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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Over a decade ago, I read a book about the Women’s Suffrage movement, and I was surprised by how little of the real story I knew. I had no idea women who demonstrated for this right were jailed and beaten or that they had endured hunger strikes and forced feedings while imprisoned—all to convince the men in charge that they deserved the right to vote. I decided someone should tell this story, and then I realized the someone was me. But how do you tell a story about women working to get the vote without sounding like a textbook? I decided to add a little spice by having my heroine be a con artist who accidentally gets locked up with a group of suffragists and becomes a co…
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2022 was an incredible year for crime films, I’ll just say that up front. We had at least three big-screen whodunnits, several neo-noirs, reboots of beloved detective franchises, two cannibalism stories, several meditations on victimhood, some good superhero movies, some bad superhero movies, and Bullet Train. Here are the rules for our selection. As usual, all films considered had to be full-length feature films, released (in theaters or on streaming services) in the United States during the 2021 calendar year. One of the most annoying things is that several of the year’s best crime films—Australia’s Nitram and France’s Happening (not to mention the best overall, non-cr…
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Maybe we shouldn’t put so much stock in first impressions. The storied costume designer Edith Head initially met Alfred Hitchcock during preproduction of his film Notorious (1946). She had been loaned out by her home studio, Paramount Pictures, at the request of star Ingrid Bergman, with whom Edith had developed a rapport. (Forgive the familiarity. I call her Edith because she’s one-half of the detective duo in the Golden Age Hollywood mysteries that I write with my wife Rosemarie under the pen name Renee Patrick.) Edith certainly understood the assignment; a daring midriff-baring, zebra-striped top immediately establishes Bergman’s Alicia Huberman as a self-destructive p…
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I know, we’ve run a lot of lists this December. But when there are so many great subgenres, why not highlight them all? Onwards to one of my favorite kinds of mystery and thriller: the speculative kind. Noir and science fiction have long gone hand in hand, and recently alternative histories have made their own particular mark in the crime world. Below, you’ll find some of the best crossovers to come out in 2022. S.A. Barnes, Dead Silence (Tor Nightfire) S. A. Barnes has crafted a masterful horror thriller in space with Dead Silence. A small communications team at the edge of colonized space following a distress signal stumbles upon the wreck of the most luxurious spa…
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When I was in the first stages of writing my new novel American Afterlife, I didn’t know how to write a great thriller. In fact, I didn’t even know how to write an average thriller. I wasn’t sure how to structure a thriller or which elements would make it fit into the genre. I was completely ignorant when it came to arcs, themes, and motifs. I didn’t know what made a narrator a great thriller narrator, and I also didn’t know how to captivate an audience while scaring them a little bit. I’d written and published novels with Random House, Simon & Schuster, etc., but my novels were literary or young adult, eco, or—in once case—a gothic, crime mystery. Critics always use…
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Writing a novel with dual timelines presents opportunities—and challenges. Plotting takes precision. Put simply, a dual timeline novel tells one cohesive story through several time periods and perspectives—typically a character who is living through the events and another character in a different time who is somehow connected to those events. Done well, books of this type can offer depth and insights that their more linear counterparts may not. Regardless of genre, readers are often treated to multiple mysteries as the connection between the characters and events in each era unfolds. Techniques vary, of course. Structurally, an author may employ alternating chapters, mu…
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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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Noir stories deal with doom. In such stories, as the great Cornell Woolrich succinctly put it, “first you dream, then you die.” So, if that is the case, how does It’s a Wonderful Life, the tear-jerking family friendly Christmas classic have anything to do with noir? It is because It’s a Wonderful Life is a reverse noir. Or to put it another way it is a kind of film blanc. As Aristotle pointed out, all dramatic stories have to do with two things: fear and pity. Fear is the motivational power behind most human action. Why do we want more money? Because we fear not having shelter or food i.e. dying. Why do we want fancy cars and jobs and more status? So that we …
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2022 was a fantastic year for television, so making this list was harder than usual. Picking 15 to rave about on this website was nearly impossible. You do not know what I have been through, making this thing. So I picked 20. TV of other genres was excellent as well, and if you’re looking for recommendations in that department, try Season 1 of Pachinko, Season 4 of Stranger Things, Season 2 of Abbott Elementary, Season 4 of What We Do in the Shadows, Season 3 of Derry Girls, Season 1 of The Bear, Season 4 of Atlanta, Season 1 of Fleishman is in Trouble, and Season 3 of The Boys. But if you want crime TV, keep reading! This was a great year for “the miniseries,” a great…
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1. THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT-- develop a simple "story statement." In other words, what's the mission of your protagonist? The goal? What must be done? Triggered by threats of losing her granddaughter and being dumped into a senior living facility, unpublished writer Shelby Garrett sinks farther into the fantasy world of her fictional characters who help her keep the past at bay. When intruders arrive to rob her and threaten her life, she is convinced the armed aggressors are her very own fictional characters, ones she can control. Unaware of the true dangers, she challenges the intruders and demands a rewrite. As the early trauma awakens, she spirals o…
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Welcome to Karachi – Pakistan’s most populous city with more than twenty million people living crammed together on the coast of the Arabian Sea. Karachi has gone from being known as the “City of Lights” in the 1960s and 1970s for its vibrant nightlife before ethnic and political conflict in the 1980s partly spurred by the Afghan-Soviet War in neighbouring Afghanistan. Karachi has suffered from high rates of violent crime which, when spiking, have been met by harsh police and security forces crackdowns. And they seem to work – Karachi dropped from being ranked the world’s sixth-most dangerous city for crime in 2014, to 128th by 2022. So let’s dig down into the city’s under…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Christoffer Carlsson (transl. Rachel Willson-Broyles), Blaze Me a Sun (Hogarth) “The first great crime novel of 2023 is Blaze Me a Sun by the decorated Swedish crime writer Chrisoffer Carlsson, who twines together national and personal trauma to devastating effect.” –New York Times Book Review Sean Adams, The Thing in the Snow (William Morrow) “Who knew there was so much wit in hell? The Thing in the Snow is a mystery, an office satire, and a slow-boil study of madness. Trust nothing in this book save for its deadpan brilliance.” –Ryan Chapman Ana Reyes, The House in the Pines…
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Listen up, my children of the night! There is a new Dracula adaptation in our midst, starring Nicolas Cage. It’s called Renfield, and perhaps you have heard of it, since it has been in development for some time. But if you have not heard about it, let me tell you. The film is told from the perspective of Dracula’s insane, zoophagous slave Renfield, who longs to end things with his “boss,” the Count. Throughout the years, Renfield has been played (to varying degrees of lunacy) by Tom Waits, Peter MacNicol, Dwight Frye, Klaus Kinski, Mark Gatiss, Arte Johnson, and lots of other people. But Renfield is always a minor character in the Dracula adaptations, and maybe it’s high…
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I find the campus to be a perfectly oppressive setting for a thriller. A campus thriller isn’t a traditional closed-room mystery, but it does share some tantalising similarities. No physical enclosure perhaps, but the bubble of the college seems to create a certain terrible claustrophobia, full of simmering discontent and narcissism – this leads to crimes that make for an addictive reading experience. Here are just some of the things I enjoy about campus thrillers, and the books that shine in the genre. The outside world invades… I have to begin with The Secret History. Donna Tartt’s debut novel remains wildly popular three decades after its original release. Reade…
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Emotions ran high in the university town of Missoula, Montana, on April 12, 2010. Police termed it “a night of chaos,” with rowdy demonstrators and counter-protesters clogging the streets around City Hall. Within, a tense debate ran well past midnight over what would become Montana’s first nondiscrimination ordinance against LGBTQ+ people. The surrounding hubbub might explain why it took far too long for the man slumped in a nearby alley to rate a second glance. The alley was within sight of both City Hall and the Oxford Saloon, a hangout for the Missoula’s transients. A passed-out drunk near the Ox was par for the course. By the time Johnny Joe Belmarez rated that sec…
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The tall, stylish woman lingered by a rail of fur coats in a top London department store, diamond rings glinting, as her fingers brushed against the most luxurious sable. World War Two was won, but with rationing still in place, such a beautiful garment cost more than six months’ wages. This lady was clearly wealthy, so the shopgirl had no qualms about turning her back, to help another woman try on a silk nightgown. It only took a moment for fur to be snatched from its hanger, rolled into a tight bundle, and shoved, unceremoniously, into a special pair of shop-lifters bloomers, which the elegant thief was wearing under her skirt. The sable coat nestled there as she str…
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In recent years, our culture has started to speak more openly about our mistreatment of famous women. We’ve looked back at the early aughts with chagrin, lamenting how, for years, female celebrities were mocked and belittled by the tabloids for anything from the shape of their bodies, to how they mothered their children. I was a preteen during this time. I distinctly remember when paparazzi took photos of Nicole Ritchie running on the beach; gossip rags claimed that she was suffering from a life-threatening eating disorder, with no sympathy for how this diagnosis, if it were true, would impact this young woman’s day-to-day life in the spotlight. In a similar, and more hi…
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It was a dreary day in October, and the baby that was supposed to have arrived was already late. Maybe that means nothing to you, but to me, it meant that my out-of-office had long ago gone up and instead of holding my new baby, I was Googling the rates of stillbirth for post-term infants and the mortality rate of the women who carried them. Like most people who are afraid of death (theirs and other people’s), I sought solace in crime fiction. There’s something tantalizing about unsolved murders and whodunnit puzzles that, when executed well, can draw even the most anxious among us away from our internal spiraling. As a lifelong reader of mysteries and thrillers, I was l…
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I recently chaired a panel in which several American crime writers discussed their most memorable discoveries in terms of noir television and film during the various COVID lockdowns we have all endured. As the moderator I did not get any time to discuss my own discovery, but if I had it would have been the Australian/American television production, Mr Inbetween. Premiering on the American FX Network in September 2018, Mr Inbetween has its US fans, but remains largely unknown. For that matter, it is also criminally unseen in Australia, where it was filmed. Mr Inbetween tells the story of Ray Shoesmith (played by the show’s creator and writer, Scott Ryan), a Sydney assassi…
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When I look back at who I was just a few years ago and who I am today, it always gives me a jolt. A lot changes throughout our lives, but more often those changes happen slowly and in parts. We move house or change jobs; we meet people, we lose people. At the end of 2016, twenty years of working in Essex as an NHS radiographer in cancer services had left me feeling exhausted, frustrated, and mostly just sad. I wrote when I could, which wasn’t often, and sold short stories while still harbouring my lifelong dream of one day becoming a full-time novelist. And then, shortly after I was given a life-changing medical diagnosis, a very close family member died unexpectedly. I t…
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What does fashion have in common with fiction? At first glance, probably not much. You could argue that they’re both means to express oneself, which is accurate. But these two worlds couldn’t be further apart on the glamorous spectrum, so it might seem bizarre that we ended up going from one to the other. Turns out, there is another unforeseen connection: they both made us cry and have similar barriers to entry for certain demographics. It’s an open secret—fashion is a cutthroat industry. Even if you avoid the Anna Wintours of the business, its ruthless nature can lead to you breaking down and sobbing on any given day. But whenever we cried during our attempt to break i…
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DAY ONE, 7:00 a.m. My wife and I walk our dog at dawn. We live across the street from a little lake connected by a channel to Florida’s St. Johns River, which, eighteen miles away, empties into the Atlantic Ocean. Even so far from the ocean, the lake is tidal, eventually refreshing its old brackish water with new brackish water. But in summer months when the lake is still, Day-Glo green algae scums the surface. It’s a terrible place to dump a body. Our dog Louise, a boxer mix named for Joe Lewis, runs ahead of us and sniffs at the ground beside the lake. She’s a tough old dog, dragging a hind leg years after a car hit her, the muscle above the leg carrying buckshot from…
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While it still sometimes feels as if 2020 never ended, in terms of publishing years, we’re already up to 2023! Which means not only a new year, but a whole new set of books to read. There are so many wonderful books coming out this year that we weep at the thought that we’ll never be able to read them all, but here’s a place to start: 10 fantastic new books out in January that run the gamut from hardboiled noir to comical caper, haunted house horror to pure psychological thriller. Also keep an eye out for many more recommendations once we post our giant most anticipated preview! Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows (Mulholland) In this pitch-dark version of Chinatown in t…
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First there was Gulf War One. (1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. 1991, a US led coalition drove Iraq out.) It was a real war. Thirty-six countries, 1,600,000 troops, thousands of tanks and thousands more armored vehicles, artillery, missiles, helicopters, jets, bombers, destroyers, aircraft carriers – plus, of course, cameras, camera crews, instant satellite transmission of footage – all coordinated to produce a masterpiece of story-telling. The networks had special theme music and big title graphics for their war coverage. All of them looked like the hive mind of a half-time marching band had taken over the news departments. Watching it, on my home screen, I said…
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I first learned about crime fiction from my father Dan Riordan and his brother Paul. They were old school gents and always called crimes novels “mysteries.” I was introduced to all the greats: Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane and Agatha Christie, Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald. It was always one-way traffic, I would read the books they gave me, not the other way around. That traffic pattern changed in 2005 when I sent them both a copy of a new novel by Michael Connelly: The Lincoln Lawyer, the first book in what would become a long-running series starring Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer, Michael “Mickey” Haller. By 2005, both Dan and…
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