’s blue and red with a white strip down the middle. He hides it away in a desk and slams the drawer, crippled with grief as he cries himself to sleep. Odd sounds begin that night. At first, he thinks it’s only air in the pipes, but then other strange occurrences continue in the foll…
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The bells of St. Mary-Le-Bow toll eleven o’clock. The narrow streets of London’s East End are strangely deserted. Out of the swirling fog comes the clip-clop of horseshoes on cobble. A carriage appears. I squint, struggling to decipher the crest on the carriage door. From within the passenger compartment, a gloved hand emerges. Wait—is that a gun? I flip the page, my heart in my throat, as the modern world vanishes in the foul-smelling mist. It’s London, 1850. Soon a body will turn up—floating in the Thames or sprawled in one of the brick-walled alleys. I settle in for another blissful sojourn in Victorian England. “Sexual repression, dark alleys, great detectives, orn…
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We only seem smarter than fictional characters when we’re indulging in horror. No one watching a crime drama or a romantic comedy sees characters walk into a deserted house says to their screen, Look out, that place is haunted! We only do it with the foreknowledge of Something Bad Happened Here, even though there are more present fears in a crime drama between serial killers, organized gangs, and murderous cops than a ghost. Except when that’s not the case. Sometimes the crime layer peels and reveals more horrific muscle underneath. Crime and horror, especially the occult, have a long-entwined history. Sometimes it’s a ruse like Sherlock Holmes faces in The Hound of the …
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We all read crime novels, and all crime novels feature guns (more or less). When I got to work on my own crime novel—my first, after cutting my teeth on Napoleonic spy thrillers—I wanted to make sure I knew my stuff. It’s a contemporary heist thriller about counterfeiting, art forgery, neo-Nazis and a horseback-Amtrak train robbery. Guns are involved. My grandfather, a second World War vet, taught me to shoot when I was a kid, but that was nearly twenty years ago. There’s a lot about the gun world you don’t know unless you’ve spent some time immersed in it. So I spent some time immersed in it. Knowing the gun world doesn’t just make writing about guns easier, it livens …
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Apart from love, one of the largest emotions in any of our lives is grief. In the natural course of events, we will grieve for our grandparents and our parents and perhaps for friends as well. It is something we have to learn how to do, learn how to live with. There is so much death in thrillers. To take the most flagrant examples, there are far more murders in Norwegian thrillers than there are actual murders in Norway. (In 2018 there were only twenty-five homicides.) But where is the grief? Obviously there is plenty of grieving in the margins of stories. We witness the distress of victims’ families. But what about the main characters? There is trauma, anger, bitternes…
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Horses are highly sensitive herd animals and as such, they reflect the emotions of those around them—including their human partners. To quote my latest novel, Girls and their Horses, “Horses are like mirrors. They reflect all the best parts and all worst parts of ourselves back at us.” Horses in fiction are often used to echo the qualities of their human counterparts. They also inspire fast-paced, passionate stories of determination. Horses are often used to represent deeper emotional struggles or iron will. While perhaps not strictly thrillers, the following stories are fast-paced, thrilling and filled with twists. Dark Horses by Susan Mihalic \Dark Horses tells the…
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that January babies love the summer and absolutely despise the winter months. Okay, while I can’t speak for Amanda Peet (a.k.a. Betty Broderick in Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story – Jan. 11), Regina King (whose crime-related star turns include The Harder They Fall and American Crime – Jan. 15), or Patricia Highsmith (if you’re reading this publication, I take it you’re already familiar with the ur-queen of the psychological thriller – Jan. 19), I can speak for myself (also Jan. 11), when I say that this particular Januarian is not about the cold. You know who—or, rather, what—else is a January baby? Roe v. Wade, the landmark…
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The domestic blowback of the Vietnam War. The sleaze and corruption of Watergate. The incipient rollback of the counterculture and many gains of the 1960s. Economic recession. The upheaval and uncertainty in the 1970s may have been tough on America’s collective psyche, but it resulted in some incredibly good crime cinema, particularly prior to Jaws in 1975, which helped to usher in the culture of the cinematic blockbuster. And while I will happily admit to being a due paying member of the First-half-of-the-1970s-was-a-great-period-of-American-crime-cinema-fan-club, it does strike me that we tend to focus on the same handful of films from this period over and over. Yes, Th…
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While preparing for a recent appearance on a podcast episode about John Boorman’s 1967 film, Point Blank, I thought a lot about American noir cinema of the very late 1950s and the 1960s. I find it interesting that so many of the films made during this time remain unknown and underappreciated relative to the classic film noir period, generally regarded as beginning with John Huston’s 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon and ending in 1958, and the body of American crime cinema known as neo noir, which took off in the early 1970s. I have no desire to reprise the ‘what is noir?’ debate. I also realise that it is impossible to put firm boundaries between periods of cinema. Some a…
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The dark months call for dark stories. There’s nothing more delicious than to curl up under a blanket with a hot cocoa (or hot toddy!) and read a fast-paced thriller, twisty mystery, or creepy psychological thriller. If this Queer Crime Writers* round-up is any indicator, 2024 is looking to be a banner year for great LGBTQIA+ crime fiction. We’re highlighting the return of beloved characters, like Greg Herren’s Scotty Bradley, Marshall Thornton’s Henry Milch, and Joseph DeMarco’s Marco Fontana, the second installment of newly beloved characters like Margot Douaihy’s Sister Holiday and Rob Osler’s Hayden McCall, not to mention new characters like Nicholas George’s Rick “Ch…
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Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Abigail Dean, Girl A (Viking) I know it’s only February, but Girl A already looks to be one of biggest books of the year. In this powerful story of trauma, abuse, and long-delayed reckonings, the survivors of horrific family abuse must reconnect after the death of their mother. The siblings are still fractured by the alliances and betrayals of their childhood, and each is damaged—and attempting to heal—in their own way. A bleak and powerful tour-de-force that raises complex questions of responsibility and truth, Girl A is not to be missed. –…
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We spend a lot of time on this site recommending the dark and brooding, but as the weather grows chillier, I find myself drawn to the more light-hearted thrillers and mysteries. There’s quite a few extremely entertaining reads out this year and next year, and I’ve assembled 12 of them to keep you reading, laughing, and cheering throughout the dark months ahead. Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age (Berkley) As the tag-line for this incredible series launch reminds us, women of a certain age may be invisible to society, but sometimes, that’s their greatest asset. As Killers of a Certain Age begins, four trained assassins are readying for their retirement after fo…
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