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 wrote the first line of A Thousand Steps in early 2020. I intended to set this coming-of-age thriller in Laguna Beach, California, in 1967, the so-called Summer of Love. That year seemed like the obvious choice, given the blossoming of the boomers/flower children, the “free love,” the proliferation recreational drugs, the British Invasion in music giving way to Dylan and other American artists, and, of course, the explosion of counterculture fashion and big hair. It seemed to me in 2020 retrospect – and certainly to my 13-year-old’s wide eyes back in ’67 – that everything in the world had changed. The old was gone and the new was taking form. But as I began writing A…
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I know that writers often feel that the screen adaptation of their work is an inferior—sometimes even an embarrassing—take on the original. Writers say: I told myself that a novel and a film are two different things. Once you sign that contract with Hollywood, let it go. It’s out of your hands. So here’s something you’ll rarely hear a novelist say: The first time I saw the film of my first novel, A Simple Favor, I felt like someone had turned on all the lights in the house and uncorked a bottle of something fizzy and delicious. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, two suburban moms celebrate the pleasures of the afterschool martini. But to me the effect of watchin…
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People think they have the lowdown on the down-low life of mid-century American writer Cornell George Hopley Woolrich (1903-1968)—author, primarily during the Thirties and Forties, of over a dozen crime novels, including his celebrated series of “Black” mysteries (The Bride Wore Black, The Black Curtain, Black Alibi, The Black Angel, The Black Path of Fear and Rendezvous in Black) and more than two hundred pieces of short crime fiction, including such classic tales as “After Dinner Story,” “The Night Reveals,” “Three O’Clock,” “Momentum,” “Marihuana,” “Guillotine,” “Post Mortem,” “Murder, Obliquely” “The Living Lie Down with the Dead” and “Speak to Me of Death.” Cornell W…
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During the summer of 2020, when we were coming to grips with the reality of pandemic—how little we knew about it, how fearful we’d become, how many lives had been lost, and how everyone’s life had changed overnight—I re-watched all eight seasons of Foyle’s War, the absorbing and carefully crafted detective series set in England during World War II. Created by Anthony Horowitz (Midsomer Murders) and starring Michael Kitchen as the quiet but unstoppable widower, Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle; Honeysuckle Weeks as Samantha “Sam” Stewart, his bubbly and resourceful driver; and Anthony Howell as Foyle’s assistant, Detective Paul Milner; most of the series ta…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Elizabeth George, Something to Hide (Viking) A skillfully spun yarn of murder and mayhem.” Kirkus Reviews Hope Adams, Dangerous Women (Berkley) “A historical episode artfully adapted in a bleak tale that offers glimmers of hope for women discarded by society.” Kirkus Reviews Laura Joh Rowland, Garden of Sins (Crooked Lane) “Rowland’s portrait of Victorian London is so immersive . . . A Grand Guignol treat, dazzling and lurid.” Kirkus Reviews T. Jefferson Parker, A Thousand Steps (Forge) “As much sensitive coming-of-age novel as it is edgy thriller…Parker juggles his d…
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From the top of the world to the bottom. Last time we visited the Arctic, the North Pole, and so, in the interests of planetary equilibrium, it’s now time for the Antarctic, the South Pole. Of course, the Arctic is a virtual bustling metropolis compared to the far scantier population of the South Pole – barely four thousand cold souls live in the 5.4 million square miles of Antarctica. To get a sense of the isolation of Antarctica perhaps Jon McGregor’s Lean Fall Stand (2021) is a good place to start. The men of an Antarctic field station at the South Pole start to find things going seriously wrong. Robert “Doc” Wright, a veteran of Antarctic field work, holds the clues …
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Four fifty-three in the morning was too early for anything. Alfie had said so to Donny back when it was four eighteen and they were still on the freeway. But at least they’d be early, maybe catch a nap before unloading. Donny, as usual, had smiled and said nothing. Which was fine with Alfie. If you had to be sharing the cab on a long haul with someone, a guy who didn’t talk much was a good deal. They’d spent the last five days together, hauling a big house full of stuff from Pepper Pike, Ohio, to La Jolla, California. Rich doctor moving stuff from one dream palace to another. In La Jolla, the guy was waiting for them, smiling and waving like they were old friends. Big …
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“A TRUE CLAIRVOYANT IS BORN, NOT MADE” read the all-caps declaration in The Indianapolis Star on March 5, 1911. Making this bold statement? “The Man from India.” The claim came in a classified advertisement for Professor Stanley, a clairvoyant who practiced from North Illinois Street in the Indiana capitol city. Professor Stanley – who offered psychic readings for 50 cents – declared in his ad, “ONLY ONE STANLEY.” “The only adept of Hindoo (sic) occult mysteries practicing in America at the present time,” the Man from India noted. But what about Professor Sidney Elkins, billed as “The Man from India” in the Chicago Examiner on June 25, 1911? Elkins, whose readings cost…
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Is January 2nd the saddest day of the year? It’s the day after the day after. It’s cold and snowy (but then, I live in Canada, and it’s cold and snowy around eight months a year). It’s a day of breaking resolutions and swearing that it—the bite of cake, the puff of smoke, the gnawed fingernail—didn’t count. Usually, as I look over the month’s thrillers, I know which ones will make the cut but this January is unusually rich, and there are excellent books this February and March too. I focused on the many impressive and inventive new voices in the mix, with a book by a favorite because there are not enough Lisa Lutz readers in the world. Jessamine Chan, The School for G…
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In high school, one of my ‘life skills’ courses had a section on planning my wedding. Okay, to be fair to the school district and my home economics teacher’s course planning, it was a few years ago. But developing that plan was my first attempt at event planning—a skill that has been very useful in my life, and more than just for planning my two weddings…especially since I have a history of having less than perfect weddings in my real life. Wedding disasters started early for me. My oldest sister’s wedding was planned down to the minutia. The church, the dress, the guest list. The only problem was my widowed mother didn’t have a ride from the church to the reception hall…
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If you’re starting your year wishing for a sense that time is passing, than look no further! For the best way to know that each day is not, in fact, the same as the last is to keep a close watch on all the wonderful books coming out this year. If your taste runs toward social horror, dark fantasy, literary noir, contemporary espionage, fair play mysteries, or absurdly entertaining psychological thrillers, then congrats, for 2022 is the year for you. I mean, it’s still a pandemic. Let’s all keep our expectations low. Expect when it comes to crime fiction, where you can still keep your expectations very high indeed. ___________________________________ JANUARY ____________…
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Welcome to the CrimeReads Streaming Guide, where we spotlight a very specific category of crime movies we think you should be watching right now. ___________________________________ Yeah, so, now is the winter of our discontent, right? Its January, and it’s not as cold as it should be by this time of winter thanks to the seasonal lag caused by global warming, which is terrible. But it will be very cold very soon, and that is also terrible. Plus, this is our third winter spent living through a pandemic, which does not look like it will be ending soon. I’m tired, you’re tired, I’m angry, you’re angry, and look, even Elmo has grown delirious with rage, so here are some nic…
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One weekend a few years ago my wife and I were invited to dinner by some friends in north London. Let’s call them Sam and Nadia. Nadia is originally from Bulgaria, and still has family there. On our way home afterwards, I happened to look at my smartphone. There, blazoned across the screen, was a weather forecast for Sofia. Why, for heaven’s sake? I had never been to Sofia. I had no plans to go there. I could only conclude that Google hadn’t merely tracked my whereabouts, but in some sense “knew”—thanks to some data-mining algorithm—that the people I was visiting had Bulgarian connections. That seemingly trivial incident was really the starting point for Coyote Fork. L…
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Peter Swanson is the Sunday Times and New York Times best-selling author of eight novels, including The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award, and his most recent, Nine Lives. The further I got into this conversation, the more I realized how well Peter Swanson matched his chosen genre. Peter’s a classic, a throwback, in many ways, to the golden age of mystery novels. From his quaint office in Maine, to his always well-behaved cat, Peter Swanson has all the hallmarks of a mystery novelist. He also has possibly the best justification for why you shouldn’t outline your novel that I’ve ever heard. But we’ll get to that later. Since I was talking t…
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In early 2020, I began writing a new story—a domestic thriller with one of the most terrifying premises I could imagine: an armed and masked invader who forces his way into a woman’s home and holds her and her two children captive. It’s an idea that didn’t come out of nowhere. I live for much of the year in Atlanta, and this was a scenario I’d seen all too often on the nightly news, one that happened to people I knew, even. It’s a premise that was firmly grounded in my day-to-day reality—which in my mind, made it that much scarier. But as I was writing it, a dystopian reality began brewing outside my four walls. Anytime I turned on the TV, that was where the true terror …
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I come from a family of teachers. Both my parents taught at Barnsley Girls’ High School, which meant from an early age I was immersed in stories of school life: the scandals, the fights, the rivalries of any small community. My mother—who took no pregnancy leave when I was born, conveniently giving birth to me on a Friday morning and returning to work on Monday—would leave my grandmother to babysit, and to bring me into school at lunchtimes to be fed during her lunch hour. Thus I was literally breast-fed the atmosphere of the High School; the scent of floor polish and plimsolls, school cabbage, chalk and cut grass. Some of her pupils still recall a little girl who spoke …
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There is more than one devastating murder in my debut novel One Night, New York. It would, of course, ruin the book to reveal who dies at whose hand, but what I want to do here is poke around a little bit in the who and the when and the how of writing these murder scenes. For someone who hasn’t killed or been killed (adding a ‘yet’ here seems ill advised either way) murder scenes can be tricky. As writers we are told to write what we know, to mine our own emotional experience so that our characters might rise up off the page and cling to the reader as full-bodied, living, breathing souls. And so, we dig. We pull up old loves and resurrect them, we sift through traumatic c…
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I’ve been angry since 2016. To clarify, this isn’t an admission of a crime. I’m not talking about a long-hidden, keep-dead-bodies-in-the-basement kind of evildoing. As if I’d admit that here… This is about an anger, bone-deep and repeatedly reinforced and fed, that leads to the realization that what’s fair and what’s wrong isn’t equal or a bright line. An anger that whispers enough is enough as visions of vigilantism to creep in. The frustration starts simply enough. Every time a rapist receives a punishment that starts with “we don’t want to ruin his life…” and ends with limited or no jail time, or a man murders his family and the story discussing the details carries a…
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A new year, a new you, and a whole new set of books to read! Check out the site later in the week for our full preview of the most anticipated titles of 2022, but in the meantime, here are 10 essential crime novels coming out this January. These will make you think, make you cry, and distract you from whatever you need distraction from (i.e., the entire world right now). You’ll notice we got pretty literary this January. It’s cold and we’re reading long books, okay? Sara Stridsberg, The Antarctica of Love (FSG) Stridsberg’s evocative new novel is a portrait of a young woman and her violent death, a powerful story that ripples through time and across generations and so…
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translated by Paul David Young On Mondays, the Bode Museum in Berlin is closed, but that didn’t stop three visitors. They weren’t looking for the main visitors’ entrance. On March 27, 2017, at exactly three o’clock in the morning, they climbed the steps to the entrance of the nearby Hackescher Markt train station, all three dressed in black, with hoods pulled over their faces to conceal them from the surveillance cameras, but as if already weighed down by guilt. One of the figures kept putting his hand in front of his face. On the video, the hand looks very white, probably clad in gloves. During the week, there aren’t any trains so early in the morning. The station platf…
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My husband and I were little more than a handful of hours into a fourteen-hour drive … our destination? Bonnaroo Music Festival. Only one problem: we broke down on the side of the road, finding ourselves stranded for the night in Staunton, Virginia, a town that was quaint, walkable and charming … maybe even a little too charming? Our getaway turned out great—we enjoyed good food and local beers and made it to the music festival in the end—but it got me thinking: why is there something so inherently creepy about a getaway gone wrong? When you’re all set for a trip you’ve been dreaming of and something—or someone—throws a wrench into your plans? That experience was the b…
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Gilded Age New York City was much more than Fifth Avenue mansions, Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred, and Delmonico’s. Life for the elite and the very wealthy might be a dizzying whirl of formal and costume balls, nights at the opera, and debutante presentations, but beneath the glamour and the glitter lay a world no one except religious reformers wanted to acknowledge. Even they only described in the most general terms the plight of desperate women and girls whose sole means of earning a meager living was in the city’s brothels and on its streets. When I began writing the Gilded Age Mystery series (Kensington Books), I knew that in addition to showcasing a pair of legal investi…
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It’s time for Crime and the City’s annual winter holidays. And this year we’re heading to the Poles. OK, just so we’re clear before we begin – the Arctic is the northernmost part of the Earth, the North Pole, and the Antarctic is the South Pole. They’re both cold – not as cold as they used to be, which is a problem – but still very cold. Throw in Alaska, bits of Canada, Russia and Scandi and the population of the Arctic is around four million people. Compare that to the barely four thousand who live in the 5.4 million square miles of Antarctica. To get a feel for the terrain maybe watch Fortitude, set on the (fictional) Norwegian Arctic island of Fortitude, where an inte…
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All I Want began with part of a story that my mom heard from her friend, who heard it from a friend of a friend, who heard it from someone else. A young woman and her husband bought a country house in northern Michigan. The rambling structure was once a retirement home for opera singers who had performed throughout the Midwest. The house needed a lot of work, but it was huge and weirdly beautiful. It was—or so it seemed—a steal. One night, while the house was being renovated, the woman spent a weekend alone there. Her husband was on business, in Chicago. At about seven on Saturday night, she was surprised and a little alarmed to hear a woman singing opera. The music wa…
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On January 5, 1950, Estes Kefauver introduced a Senate resolution calling for an investigation of organized crime—in particular, interstate gambling—in the United States. On May 10, 1950, the freshman senator from Tennessee became chairman of the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, and the “crime committee was in business.” Jack Anderson and Fred Blumenthal’s brisk, reportorial description in “Birth of a Crime Buster” is apt because, as they remark in the following chapter, “The Limelight,” “By the time the probe was completed America knew that organized crime had become Big Business.” According to Kefauver, the annual revenues of orga…
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