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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It may be wishful thinking, but it’s never too early to start planning what to take with you to the beach this summer. These new-in-paperback titles are some of the most exciting mysteries and crime novels around—plus, they won’t break the bank! * Jessica Barry, Don’t Turn Around, Harper Paperbacks (3/2) “Barry’s adrenaline-fueled adventure explores the Me Too movement, cancel culture, reproductive rights and white male extremism. Buckle up for a heart-stopping ride.”–People Magazine Darynda Jones, A Bad Day for Sunshine, St. Martin’s Griffin (3/2) Jones has a real talent for balancing suspense with laugh-out-loud humor, never losing the tension from either. –Boo…
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A beautiful woman with a glorious voice, dressed in well-fitted breeches dueling the villain between arias. It sounds like a Gilded Age gentleman’s opera fantasy, but it’s really a dream come true for a mystery writer looking for a unique idea. Best of all, it’s based on reality. Not just the reality of trouser roles, but the reality of Gilded Age New York—and its people. Let’s start on the stage. In the early days of opera, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were a good number of castrati singers, men with artificially high voices for exactly the reason the name suggests. Amazingly enough, that wasn’t a popular career choice for long. By the end of the eig…
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In 1961, a dashing young President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was sworn into office amidst world crisis. To greet the new President, East Germany covertly erected the Berlin Wall and Russia launched Yuri Gregorian into Earth orbit from a secret underground bunker. Not to be outdone, CIA trained mercenaries stormed the beaches of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and later assassinated the Dominican President, Rafael Trujillo, in bungled attempts at regime change. Nuclear warheads were bristling at “Fail Safe” designation on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The Cold War was hot and spies were in demand. Espionage fiction was also in demand, led by a dashing British secret agent …
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If Chris Bohjalian were to write a memoir—or a manifesto on craft—it could be called: I was a teenage magician. It’s a history that has served him well. A master of misdirection, Bohjalian—the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books including The Lioness and The Flight Attendant—occupies unique territory in the literary landscape. While his novels often incorporate crime, they aren’t often considered crime novels (which is why you’ll usually find them shelved in Fiction as opposed to Mystery). And yet Bohjalian considers crime his MacGuffin, or the pistol that marks an opening salvo. Case in point: While Bohjalian’s newest genre-bender, The Princ…
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When Valora first stepped through the door of my office, the smell of cigarettes followed, along with a palpable physical tension. He was in his thirties but looked older, with a tight, tense frame, deep creases in his face, and bags under his eyes. His thin, sinewy arm muscles twitched under his skin, and his fingers beat a rhythm against each other as he fidgeted to find a comfortable position. He spoke in a staccato voice, interrupting himself when his train of thought outpaced his speech. He had a million questions for us. Who were we? What did we want to know? Where should he start? Did we know about his pending criminal case? He didn’t care if helping us helped him …
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When Allison tells people she is a forensic scientist, “they don’t really understand. Everyone’s watched CSI, and they think they know every- thing about it. I try to tell them it is not as glamorous, and it doesn’t happen in fifteen minutes. Because a lot of people have the misconception that a crime occurs, and within two days they find the suspects and within a week and a half they are convicted and in jail. And it just doesn’t happen that quickly or easily.” Contrary to the popular image, forensic science is not a glamorous job. Despite the crimes involved, the work resembles that of bench scientists or laboratory technicians. When dusting the whorls of a finger- p…
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As we enter the second year of the pandemic, we’re launching a new monthly column to bring awareness to the great titles you might have missed the first time around. These new-in-paperback titles are some of the most exciting mysteries and crime novels around—plus, they won’t break the bank! Gytha Lodge, Watching from the Dark, Random House Trade (1/5) “Readers will enjoy the fast pace, red herrings, and intriguing characters in this British police procedural–slash-psychological thriller.”—Booklist Hank Phillippi Ryan, The First To Lie, Forge (1/5) “A taut, propulsive plot with twists that will take your breath away…book clubs will gobble up The First to Lie.” —Sa…
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Bangalore, officially now called Bengaluru, is the capital city of the Indian state of Karnakata in south west India. Eleven million people in what is now India’s third largest city. The country’s ‘Wild South’ and also one of India’s ‘Garden Cities’. But, of course, most people now think of Bangalore as ‘India’s Silicon Valley’, home to an estimated 7,700 millionaires and eight billionaires with a total wealth of US$320 billion. And, as we all know, where there are that many millionaires and billionaires with that much money there will be some crime too just as night follows day. If any book has made English language readers more aware of Bangalore then it’s probably Ar…
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The Man Who Didn’t Fly, first published in 1955, is a highly successful novel by an author of distinction whose crime writing career came to a sudden and rather mysterious end when she was at the peak of her powers. The central puzzle in the story is unorthodox. A plane is engulfed in fire and crashes in the Irish Sea. The wreckage can’t be found. A pilot and three men were on board and their bodies are missing. But four passengers had arranged to go on the flight and none of them can be found. So who was the man who didn’t fly, and what has happened to him? This is such an original mystery that I don’t want to say much more about the plot, for fear of spoiling readers’ …
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Ah, school days! The grassy quads, the tang of autumn in the air, the dying screams of murdered classmates. With atmosphere like that, it’s no wonder campus mysteries have been around since the Golden Age of detective fiction. All the greats took a crack at it—Dorothy Sayers in Gaudy Night, Agatha Christie in Cat Among the Pigeons, Ellery Queen in The Campus Murders—and later innovators like J. S. Borthwick, Pamela Thomas-Graham, and Lev Raphael helped diversify the subgenre. But in 1992, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History was the first to break out of the cozy mold, becoming a crossover bestseller and changing the face of the campus thriller forever. A lush, melancholy wh…
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What do the following have in common: rituals shrouded in mystery; a closed circle of suspects; backstabbing intelligentsia; built-in power structures; and beautiful settings, from the gothic to the bucolic. They could be features of many crime novels, no matter the genre, but they’re also some of the reasons why academia has proven such a rich source for crime fiction. Here are six standouts (five novels and one true crime). Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers (1935) I teach a course called Women Crime Writers as part of the Emerson College MFA program. Sayers’ novel was the first book I added to the syllabus (paired with her fantastic essay, “Are Women Human?”). Set in O…
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___________________________________ The Life and Crimes of Jennifer Mee ___________________________________ The whole thing seemed kind of silly if you didn’t look too closely. Here was a girl, on national TV, who couldn’t stop hiccupping! Her hiccups were short and high-pitched. It was kinda cute, right? She was only fifteen. She didn’t come from money. And now she was being flown all over the country to appear on every talk show imaginable; she was being put up in fancy hotels and given expensive manicures. She was experiencing that very specific sliver of the American Dream: fifteen minutes of fame. Andy Warhol was the one who came up with that fifteen minutes of fa…
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Milan, capital of Northern Italy’s Lombardy region. Noted for its fashion, style, and industriousness the city is Italy’s second largest, after Rome, and has often displayed a tendency to separatism, embodying the spirit and culture of the northern part of the country as opposed to the more rural and perhaps slower south. Milan has long attracted crime writers. The great 1930s exponent of the pre-war spy novel and the suspense thriller Eric Ambler visited in Cause for Alarm (1938). Ambler’s fish-out-of-water protagonist Englishman Nicholas Marlow is sent to Milan to work at the Spartacus Machine Tool Company. A nice assignment abroad for a while with good food and wine?…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Jessica Fellowes, The Mitford Trial (Minotaur) “Inspired by the larger-than-life Mitford family and a real-life murder, Fellowes delivers a ripping-good read.” –Booklist Allie Reynolds, Shiver (Putnam) “Deep in the breathtaking winter bleakness of the French Alps, revenge—and perhaps even murder—is most definitely afoot…This suspenseful debut thriller by a former freestyle snowboarder contains both style and substance.” –Kirkus Reviews Lisa Gardner, Before She Disappeared (Dutton) “Fans of this incredible author, police procedurals, timely immigrant stories, strong determin…
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When I met Zille in 2015, he had been working as a crime reporter for over a decade and dissembling had become second nature. The job required it: he had to maintain good relationships with the police, with gangsters, with his own TV channel. His was dangerous work that involved angering powerful people. When he was reporting on screen, the truth was ostensibly the point. But Zille had also learned to self-censor, to hedge around the subject, to avoid mentioning a specific party name. And off screen, where risks lurked at every corner, he took this further: holding back, contradicting himself, leaving some mystery about his family, his past or even his whereabouts. Perha…
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The most famous cryptic manuscript of the medieval period is—as far as we know—written in a unique language that to this day remains understood only by its author. It was found in 1912 by a Polish rare book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich, hidden among a pile of manuscripts in the Villa Mondragone, Italy. Voynich was immediately captivated by its unknown language and the strange illustrations of mostly non-existent plants and groups of nude bathers, and purchased it along with twenty-nine other items. (During more than thirty years Voynich sold the British Museum more than 3,800 books, many of which were so unusual that they were given their own ‘Voynich’ shelf mark.) The…
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These are dark days for romance. Even if you are the type who usually buys into the schmaltzy hullaballoo of Valentine’s Day, you’re probably not feeling too lovey-dovey this year (and if you are, what the hell is wrong with you?) With the pandemic still raging and date-night hotspots shuttered, many of you will no doubt settle in to watch a movie at home, probably one all about love and romance, through which you can pine and swoon and live vicariously. But all that’s likely to do is make the current day reality more bitter. So, instead of watching some cheap, over-lit Hallmark movie or Vaseline-lensed classic, why not embrace the darkness by indulging in something mea…
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She slept naked. Dates with her psychiatrist were scrawled in a diary beside her bed, and it was her psychiatrist, in the end, who would find her lifeless body. She was thirty-six years old. A broken marriage, affairs with married men—but all of that was public knowledge. What wasn’t public was the problems with drugs and alcohol: amphetamines and barbituates, mostly, including old-fashioned sleeping tablets known as “knock-out drops.” Recently there had been lapses in personal hygiene: her toes and fingernails were unkempt, and her teeth were in a state of decay. She was not well, had not been well for some time. Most of the drugs had been prescribed to help with her me…
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One thing I’ve noticed about cozy mysteries is that—for those unfamiliar with this charming genre—they seem to have a bit of a reputation. Basically, older women snooping into crimes, possibly a knitting group, definitely a cat. But this isn’t always the case. Well, except for the cat. Although really it can be any cute animal companion. This misunderstanding makes sense. I mean, famed characters like Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher arguably defined the genre. But it’s grown from their foundation, branching out to encompass so much more in terms of characters, themes, narration, and mystery elements. First, you might be asking, what exactly is a cozy mystery? A puzzli…
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Each member of the gang had a job. Margaret Whittemore, soon to be known all over America as “Tiger Girl,” knew exactly what to do. And she played her role to the hilt. Early on the morning of January 11, 1926, Margaret Whittemore, not quite twenty-two years old, rose just before dawn. Daylight would reveal a sky as dull as a mollusk and gray as concrete on this early winter day, but at this hour, as the sky slowly brightened, the lights of the streets of Manhattan still twinkled outside the window. Most days Margaret and her husband, Richard Whittemore, rarely opened the curtains before noon, if at all. They stayed out late and awoke even later, often stumbling home at …
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My brother, an avid backpacker, carries a satellite phone with him in the backcountry. I suppose it is meant for emergencies, although I’m not sure he’s ever used it for that purpose. The most recent message our siblings text thread received from that phone was a joke about how long he would wait in line for an In-N-Out double-double. I thought about this as I read Zoje Stage’s essay “How Do You Write an Isolation Thriller When Everybody Is Connected All The Time?” It is a very good question, one I have been turning over in my head since I read that piece a few weeks ago. My first, and most flippant, reaction was to think, “You set it in space”—which is admittedly a rath…
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There have been many times in the last ten years when I’ve watched a movie or read a book created before the twenty-first century and had the reaction, “You just can’t do that now.” Usually this was in response to a character who, for lack of access to a telephone, was in dire trouble with no way to summon help. Perhaps their phone line had been cut. Or maybe they were dodging a bad guy and couldn’t risk making a mad dash toward the nearest phonebooth. I recently read Harvest by Tess Gerittsen (published in 1996) and was constantly aware of the aspects of the book that were dated due to advancements in how we communicate. With its medical setting, there was a prolific u…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Abigail Dean, Girl A (Viking) “Girl A, Abigail Dean’s debut novel, shares a kinship with Emma Donoghue’s Room and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones in its harrowing portrayal of trauma. Like those titles, Girl A is certain to rouse strong emotions. It is a haunting, powerful book, the mystery at its heart not who committed a crime, but how to carry on with life in its aftermath … I kept wanting to read Girl A as a fairy tale or parable, to cauterize some of the suffering in its pages, but Dean resists that impulse at every turn, always rooting Lex’s story in the real. Dean looks squarely at …
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April brings a host of epic new international crime fiction, and as always, we’re here to recommend the best new works from around the globe. This month’s offerings include a stone-cold Balkan noir, an epic crime saga out of Japan, a bloody German historical, and a rather terrible French vacation. Ivana Bodrožić, We Trade Our Nights for Someone Else’s Day Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac (Seven Stories Press) Ivana Bodrožić’s newly translated novel of trauma, vengeance, and despair is as noir as they come. A journalist’s arrival in an unnamed city where neighborhoods are long on memory and short on justice is the catalyst for new explosions of ethnic hatred. The jou…
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The funeral took place on a Friday. It was ten days into December and the air was grey with sleet. I met Jakob Aasen outside the chapel. At first I hardly recognised him. He had grown a beard and his dark, tightly curled hair was speckled with grey. For an instant we stood looking at one another. Then he smiled tentatively, while I nodded a kind of acknowledgement. ‘Varg?’ I nodded. ‘Jakob…?’ We shook hands. ‘How long is it since we…?’ I shrugged. ‘1965.’ ‘Yes, but … surely we must’ve seen each other since then.’ ‘Couple of times in the street maybe. By chance. Have you been in Bergen the whole time?’ ‘More or less. And you?’ ‘Yes, at any rate since 1970.’ ‘Six…
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