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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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 never been more important to start your crime novel with high-stakes. Doesn’t matter if it’s life-or-death type peril, or if someone’s marriage is about to go down the toilet. Maybe he’s hanging from his fingernails from a cliff. Maybe she just arrived home from meeting up with her boyfriend, and hubby’s sitting there in the dark kitchen waiting for her, his eyes full of dreadful knowing. Something has to be at badly at stake in your opening page, paragraph, line, because we’re living in a time when readers don’t have to tolerate anything less. Elmore Leonard said it in his ‘Rules for Writers’: ‘Never open a book with weather.’ He was trying to say that what’s goin…
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When I was watching Asteroid City, the new film from Wes Anderson, I kept thinking of a line from The Fabelmans, the Steven Spielberg movie that came out last year: “in our family, it’s the scientists versus the artists.” Asteroid City is a film about a group of strangers in September 1955 who all wind up in a desert town made famous by an ancient asteroid impact, now populated with scientists doing astronomical research and atomic bomb testing. It had seemed, from the advertisements, that Asteroid City would be Wes Anderson’s first sci-fi movie, and it is, but it’s also more a film exploring the relationship between science and art—the shared investments of scientists an…
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Lunatic fans! Teens run wild! Unlikely assassins! Twisted twins! And that old favorite, trouble in paradise! September is a festival for thriller fans, with many delights to sample. Don’t fill up on bread—let’s get straight to the main course. Meg Elison, Number One Fan (Mira) Elison’s premise is a little rocky: a popular fantasy novelist, Eli Grey, gets into a car she thinks is taking her to a speaking engagement. Assuming the car has been provided for her, she accepts a drink from the driver and wakes up in his basement. Light on family and friends who would miss her, Grey is left to her own wiles to figure out who her captor might be and what the motivation is for…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Wanda Morris, Anywhere You Run (William Morrow) “Beautifully rendered prose written in the vernacular of a small Mississippi town will immerse readers in the lives of two sisters trying to survive. In this viscerally frightening novel of the Jim Crow era, Morris writes a stunning, heartbreaking portrayal of being Black in the 1960s U.S. South.” –Library Journal Claudia Lux, Sign Here (Berkley) “Lux brilliantly combines satire, suspense, and pathos in her remarkably assured debut…Lux balances the whodunit plot and her antihero’s quest perfectly as the action builds to a surprising…
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Turning points are incredibly important landmarks in crime fiction. They are the peak or series of peaks we climb to, where everything shifts inside the story. These moments are when we realize nothing is what it seems. Once we reach them, whether it is the climax of the book or an earlier point of change, we have new information. At the start of a book, a sleuth walks into a situation with no idea of what has created it. Who has “the scene” been set for? Who has carefully crafted lies in order to create an impression? A turning point occurs when critical information is revealed. While reading a work of seventeen-nineties fiction, I discovered that the turning point lit…
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Whenever I’m asked for tips about writing, the first piece of advice I give is always the same: The trick to crafting a good mystery is reading a good mystery. Any time a story surprises you, any time a twist takes your breath away or makes you rethink everything you thought you knew up to that point, you’re learning something essential about the art of building a top-notch whodunit. I cut my teeth as a writer on books by Agatha Christie, Gillian Flynn, and Sara Shepard, authors well-versed in the art of red herrings and sleight of hand, whose novels made me itch to open my laptop. And the late, great Sue Grafton taught me you could play your hand face-out and still shoc…
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Usually, when it comes time to round up the best crime novels of the year, we cap it at 10, but this year brought such a wide variety of excellent releases that we decided to up the number to 20. And it’s that variety, rather than any particular trends, that truly distinguishes 2022 from previous years. This year’s list includes plenty of hard-boiled noir, insightful psychological thrillers, lush historical journeys, and stunning traditional mysteries. There’s also some old ladies kicking ass, a social-justice oriented procedural, two works in translation, and the most noir depiction of a football game since North Dallas Forty. Scroll to the bottom to see our list of nota…
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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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Crime fiction and speculative fiction go together like, well, crime and anything else, for crime writing is the perfect plot vehicle for exploring a beautifully built universe—and testing the bounds of its structure. Below, you’ll find fantasy, science fiction, alternative history, and sardonic thought experiments; other than a thread of violence and its consequences, these novels share one more thing in common: an abundance of imagination. Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night (Hogarth, February 7) What a strange and luminous novel. Mariana Enriquez stunned with her collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, and Our Share of Night is just as fantastic (and fantastical…
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Sequels are hard to pull off. Very hard, actually. When CrimeReads asked me to put together another list of must-read alternate history thrillers, I felt the same brand of doubt and apprehension that had settled upon me as I sat down to write my second novel: Sunset Empire. Would I be able to write another adventure with Detective Morris Baker? Could I match, or perhaps even top, last year’s collection of recommended thrillers? The answer, in both cases, was the same: I wouldn’t know until I reached out in an effort to “touch the multiverse,” if you’ll allow me to borrow a phrase from Kang the Conquerer (for some reason, I feel compelled to quote the Marvel Cinematic…
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Kate knew something was wrong the moment her phone buzzed. Well, maybe not the exact moment. But, like, pretty soon after. Once her brain registered that the clock read six thirty. In the morning. During summer break. And she’d already missed, like, five messages from Rowan. Six thirty a.m. texts were never a good thing. Kate grunted as she pushed herself to a sitting position, running her fingers through her tangled rat’s nest of wavy auburn curls. She took a deep breath and steeled herself against Rowan’s news. Although, seriously, how much worse could it get? It had been less than twenty-four hours since the bomb dropped, since the cops had shown up at Dex Prat…
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We are excited to host the cover reveal of S. A. Cosby’s latest novel, All the Sinners Bleed, forthcoming from Flatiron Books in June 2023. S. A. Cosby was kind enough to answer a few questions to go along with the cover reveal. Scroll to the bottom to see the cover. Congratulations on winning the Anthony Award for Best Novel two years in a row! How does it feel? S. A. Cosby: Surreal, especially when you look at who I was nominated with. Every book in my category is an instant classic. I’m so honored. You’re one of a few writers redefining rural noir, especially for stories set in the South. What does rural noir, or Southern noir, mean to you? SA: I think it’s the go…
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The world of espionage has always fascinated me—from the intrigues of Francis Walsingham on behalf of Elizabeth I to twentieth century wartime operations, through the Cold War, and all the way up to the workings of the modern CIA. While the action-packed adventures of James Bond and Jason Bourne are fun to watch, to me there is something even more compelling about people who use intelligence and ingenuity, rather than fists and firepower, to fight for their country. Traditionally, most spy stories have focused on men, and it’s true that historically, the occupation of spy has been largely a male preserve. But with manpower short in wartime Britain, many women were given …
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What if Jessica Fletcher was your grandmother? That was the spark of an idea that turned into my second YA murder mystery, Pretty Dead Queens. Technically. It was hardly that simple, or linear. Crafting a book, and a mystery especially, is a circuitous process. Collating and meshing multiple inspirations, tweaking and twisting ideas to provide the most fun ride for the reader possible. But you’ll be hard-pressed to read Pretty Dead Queens and not see the winking references to Cabot Cove, murder capital of the U.S., or to a bygone era of mass market paperbacks and TV movies of the week. If you’re catching a whiff of nostalgia in the set-up, you wouldn’t be wrong. Isn’t…
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“I have a gun in my head.” My mother used to say that. When I was very little, I didn’t know what she meant, but soon enough it became clear. The asshole in the BMW who jumped his turn at the four-way stop? Blam. The incompetent male colleague who took credit for her ideas? Pop pop pop. The xenophobic neighbour asked her why she married a “greeny”? Right between the eyes. What my mother knew, and what I recently discovered as I wrote my first crime novel, is that it’s extremely satisfying to kill people in your imagination. Especially rotten people. Prior to penning The Opportunist, I had written three novels and a novella. They had plots that amused me: a broke artist s…
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“Which is better—to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?” Piggy asks, in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The concept of stranding characters on a deserted island in order to test their humanity and expose their inherent flaws and vulnerabilities is not a new storytelling trope. But, like so many literary themes, for decades the concept has largely been used to shine a light on the souls and inner demons of men. There have, of course, been some exceptions: like the early science fiction allegory Angel Island by American feminist author, suffragette and journalist Inez Haynes Irwin. The novel, published in 1914, sees a group of men shipwrecked on an island occup…
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We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it. Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction; Nonfiction; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; and Literature in Translation. Today’s installment: Mystery and Crime. * 1. Paradais by Fernanda Melchor, trans. by Sophie Hughes (New Directio…
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Nothing is ever as it seems. That’s the way it goes in murder mystery stories, isn’t it? Nowhere is quite what you believe it is. No one is exactly who they say they are. Nothing happens entirely as you think it will. At least, that’s what any author would hope to achieve – keep you guessing right up to the end when the skill and bravery of the detectives allows them to reveal all before apprehending the culprit. I’ll never forget the ‘reveal all’ scene in the 1968 movie Where Eagles Dare, which starred Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. It may be an action-adventure, war-and-espionage movie but there are a couple of murders along the way, so I feel justified in giving …
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Horses are highly sensitive herd animals and as such, they reflect the emotions of those around them—including their human partners. To quote my latest novel, Girls and their Horses, “Horses are like mirrors. They reflect all the best parts and all worst parts of ourselves back at us.” Horses in fiction are often used to echo the qualities of their human counterparts. They also inspire fast-paced, passionate stories of determination. Horses are often used to represent deeper emotional struggles or iron will. While perhaps not strictly thrillers, the following stories are fast-paced, thrilling and filled with twists. Dark Horses by Susan Mihalic \Dark Horses tells the…
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The late Cormac McCarthy, widely regarded as the literary heir to Herman Melville and William Faulkner, a traditionalist in a sea of deconstructionists, had a flair for violence. Sometimes he boiled everything down to the brutal essentials. From his novel “No Country for Old Men”: “Chigurh stepped into the doorway and shot him in the throat with a load of number ten shot. The size collectors use to take bird specimens. The man fell back through his swivel-chair knocking it over and went to the floor and lay there twitching and gurgling. Chigurh picked up the smoking shotgun shell from the carpet and put it in his pocket and walked into the room with the pale smoke still…
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Everyone from scientists to adventure seekers and everything in between could talk about the Florida Everglades for hours. There is so much to unpack—all 1.5 million acres of unique, subtropical ecosystem which homes over thirty-six endangered species. Surprisingly, this marshy swampland is primarily made up of freshwater, and it’s the only place on earth where both alligators and crocodiles coexist. And we can’t forget the caimans. They live there, too. While the Everglades is truly a beautiful, awe-inspiring place, it also holds its share of secrets as well. The environmental facts are intriguing, but the folklore is sinister. The Florida Everglades is prime real estat…
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When I was ten years old my mother handed me a worn paperback called THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving. “What’s it about?” I asked her. “Life,” she said. I had never read anything so brilliant. She used to take me to the used bookstore and let me buy stacks of paperbacks because I read so fast it was hard to keep me in books. And if we got the usual comment. What’s a little girl like you doing with so many big books…she would look at them and snap…She’s reading them. How may books have you read this week? My mom had one rule about what books I read growing up. Which was there were no rules and I could read anything I wanted. You know what she told me? Use your o…
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