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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Below are six YA novels that I adore for their complexity, their willingness to grapple with larger social and moral questions, and their resistance to easy answers. Part of adolescence isn’t only coming to understand one’s own self and place in the world; it’s about questioning why the world is the way it is in the first place. No wonder adults find literature and teens so terrifying. They ask the questions we don’t always have the answers to and force the issues we’ve never been prepared to answer for. Courtney Summers, The Project A girl grieving for her shattered family. A father grieving for his lost son. Their pain, their suffering, as well as her own, lead you…
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The first book I ever got lost in was Sebastian Lybeck’s “Latte and the Magical Waterstone”, a rather obscure Finnish children’s classic. I had borrowed it from the school library, carried it around proudly in my little leather satchel for most of the day, and once I had returned home, promptly disappeared into it all afternoon. When I finally remerged, something in me had changed. I felt happy and bereft at the same time, full of clarity but also a bit dazed. It was my first true reading adventure, and it made me understand what a wondrous thing a story can be. The hero of the book was a hedgehog, brave and bristly, upright and determined in his quest to reclaim the mys…
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My new novel, Red London, revolves around the world of Russian oligarchs living in London. Wealthy Russian expats have been a fixture in London for so long now that the city’s moniker, Londongrad, no longer shocks. The oligarchs are dug in deeply and broadly: Russians are believed to have 27 billion pounds invested in the UK in one form or another, and the top few alone own about $1.5 billion in London property. When Putin launched a full-scale invasion into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, however, it forced a hard look at the ultimate price of this accommodation of Russian elites. Wealthy people have always bought property in foreign locations, whether as an investment o…
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I had always intended to be a writer of adult mysteries. When I conceived of the first novel I would eventually publish, it concerned a murdered hippopotamus at a zoo. I had imagined that one of the zoo’s veterinary staff would discover something suspicious during the autopsy and decide to investigate the crime. But I soon realized (with the help of my literary agent) that this novel might make more sense in the middle grade space, with a tween cracking the case. Now that I was setting out to write a mystery for young readers, I decided to reread the stories of three seminal junior detectives to see what made them successful as both novels and mysteries—ones that appeale…
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If the key to comedy is timing, the key to subterfuge is, well… also timing. Adapted from Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series (the eighth installment of which is due out this May), Apple TV+’s Slow Horses launched last week with a bang—literally. At the end of the first two episodes the streamer dropped by way of premiere, one of the series’ titular Slow Horses ends up slumped on a rainy front stoop, shot through the head. Pan back, cut to black, see most of you could-have-been spies next week. If this sounds like the culmination of what must have been an explosive pair of opening hours, you don’t know the Slow Horses. Incompetent, dull, and slow off the mark, the Slow Ho…
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The phrase “people often ask me” sounds like a setup here, but it’s true that people often ask me why it is I’ve chosen to write about small-town Texas. And every time, the question sort of takes me aback—not because it’s an unusual one, but because the setting of my books feels inherent to me, the first thing that comes when I sit down to write; it doesn’t feel like much of a choice. The straightforward answer is that I’m writing what I know: I grew up in small towns and rural areas. I enjoy wide-open spaces and have a need to spend time there in my mind. There’s also an intrinsic relationship between crime fiction and small-town settings—small-town mysteries their own …
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Throughout many, many drafts of The Neighbor’s Secret, I rethought or rewrote almost all of the novel’s elements—the characters and their motivations, the pacing, the reveals, the title, the title, the title. I never budged on the setting. Cottonwood Estates, a small, close-knit community tucked into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the type of neighborhood where everyone smiles and says hello and knows each other’s families and looks out for one another. Or at least pretends to. What is it about small communities? As a reader of suspense, I am always excited to be dropped into one. My mind goes into overdrive: Is this place cozy. . .or claustrophobic? Can we tru…
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On a Saturday in early November, Guido Brunetti, reluctant to go outside, was at home, trying to decide which of his books to remove from the shelves in Paola’s study. Years ago, some months before the birth of their daughter, he had renounced claim to what had been his study so that their second child could have her own bedroom. Paola had offered his books sanctuary on four shelves. At the time, Brunetti had suspected this would not suffice, and eventually it had not: the time had come for The Cull. He was faced with the decision of what to eliminate from the shelves. The first shelf held books he knew he would read again; the second, at eye level, held books he wanted t…
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I think my wife is plotting to kill me. Countless mysteries have begun with some poor fellow uttering these most ominous words. And all too often, as it turns out, the poor fellow was correct. Murderously-minded females do hide in polite society—but of some such femmes fatales, you need have no fear. Consider the case of this young chap whose anxious missive recently crossed our desk: Dear Miss Lovelost, I think my sweetheart is plotting to kill me. Or worse: she may have given her heart to another. I have lately entered into an engagement with a dear and sweet Young Lady of Substance—accomplished, well-read, and able to converse on the widest variety of subjects. I b…
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The beloved character Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief who moonlights as a detective, was created as a direct result of the popularity of Sherlock Holmes, which surged throughout Europe and America towards the end of the nineteenth century. As scholar David Drake notes in a 2009 article on Lupin, though Holmes had been introduced in the 1887 novella A Study in Scarlet, he did not become a sensation until author Arthur Conan Doyle published six Holmes short stories in The Strand Magazine from July to December 1891. With queues of excited readers forming at newsstands on release dates, the stunned Conan Doyle agreed to write another six. But quickly bored of his character, …
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The soft-boiled mystery is real, relevant, and required. I hereby proclaim this as fact on behalf of all the vibrant females over 50 like me, who want to read books starring lead characters like us. In crime fiction, the soft-boiled genre is embedded firmly between the cozy and the hard-boiled, like middle-aged and elder women ensconced between siren and senior. When I first began shopping around my humorous, soft-boiled mystery novel, How To Murder a Marriage, featuring a fifty-year-old female protagonist, I pitched it as “Modern Janet Evanovich meets middle-aged Bridget Jones.” I had one editor tell me that soft-boiled is not a recognized genre of crime fiction, and an…
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It took Anthony Bourdain forever to get around to featuring Taiwan in one of his food shows, even though he’d been to the country a few times already. He finally made an episode about the capital, Taipei, for his series “The Layover.” I was psyched to see it but after the show aired in January 2013, a few things bugged me. First of all, Bourdain lands at Taoyuan International Airport and then takes an hour-and-a-half cab ride to the W Taipei. He has a few drinks in the hotel bar that hit him “like a cement mixer.” Then he hops on an eastbound commuter train for half an hour to go to Keelung Night Market? Assuming that the jet lag and alcohol intake don’t knock him out (…
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Lately, I’ve been in the mood to watch Throne of Blood, the Japanese jidaigeki film directed by Akira Kurosawa. Maybe it’s the wind or the chill in the air or the mysterious fog enveloping Manhattan, but I’ve been longing to be transported, eerily transfixed in the way that Throne of Blood can transport and transfix. Released in Japan in 1957 and released in the United States in 1961, Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth, setting the events in feudal Japan rather than its temporal counterpart in Scotland. The first man to appear onscreen in the film does not look like a man after he dismounts his frantic horse and thrusts himself against the giant doors of Spider’s Web Ca…
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“The height of the Bush era was a weird, giddy time.” -Stephen Thomas Erlewine on Milli Vanilli’s Girl You Know It’s True (1989) Cop Rock (ABC, 1990) was a real television show that existed. It was a police procedural with musical numbers. The plot of the show chugged progressively from episode to episode like any police procedural. The songs in the show occurred with clockwork regularity, as in any musical. The characters—police officers, suspects, lawyers, bureaucrats—resembled characters in fraternally related shows like Law & Order, except that they sometimes burst into song. I promise this is true. I first learned of Cop Rock from a video posted almost as …
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Last year, I took part in a London festival’s panel discussion of the work of Agatha Christie. On the panel with me were four other writers, all passionate Agatha fans. One by one, we described what we loved about her work and talked about how much she meant to us. Then it was time for the Q&A, and the questions we were asked by the audience were, by and large, the same ones I’ve been answering on Agatha-themed panels since around 2011: why is she still the no. 1 bestselling novelist of all time? Is her work dated now or is she still relevant? Even though she’s widely and rightfully regarded as a plotting genius, wouldn’t the panel all agree that she’s not actually a …
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