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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New Haven, CT As an adult, Miles had always lived alone. Not only had he never married, he’d never had a live-in girlfriend. Sure, plenty of women had slept over through the years, but rarely more than two nights in a row. Miles didn’t encourage that kind of thing. Never give a woman the chance to get comfortable under this roof. He valued his privacy. He liked things just so. Living a solitary existence, at least on the home front, was not a problem. But since the diagnosis, something in him had changed. Not physically, but emotionally. He was lonely. Miles found himself having conversations, out loud, with him- self, if only to hear someone’s voice. Not when the ho…
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As she was approaching Skálar, fog rolled in without warning, blotting out the landscape and merging sea with sky. It felt like driving into an Impressionist painting, in which her destination kept receding as fast as she approached it; like entering a void in which time had ceased to have any meaning. Maybe, in a sense, this was true: maybe time was less important there; it mattered less what day it was, what hour it was, out here where people lived at one with nature. When she finally reached it, the tiny hamlet of Skálar was wreathed in dense cloud. And now the feeling was more like being in a folk tale, an ominous, supernatural tale, set in a vague, shifting world. Th…
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Aidan Truhen is the author of Seven Demons, the sequel to The Price You Pay. Here, he talks to Nick Harkaway (Gnomon, The Gone-Away World) about writing, identity and the world. Nick Harkaway: You described the first Jack Price book as “morally disimproving”. Do you feel a moral duty as a writer? Aidan Truhen: Bam. No small talk. Just like that. NH: I don’t picture you as someone who likes small talk. AT: That’s fair. NH: So… morally disimproving. AT: Yeah, if we say that books in general matter—which we do—and we say that they uplift and they create empathy and they teach… if books can affect the self, then it follows that some books could also be bad for you. Th…
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A man walks unsteadily into an impressive art deco building. There are police officers inside, milling about. He asks a question we don’t hear as an anxious score fills our ears. He turns left down a long hallway. Now, he’s outside the Homicide Division—room 44—and enters. There are a half-dozen men sitting around, doing nothing much. Not many homicides in this town, I guess. He asks for the man in charge. He’s shown into an interior office and says he wants to report a murder. He’s invited to sit down and is asked where it occurred. “San Francisco, last night.” “Who was murdered?” “I was.” The Captain looks less shocked than you’d think given the declaration the …
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Warning: potential triggers ahead. How about that? A warning at the beginning of this piece; I’ve never done that before. I’ve killed off a decent amount of folks in my thrillers—hell, even crucified a few of them—yet none of my books contains a trigger warning. I added one here because I saw a review on Goodreads for my new book, The Dead Husband, that stated, “There are a couple instances of animal torture/death, which deducted half a star from my final rating.” (To be fair, there was only one instance (that I remember) and the death was quick and off-camera. I say give me my half-star back!) The reviewer went on to mostly praise the book but warn of potential triggers…
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Linwood Barclay is the author of eighteen novels, and two thrillers for children. A New York Times bestselling author, his books have been translated into more than two dozen languages. His latest novel, Find You First, about the mysterious deaths of a tech millionaire’s would-be heirs, is now available. ___________________________________ Otto Penzler This is your twentieth adult novel. (With a pair of Young Adult ones to your credit, as well.) However, your first fiction—the four books featuring amateur sleuth Zack Walker, starting in 2004—were quickly overshadowed in 2007 by the immense success of the thriller No Time for Goodbye. It seems you haven’t looked back …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephen Mack Jones, Dead of Winter (Soho) “Like Walter Mosley and Joe Ide, Jones builds a raucous and endearing cast of characters from his inner-city setting, fusing neighborhood camaraderie with streetwise know-how and head-banging action. This is a fine thriller in the grand hard-boiled tradition, but it’s also a sensitive, multifaceted portrait of race in America.” –Booklist Linwood Barclay Find You First (William Morrow) “Barclay melds a solid, winning plot with in-depth character studies, including his supporting characters. . . The tense Find You First gains its suspense fro…
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As a child I remember being told not to judge a book by its cover. How we should always judge a person by their deeds and not be seduced by words, and something about a person showing their true colors. I’m sure there are other phrases but they’ve all blurred into an indistinguishable blob of the advice I absorbed as a child without question. Then I grew up and realised adults don’t follow their own advice, ever. All that good logical instruction slips away until it seems only applicable to children and it’s widely accepted that some adults especially seem to be able to get away with behaving badly. At the same time, we expect bad people to come with devil horns and a ha…
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Spring in New Hampshire is slow to arrive, with warm stretches rudely interrupted by a return to winter complete with snow flurries and blustery winds. How do we survive six slow and endless months of frigid weather, you might ask, each and every year? One answer is that we turn our focus to interior pursuits, to the pleasures of life at home. Last spring, the entire nation joined us as people sought comfort, meaning, and face it, the need for something to do during their own forced isolation. Looking for ideas to while away the hours? The cozy mysteries I discuss below have you covered. Besides savoring the puzzling plots, mystery fans enjoy learning more about a subjec…
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I’m a 4th Degree Black Belt and Certified Instructor of Taekwondo. I trained and taught as a career for over 20 years. I also write suspense novels, and it drives me a little nuts whenever I read a fight scene that isn’t realistic. It’s probably hard to write a fight scene if you’ve never trained or never been in a fight. A lot of people fall into that category, so here are a few tips on mistakes to avoid. 1. You think movies are accurate. In a lot of ways, they are not. We all love watching those movies that are all about the tough guy/girl who kicks butt over and over. Sometimes, those scenes will go on for 30 minutes. The problem? Who has that kind of stamina? No on…
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I am a person who has to travel. It’s in my blood. So the last year of isolation was especially hard for me. Fortunately I have books by brilliant writers who can take me to exotic places from the comfort of my arm chair. This is exactly what I try to do when I write my own books: allow the reader to travel vicariously. It’s especially true of my new novel The Venice Sketchbook. Venice is one of my favorite places on Earth and I’ve been re-reading my own book just to imagine myself back there again. But here are some of my favorite books that transport the reader and immerse him or her in another culture. I hope you enjoy this tour around the world until we can all trav…
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She limped a little as she went down the hall. It seemed heartless not even to look at her rooms. She was a big woman; heavy bones showed through her sagging flesh, but from the back she looked very old, her head hunched forward so that her black crepe shoulders rose above her neck. She limped straight down the hall, stopping at the blackened double doors at the end, lifted a key from the casing, threw the doors open, and stood there in the opening, nodding, smiling, beckoning, in some odd way furtive. The hall, as I went toward her, didn’t improve. The walls were hung with thick red paper. Red? It was again the red-black of the walls outside. Against the left wall stoo…
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Everyone loves an odd couple. “The Odd Couple” proves this—the premise is right there in the title—and for mystery lovers, there’s the brilliant Sherlock Holmes and slow-to-the-solution Dr. John Watson. (Although the movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce went way too far in making Watson a dunderhead.) But while Rathbone and Bruce was arguably the most notable on-screen pairing in mystery films, starring in 14 (!) movies between 1939 and 1946, they had competition as “most unlikely thriller partners” from Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. Lorre and Greenstreet were, of course, memorably teamed in “The Maltese Falcon” in 1941 and “Casablanca” in 1943. They wer…
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander (MCD) “[VanderMeer] uses spy fiction to show how spy fiction can’t help us when the sky falls in. Or heats up … Like your favorite Hollywood blockbuster, Hummingbird Salamander features ecoterrorists, evil corporations, a race to defuse doomsday weapons, gunfire, fisticuffs, action sequences and hair-raising escapes … like Ling Ma and Holroyde, VanderMeer introduces all this genre fun mostly to subvert it … part of what the novel is doing is showing how humans are connected to the rest of nature even when we’d rather not think about it. The planet on w…
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Nearly a decade ago, Sisters in Crime created the Eleanor Taylor Bland Award, a $2,000 grant that “is intended to help an emerging BIPOC writer with a novel-in-progress or early-career work of crime fiction. It also supports developmental opportunities, including workshops, online courses and research.” Submissions for the award remain open for submissions until May 15. Previously, we’ve interviewed the winners of the award, but this year, we did something different, asking the judges to reflect on Bland herself, and how crime writers and readers can continue to show her work the respect and love it deserves. Thanks so much to David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Mia P. Manansala, …
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“In fact,” my sister murmured without looking my way, “it made me think of someone. I had an…encounter, years ago, didn’t I ever tell you? Something happened to me.” An encounter! The word sounded bizarre, what with all the shadows. I stopped singing at once. I remembered Mama’s frequent command: “Go see what your sister’s up to.” Actually, in some respects, Claire Marie reminds me of the ducks you sometimes see, ducks that look as though they’re gliding on the water without making any movement at all themselves, but under the surface, their feet are paddling like mad. There’s something trompe-l’oeil about those ducks. “A very curious story, it’s true,” my sister wen…
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Today the Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of the 2021 Edgar Awards, one of the mystery world’s premier honors. This year marks the 75th annual presentation of the awards. For more on the nominees and special award winners, check out our roundtable discussion: The State of the Crime Novel in 2021, Part One and Part Two. Congratulations to all this year’s authors. ___________________________________ BEST NOVEL ___________________________________ Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (Penguin Random House – Random House) Before She Was Helen by Caroline B. Cooney (Poisoned Pen Press) Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Penguin Random Hou…
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__________________________________ From Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith. Used with the permission of the publisher, Fantagraphics Books. Copyright © 2020 by Barry Windsor-Smith. View the full article
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