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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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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You’ve written a great first novel. There’s buzz! There’s praise! The book is flying off bookstore shelves. Even the notoriously finicky and hot-blooded reviewers on Goodreads adore it. They’re throwing stars at you like henchmen in a ninja movie. Your publisher loves the book so much in fact, that they want you to write another one. Pronto. Welcome to the Land of the Sophomore Slump. Many writers spend years crafting their first book in a headspace that’s blissfully free from deadlines, contracts, and fan expectations. Then, when their debut novel is (miracle of miracles!) successful, they’re expected to crank out the next book in the series in record time–often less …
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I wrote much of my new novel, Relentless Melt, during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. My partner was in another city and I spent a lot of hours alone in my apartment, grappling with the manuscript and making weird art with some remote collaborators. I’ve always used music as a backdrop while writing, but it was even more crucial during this drafting period, bringing vitality and creativity to what would otherwise have been very quiet months. My new novel is set in 1909 Boston—but, to me, its “soundtrack” is not era-appropriate ragtime music or popular marches: rather, it is best accompanied by longform ambient tracks or noisy electronic music. The novel involves magicia…
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Elements of the Gothic permeate every aspect of American media. We see it in film, music, literature and on TV shows, where it continues to grow in popularity from the crumbling plantations of HBO’s True Blood, to the lush landscapes of Louisiana’s Oak Valley Plantation in the first season of True Detective. More recently, Ozark and Love Craft Country have captured the imagination with its Gothic settings and characters. It’s no surprise that the Gothic is making its presence felt in the pages of crime fiction. But why should we care? We should care because the stories we tell ourselves shape our society, and crime fiction is the second bestselling genre in the country…
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Science fiction readers recognize the old distinction between stories that are rigorous about scientific plausibility (“hard” SF) and stories that are more fantastical or philosophical (“soft” SF). And writers know wherever there’s a binary, there’s artistic opportunity in breaking it. I appreciate stories that scramble the mechanical and the mystical. By treating fantastical machines, algorithms, and social processes with what feels like hard-SF rigor, we can approach ideas in a fresh way. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, “psychohistorians” use mathematics to predict the futures of entire societies (a riff, perhaps, on Marxist dialectical materialism). In Cixin Li…
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The Victorians were fanatical about the dead. During this era, the spiritualist movement—central to which was communication with the dead, especially through mediums—was in its heyday. Victorians were fascinated by anything supernatural, otherworldly, or occult, and a number of our present-day traditions around death and dying echo the practices of this bygone era. Public theatrical displays of mediumship and psychic power were a common occurrence in the Victorian era, particularly séances. These were an especially popular affair among the wealthy looking to entertain their friends with elaborate parlor-room displays. Though the Victorians did not abide by any standard …
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If you like fiction featuring spiritualists and their brethren, then you’re in for a treat, as 2023 has brought a host of new crime novels exploring ghostly visitations and otherworldly knowledge. Some of the books below feature straight-up con artists, using the cards or a seance or two as a means to an end, while others truly believe in their own connections to the spirit world. Most of the following titles are historical fiction, clustered during the late 19th century and early 20th, but some are contemporary, speaking to both a current surge of interest in spiritualism and the tragic historical circumstances that tend to serve as a prelude for wanting to contact ghost…
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Thirty years ago, July “Come on, Erik!” Josh’s sneakers disappeared over a mussel-encrusted rock ridge left exposed by the low tide. His voice echoed behind him. “We have to get there and back again before the tide turns!” Like Erik didn’t know that. He pulled himself up the ridge, puffing, and saw Josh’s tracks in the dark sand, the strides long, the toes dug in. He was running. Bastard. Erik savored the forbidden word in his mind and even thought about saying it out loud. No one was around to hear, or wash out his mouth with soap, or spank him, or send him to bed without his supper. Which his mother lost no opportunity to do because she thought he was too fat. Inste…
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“Put silver in your pockets, walk with dirt in your shoes, or he’ll poke your eyeballs from their sockets, and boil your bones in stew.” (Katherine Greene is the pen name of two women writing twisty thrillers) Our upcoming psychological thriller, The Woods Are Waiting, begins with a morbid nursery rhyme that highlights a very specific set of superstitions that are followed by an isolated community in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. Silver and dirt have a long history of protective properties in many different cultures and the residents of the fictional closed off town of Blue Cliff, Virginia have held onto these beliefs and macabre traditions for generation…
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You don’t know this person, so don’t even try to figure this out, because you won’t be able to. (Seriously. And she is not part of the book world community). I’m telling you this because it’s a cautionary tale, and one that’s more reassuring to believe isn’t true. But it’s true. It’s also the genesis of THE HOUSE GUEST, and more on that in a minute. There’s a woman I once knew who was happily married. She’d go to work every day and send her husband off to do whatever he did; accounting, or insurance, or something financial. And to hear him tell it, the next big sale or the next big deal was always around the corner, and she was incredibly supportive. Then one day the po…
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You’ve got your large Coca-Cola in the cupholder affixed to the chair and your bucket of popcorn overflows into your lap. The lights go down and the movie begins. Cue the hero: some grizzled ex-special forces vet or former assassin with an ax to grind. This isn’t just any hero, though. This person is godlike, superhuman, the best in their field. No punch or kick will derail them. Maybe they’ll break a rib or two, or take a knife to the arm, but they will not stop kicking ass. Similarly, no bullet will take them down. There will be hundreds of bullets—thousands—fired at them over the course of the movie, and not one of them, not a single one, will be lethal. The bullets th…
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It’s been years since our protagonist gave up his life of crime. He’s gone straight now. He just wants to be left alone to live the quiet life. He’s served his time, paid his debt to society and is ready to reconcile with his estranged daughter. Then, with a knock on the door, the past walks in. It’s Old Partner and Old Partner is in way too deep with some bad people. He needs Protagonist to help him. He needs to steal the thing in a heist no one thinks is possible. Also, if Protagonist ever wants to see his estranged daughter again, he’s only got 72 hours to pull it off. It’s time for one last job… There is something inherently lovable about the heist story. They have b…
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When The Best American Mystery Stories series began in 1997, I was eleven years old and an eager consumer of the criminal and the macabre. I’m glad I spent my childhood without the Internet for many reasons, but one of them is that I didn’t have access to Wikipedia’s list of serial killers by number of victims. Instead, I savored whatever I could get from my closed universe of resources: reading materials chosen by elementary school teachers and my easily scandalized Korean immigrant mother. I treasured my mass-market collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories, and over twenty years later, I remember “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl—a creepy st…
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Steve Berry is the author of 16 Cotton Malone books, as well as number of thrillers, and runs a historical preservation foundation along with his wife. In Berry’s latest, The Last Kingdom, Bavarian separatists are trying to establish a right to a kingdom based on the mysterious papers of a 19th century king, and it’s up to Berry’s hero Cotton Malone to travel to several fairytale castles in order to find the elusive documents. We caught up with Steve Berry over email to ask about history, research, and his dedication to preservation. How do you go about making history so exciting? It’s simple. Tell a good story. People love stories. But, traditionally, history was taugh…
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West Side Story, the charged, nimble musical created by Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Arthur Laurents (book), and Jerome Robbins (story and choreography) is one of the greatest artistic achievements of mankind. It is a blaze of sound and movement and feeling, full of pathos and gracefulness, indelible and ephemeral at the same time. Since it premiered on Broadway in 1957, and even more so since it was made into a Best Picture-winning movie in 1961, West Side Story has hummed in the air, permanent and resonant and revolutionary in the modern cultural imagination to such a degree that it might seem like a terrible decision for anyone to ever remake i…
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