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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I’m not a risk-taker. I’m careful and safety-conscious to a fault. But as a writer, I have the freedom to take infinite risks on the page. In my stories, I can explore things I never would in real life. Often, I write about the things that scare me most. I want to understand them, to experience them in a safe and controlled way. In A MOTHER WOULD KNOW I asked myself the question: what I would I do if I suspected one of my children had done the unthinkable? How would I react? As a mom, I’m fiercely protective of my children. But what if I was faced with something I shouldn’t protect them from? Here are five other books with that same theme in mind. The Good Son by Ja…
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I think about murder a lot. No big surprise, since I write murder mysteries for a living. But I’ve been thinking about murder for a lot longer than I’ve been writing it. Since I was old enough to pull a well-thumbed paperback off my grandmother’s bookshelf. Detective fiction has been my comfort food since I was a child. And my preoccupation with murder hasn’t stopped at fictional ones. If my audiobook library can be believed, I spent a large chunk of the 2010s consuming true crime podcasts and documentaries about long-caught serial killers. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the why of it all. Why the preoccupation with murder? Why was I reading Sherlock Holmes at eight…
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For me, there are few things more enjoyable than a good, old-fashioned whodunnit. Or a good, new-fashioned whodunnit. I say it a lot on this website, but, to me, the best thing that can happen in a book or a movie is someone crying out: “someone in this house is a murderer!” Or, if that doesn’t happen literally, I’d like that to be the overall vibe of what I’m reading or watching. As such, I was thrilled and honored to get to pick the best traditional mysteries that came out in 2022. The “traditional mystery” is a story in which there is a murder (or a robbery), and an investigator (either an inspector or a plucky amateur) follows a series of clues to find the killer (or …
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The Gothic Revival continues! And this year, Southern Gothic joins the fold in our roundup of the most haunted, atmospheric stories of 2022. Here’s a quick definition of what Gothic fiction does, courtesy of Faye Snowden’s wonderful article: “Through stories of transgression and depictions of the grotesque, [Gothic fiction] evokes anxiety in the reader, leaving them to question society’s institutions, religions, politics, familial and other relationships…” While European Gothic novels mostly featured women in distress in dilapidated houses, Snowden distinguishes two particularly American evolutions to Gothic fiction once it crosses the pond in the 19th century: “The firs…
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Good people making bad choices. Bad people making good choices. I have a love/hate relationship with fiction about characters who take that first wrong step…then the next, and then another, until they are so far away from where they were meant to go that they have almost no choices left at all, except the worst ones. I’m fascinated by how easily our lives can be upended by taking one path instead of the other. Maybe it’s because writing about people with messy lives feels comforting – no matter what’s going on in my own life, at least I’m not dealing with my best friend’s betrayal and missing memories (After All I’ve Done) or an ex-boyfriend trying to ruin my life while …
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You are here because you love mystery stories. I understand. I am like you. I enjoy them so much that I write them, and I’ve just written one that takes place at an English country manor house. Everyone loves a manor house! And wouldn’t it be fun to go! After all, they aren’t really full of murders and dead bodies. Those are just stories. Visiting a manor house would be fun! If you hold these naïve views, you fundamentally misunderstand the manor house and its occupants. The manor is not a house or a home; it is an extension of a biological line, a symbol of dynastic power. Now it stands—barely—a shell of its former glory. The manor is too expensive to maintain in the m…
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Maple’s mother had insisted she wear riding clothes to the horse stable, even though they weren’t there to ride. They were there to feed the horses carrots. They had brought a big bag of them. The stable was only a mile away from their new house. It had been part of the promise of moving to California. “Rancho Santa Fe has horses,” Maple’s mother had told her, like there weren’t horses everywhere in Texas. “The first thing we’re going to do is find you a new place to ride.” Heather sometimes seemed to genuinely believe that Maple loved horses just as much as she did. It wasn’t that Maple didn’t like horses; she just thought they were a little scary, especially the horse…
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Much has been said about the recent film adaptation of She Said: its cultural importance and cinematic quality, but also its allegiance to the newsroom thriller sub-genre. Films like Spotlight and All the President’s Men, where the crusading newspaper reporters overcome corruption and secrecy to expose an institutional abuse of power. It’s all very American, all very pro-Fourth Estate, and all very, perhaps… twentieth-century? A throwback to an earlier vision of newspapers as the true arbiters of justice? But in 2022, as traditional newspapers compete with social media, streaming platforms, and online echo chambers for attention, are journalists the most apt heroes in …
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A look at the year’s best new noirs (with the usual disclaimer that noir can never quite be defined, which is really part of the appeal, but let’s all agree it has something to do with a journey into the moral abyss). * Don Winslow, City on Fire (William Morrow) In Don Winslow’s magisterial ode to the Iliad and the Aeneid, two crime families battle for New England after the appearance of their own Helen of Troy is a catalyst for full-scale conflict. Winslow’s work is at the pinnacle of modern crime writing, and City on Fire continues his run of powerhouse emotional noir. –MO Kelly J. Ford, Real Bad Things (Thomas & Mercer) Ford’s 2017 novel, Cottonmouths…
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Here’s how the story of America’s Great Diamond Hoax—“one of the most remarkable swindles ever perpetrated,” to quote a newspaper of the era—usually begins. In November 1870, a couple of grimy, malodorous men pounded on the San Francisco office door of George D. Roberts, a mine broker and speculator known for his kind-heartedness but also for a “shady past” well littered with abortive bonanza stratagems. Although Roberts had previously shut down for the evening, he was waiting for these two, so welcomed them in off the wooden sidewalk. Roberts was better acquainted with the younger, more handsome member of that duo: Philip Arnold, a robust, self-sufficient, and smooth-ta…
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I’m not going to say, “winter is coming,” one, because by the time this goes to print, the first season of House of the Dragon will have wrapped up, like, two months ago (aka two decades in GoT years). Totally unscientific fan theory that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately (maybe I should write an article for The Cut about it?): Dramione shippers like me grew up to be Daemon fangirls. Two, would I ever be so trite as to co-opt that most memorable of Starkisms? Copywriters of the world, please stop using the first family of Winterfell’s motto to sell your coats/sweaters/scarves/etc. In my case, winter isn’t coming. I’m headed home to Florida for the holidays, aka the…
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“People don’t read books to get to the middle.” –Mickey Spillane The four stories that make up The Broken Doll, from Amazon Original Stories, was written in the same way I’ve approached all my 45 novels and 90 short stories: from conception to execution, I strive to sure the reader is immersed in a nonstop tale. I do not write character studies or atmospheric stories contemplating the nature of good and evil. I write foot-to-the-floor page-turners that race from start to finish, featuring whipsawing plot twists and surprise endings. (A recent review suggested that readers should send me their chiropractic bills.) To achieve this goal I’ve come up with some rules I kee…
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I upload my latest trailer to TikTok advertising my new YouTube video Killer in the Family and sit back. Within seconds the numbers under the little heart start climbing like if Jeff Bezos was to watch a live stream of his bank balance. He’s building rockets. Malcolm Wyatt, a rich dude who’s invited me to his amusement park, is building islands. Tearing open a packet of Hershey’s Kisses with my teeth, I wait. Chocolate passes the time. I get a bunch of comments telling me how awesome it is that I’ve posted but it’ll take about thirty minutes for people to head over to my YouTube channel to watch the full video then come back to TikTok to let me know what they think. My…
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We’ve had real trouble this year narrowing down our lists, as is evidenced by yet another grouping of 15 instead of a top 10, but hey, it was a great year for subgenres, okay? 2022 was, in particular, an excellent year for new works set during three time periods: the 1920s, the early 1960s, and the long 19th century. Each has its own relevance for today—the 1920s, and for that matter the first half of the 19th century, both share uneasy parallels with today’s increase in activism and (in the case of the 1840s) barn-burning millenarianism. The 19th century has been called the era of the con artist, in which successive economic panics and booming fraud made swindlers into p…
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I moved to New Orleans twenty-six years ago because it was the first place where I felt like I belonged. I came here to visit for my thirty-third birthday and the city opened its arms to welcome me home. I fell in love with this strange, magical city nestled in the curves of the lower Mississippi River that weekend. Something—I’ve always believed it to be the heart of the city– kept whispering in my head, move here and all your dreams will come true. I used to say jokingly that New Orleans felt like home because “no one thinks I’m eccentric here.” I said it as a joke, but it was also true. New Orleans not only embraced its eccentrics but encouraged them. Where else bu…
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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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As the nights draw in and the weather gets cold and you might find yourself heading to bed early, pulling the covers over your head, and searching for some new podcasts. But then, of course, this is the international edition of the podcasts review on Crimereads, so we’re aware that you might be enjoying a cold beer in a Singapore hawker court, grabbing lunch in a Malaysian kopitam, or hitting the beach in Australia, but perhaps still in need of a good listen. And so our semi-annual round up of the best international (non-USA) true crime podcasts in English… ___________________________________ England ___________________________________ Bad Women: Blackout Ripper (Pu…
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It’s rare enough for stories to go from ideas to published works, let alone garner enough attention to get translated, but these books have all made that long journey to be with English-speaking readers today, which is why we try to draw special attention to crime fiction in translation here on the site. Each of these works offers insight into other cultures. These are not niche reads, however, consumed for tourism rather than literary merit—these are proper opuses, likely to stand the test of time and (hopefully) multiple adaptations. 2022 was a particularly excellent year for works translated from Spanish (Mexico and Argentina) and Japanese, with books from South Korea …
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When I first moved to LA, I felt like I was in another country – and sometimes another planet. There were red-tiled Spanish mansions, giant Seussian cactuses, and scores of gorgeous, gazelle-like young people. But there was also a dark side. Tent cities just blocks from city hall, downtown streets littered with needles, broken glass, discarded underwear, and ambiguous biological stains. Then there were the surprises. Chic speakeasies inside subterranean sandwich joints, soulless-seeming strip malls containing the most delicious hole-in-the-walls, tiny 20-seat theaters staffed by brilliant actors with big dreams. LA is a hard place to put your finger on. It’s a city…
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It used to feel like YA was all about werewolves, vampires, and post-apocalyptic wastelands, but over the past few years, there’s been a turn towards the mysteries, thrillers, horror, and suspense in the genre. Some new classics of the genre include Karen M. McManus’ One of Us is Lying, Tiffany Jackson’s Grown and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give; in short, the teen fiction mystery pantheon is no longer just The Westing Game, although I could read The Westing Game all year long. I only started paying proper attention to the new wave of YA suspense last year, and what I found thrilled me, so this year I’ve been covering young adult crime fiction in the hopes of getting every…
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Okay team! It’s time for us to round up crime movies which also happen to be set during the Christmas season but are not really, technically “Christmas movies.” As I explain EVERY year, when I make another one of these lists, these aren’t movies like Die Hard or Bad Santa or Lethal Weapon or the new Violent Night: famously crimey and obviously seasonal for having a “Christmasy” backdrop. NOPE! These are the movies you don’t always remember are even set at Christmas. In December 2018, our editor Dwyer Murphy assembled ten thrillers that might surprise you with their holiday settings, and in December of 2019, I added ten more. And then in December of 2020, I added another t…
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I’ve never been one for “year-end” lists. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because I’ve always been too busy rushing forward to look back. All that rushing and hustling has gotten me here, though, to the year I’ve been chasing since I first started writing. My debut novel came out last March. I marked so many items off my author bucket list in 2022. I also got to meet nearly all of my literary heroes, thanks to this column. I started “Shop Talk” because this was the content I looked for in author interviews. I wanted to know how authors put the black on the white. How they structured their lives to do this thing we do. Thanks to CrimeReads, I was able to interview my…
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Do you follow every rabbit hole in true crime podcasts or watch serial killer documentaries religiously? Does the Forensics Files or Cold Case Files theme songs ever get stuck in your head? Do you pour over each detail in Only Murders in the Building looking for clues so you can figure out the killer before our heroes Mabel, Charles, and Oliver do? Then you, my friend, are an armchair sleuth! You’re by no means alone. Up to 50% of podcasts right now are based on true crime. Murder mysteries—real and fictional—are topping the charts of Netflix and Hulu. We can’t get enough of it, which is a good thing because I’m an avid reader (and writer!) of cozy mysteries. If you’re b…
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The new renaissance of horror fiction came to my attention just last year, when the number of books hit such a critical mass I couldn’t help but notice, but the return of the spookiest genre to the highest levels of acclaim has been building for some time. Right now, if you speak with anyone in America, they’ll probably say that horror cinema is where the most relevant stories are being told today, and I’d argue the same for horror fiction, where our wildest fears meet our darkest realities, and every moment holds potential for either shocking violence or even more shocking kindness. Without further ado, here are the 12 best horror novels of 2022, followed by a list of no…
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The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. Katie Gutierrez, More Than You’ll Ever Know (William Morrow) This book is full of so much love. Lore Rivera has everything a woman is told to want: a husband who loves her, two children who work hard to succeed, and a career that values her. When her husband’s business falls prey to a recession, she finds herself suppressing her own success to make her husband feel better. Meanwhile, she meets another man in Mexico City who finds her success a turn-on. Soon enough, she’s got two husbands; soon after that, one husband finds out and kills the other. Forty ye…
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