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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The FBI, as America’s top law-enforcement agency, has always depended heavily on informants to bring to justice all manner of criminal organizations—be they the Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia, or an international drug cartel. But along the way the efforts had sometimes gone appallingly awry, with agents undertaking illegal bugging operations or committing rampant civil rights violations—Martin Luther King Jr. had been one well-known target of gross FBI malpractice during the civil rights era. In another, the worst known informant scandal in FBI history, the legendary Boston crime boss James J. “Whitey” Bulger was protected by a band of corrupt agents in the FBI’s Organized Crime…
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In the summer of 2015 a rough beast slouched out of the shadows and into the waking nightmares of an unsuspecting world. His name was Dark Mill South, but that wasn’t the only name he went by. Cowpoking through Wyoming, working the feedline, as they used to call it, he’d been the Eastfork Strangler. Not because he ever hung his hat in the Eastfork bunkhouse or rode their fences, but because he’d somehow come into possession of one of their 246 branding irons, and had taken the time with each victim to get that brand glowing red, to leave his mark. For that season he’d been propping his dead up behind snow fences, always facing north. It wasn’t a Native American thing—Da…
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Humans have been using dogs for hunting, protection, and herding for at least 14,000 years. Dogs were domesticated in China by 12,000 BCE for hunting, companionship, and occasionally as a food source. Analysis of canine DNA suggests that humans began domesticating dogs nearly 20,000 years ago. Earlier still, dogs may have begun domesticating themselves by scavenging garbage and alerting humans to potential intruders. Currently, canine service dogs are widely used by national, state, and local governments for community policing, guarding infrastructure (ex. airports, prisons and jails, power plants and nuclear facilities), and providing security at public venues like scho…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Hannah Morrissey, Hello, Transcriber (Minotaur) “Former police transcriber Morrissey brings her expertise to this suspenseful debut. The story of an introverted, troubled woman, isolated in a bleak small town, will appeal to fans of Jess Lourey’s atmospheric books.” Library Journal, starred review Flora Collins, Nanny Dearest (MIRA) “Nanny Dearest is not just an entertaining suspense novel but a therapeutic one for any adult who has faced disturbing holes in the family tree. Unsettling, compelling, elegantly paced—Flora Collins’ debut is a slick, contemporary novel that explores …
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Tasmania – 150 miles off the southern coast of Australia, directly across the Tasman Sea from Melbourne. It’s the country’s least populated state with approximately half a million people. But it does have a bit of a reputation – the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, mass slaughter of the island’s Aboriginal peoples by colonialists and, of course, the legendary Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) marsupial. And some great writing too… I’m going to start with a personal favourite, The Potato Factory (1995) by Bryce Courtney. It’s a big novel that starts in the slums of East London in the nineteenth century and follows the criminal career of Ikey Solomon, the so-called …
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A look at the month’s best reviewed crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Alison Gaylin, The Collective (William Morrow) “Gaylin’s prose, so achingly pure yet electric in its gathering rage, pulls readers so far into the abyss in which these women live that it feels entirely plausible … readers may be prompted to ask: Are evil acts always reflective of evil hearts, their perpetrators forever beyond redemption? Is there any way to atone for one’s mistakes, no matter how grave? Full of twists, The Collective also raises fascinating questions about the echo chamber of social media and the righteousness of rage—maternal or otherwise. Even after reading its shatterin…
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When I couldn’t see my youngest for two years because we were in a global pandemic and she lived on the other side of the world, I had to find a way to endure it. What other choice did I have? My partner Karyn and I live in Santa Cruz, California. Our daughter, Eliza, lover of languages and travel, resides in Amman, Jordan, 7500 miles away. When your child lives ten time zones away, you get a crash course in separation. I learned to shelter my emotions and look on the bright side: our daughter was living her dream. She was 24 years old. Independent. Doing what she loved: living in another country, speaking fluent Arabic, working with refugees. She’d met a Jordanian man …
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On June 12, 1950, a British journalist and bureau chief for Reuters News Agency in West Berlin made Cold War-era history. John Peet, 34, stood in front of a crowd of more than 200 international reporters, summoned to East Germany’s government information office, formerly home to Hitler’s Propaganda Ministry. The place where Joseph Goebbels had once briefed the Nazi press was bursting at the seams. No one knew what the news would be, except for Peet. In fact, Peet was the news. “I simply cannot consent to take [part] any longer in the warmongering,” began the crow-like Peet in fluent German, with an upper-class British accent, “which threatens not only the Soviet Union …
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With most heist films, the pleasure is in watching everything fall apart. No matter how meticulously planned the central heist, something always goes wrong—the passcode to the vault changes, the getaway driver decides to turn rat. Even if our antiheroes escape with the loot, it’s often with a trail of bodies in their wake. If they escape at all, that is. Fortunately for cinematic criminals everywhere, though, there’s another path: a subgenre of “nice heists,” in which the robbery goes absolutely to plan with a minimum of bloodshed or drama. These movies often hinge on the charm of the heist’s ringleader as they reliably outsmart all opposition, leaving confused cops and …
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I have long believed that Thanksgiving is the most boring holiday. Christmas, Halloween, and New Year’s all have a competitive edge—there’s always the desire to out-do last year’s festivities. But no one’s ever said “this is going to be the Best Thanksgiving ever!” Frankly, it feels like a holiday built to fail: it’s racist, centered on the worst sport and the worst meat (football and turkey, respectively), and takes place during the end-of-year slump when days are short and dark but not cozy. And it’s on the Thursday before the most morally bereft day of the year after Columbus Day, Black Friday. Good luck ever enjoying this holiday if you work retail. So why not embrac…
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There’s a passage by the great Salman Rushdie in his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet that I’ve long admired and like to revisit every so often. It’s about those select few who are born into the world as inherent non-belongers—societal outcasts who march to the beat of their own drum, or who march to no drum at all—and how we, the presumed upstanding citizenry, secretly admire and wish we could be more like them. I say “presumed” because Rushdie posits that perhaps there are even more of these outcasts than we know—perhaps even we are among them, born with the same inherent proclivities, but we hide among the ranks of the upstanding citizenry because we’ve repressed ours…
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While preparing for a recent appearance on a podcast episode about John Boorman’s 1967 film, Point Blank, I thought a lot about American noir cinema of the very late 1950s and the 1960s. I find it interesting that so many of the films made during this time remain unknown and underappreciated relative to the classic film noir period, generally regarded as beginning with John Huston’s 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon and ending in 1958, and the body of American crime cinema known as neo noir, which took off in the early 1970s. I have no desire to reprise the ‘what is noir?’ debate. I also realise that it is impossible to put firm boundaries between periods of cinema. Some a…
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In 1859, workers at a dock in New York City noticed that a barrel that had been shipped into town smelled particularly foul and decided to open it up. The first thing that they saw when they pried the barrel open was a woman’s face, detached from the body parts beneath, but still recognizably a face and, in some accounts, even still beautiful, despite the fact that the woman had been dead for several weeks. The barrel was traced back to Henry Jumpertz, a barber in Chicago, and the body proved to be that of his girlfriend, Sophie Werner. In Jumpertz’s own account, he had come home from his barbershop and found that Sophie had hanged herself. Fearful that he, as a Prussian…
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The greatest financial secrecy tool the world has ever invented isn’t something you can hold. It’s not something you can see, or touch, or peer into, trying to ascertain what exactly it contains. It is, in a very real sense, something of a fiction: it exists solely on paper, and solely to conceal the names of the people, and the sources of their money, for whom it was created. It’s called an “anonymous shell company.” Like regular companies, these anonymous shell companies can be registered quickly: a few phone calls, a bit of paperwork, and a new company can be had in a short period of time. On paper, it’s often difficult to tell the difference between the founding of…
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Violence and art couple freely as rabbits on the American scene, but as a crime writer and defense attorney—with a foot in each world—I find it impossible to recognize real-world crime in the depiction of violence for art’s sake. Popular media gets murder wrong. The fantasy unpacks itself weekly from red Panavision trucks, spitting distance from the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn where I work. There on random afternoons crews erect lighting scaffolds and gaffers fasten down thick electrical cords before actors arrive to shoot another episode of whatever crime show Americans love. I don’t watch them anymore. Before becoming a DA twenty-five years ago, I worked for a big…
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The French Murder Case That Shocked a Francophile Family Into Writing A Detective Series
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It was the perfect venue for a summer vacation. A comfortable stone country house in the Dordogne—land of foie gras and deep green rolling hills—not far from Issigeac, one of the most idyllic of the “bastide” villages. The rambling old home was set high on a hill, with a spacious living room, and big French doors opening onto a terrace. In the fields out back, among the trees, sat a large pool for swimming every morning. Our family, all Francophiles, had come for a summer of sightseeing in the narrow winding streets of the medieval towns, and the bustling Sunday morning markets with the tomatoes glistening in the sun, and strings of sausages swaying in the breeze. All…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Santiago Gamboa (transl. Andrea Rosenberg), The Night Will Be Long (Europa) “Each novel by Santiago Gamboa is at the forefront of the best Latin American novels. Gamboa dismantles the legacy of Chandler and Hammett, adapting it to the craggy environs of Colombia, and adds to it a tireless sense of ethics. His novels revitalize a genre that we thought could do no more.” Martín Solares Shelley Noble, A Secret Never Told (Forge) “Fascinating history about Coney Island …those with a taste for the madcap will be entertained.” Publishers Weekly Carlos Ruiz Zafon, City of Mist: Stor…
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When I was fourteen years old, much to the annoyance of my parents, I would only read one type of novel: the ones that were written by Agatha Christie. My mother used to nag and/or bribe me to read more upmarket fare, and actually I was busted, around the same time, having pocketed the prize money, for claiming to have finished Jane Eyre and then ‘not remembering the bit’ about Mrs Rochester. I am still teased about it today—but that is another story. Attempting to defend the quality work of Agatha Christie, my teenage self told my far-from-stupid mother that I had been moved to tears while reading Death on the Nile, due to the amazing character development of its variou…
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My new book, Murder at Mallowan Hall, is a mystery set in the (fictional) home of Agatha Christie. The housekeeper at Mallowan Hall, Phyllida Bright, discovers a dead body in the library during a house party hosted by Agatha Christie and her husband Max Mallowan. When the authorities seem far too bumbling and slow to solve the crime—and, just as importantly, chase away the journalists and photographers camped out on the premises—Phyllida takes on the task of exercising her own “little gray cells” to unmask the killer. Having the protagonist of the mystery series being a housekeeper—that is, being from the downstairs world—made it both a challenge for me, and a refreshing…
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Looking for the perfect present for your crime-obsessed loved one? Well, look no further, for I have a host of gift books to recommend this holiday season, from oversized to pocket-sized, and everywhere in between. (What is a gift book, you might ask? A gift book is a book that someone would not ordinarily buy for themselves but would love to receive as a present. There. Easy peasy.) These beautifully designed books should make perfect gifts for the fan of true crime, detective fiction, graphic novel mysteries, or film noir. Check out Olivia Rutigliano’s great list from earlier this week for crime-themed candles, mysterious wall prints, and much more. Poe For Your Pr…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new nonfiction crime books. * H.W. Brands, Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution (Doubleday) Brands’ latest history is an engaging, provocative look at the American Revolution and the largely forgotten battle lines it drew within the colonies: dividing neighbors, families, and communities. Our First Civil War is a study of the schism between Americans who wanted to throw off British rule and those who stayed loyal to the crown. Centuries later, the American Revolution is often taught as a great swelling of popular unrest, but Brands shows how fine the distinctions were, and how the build-u…
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A reptilian line of hills, the Serrata del Marchante, drags itself from the east like fossilized vertebrae. Beyond it lie the windings of a bleached and twisted labyrinth. Through the haze I have an impression of ravines and riven rock, but if I stare at them too long the lines detach and lose their form, dissolving into pale glare. My eyes cannot get a grip; it is too hot to see. Downward now on a slope of dust, past shattered canyons of grey and kidney-purple rock. The sun is high overhead. Trees are an extinct species. My boots crunch on gypsum shards which I mistake, at first glance, for broken windscreen glass. The ground is white, baked hard, interspersed with flak…
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In the Netflix’s documentary, Making a Murderer, 16-year old Brendan Dassey is interrogated by two detectives who believe he might be implicated in a murder. The detectives stressed that they knew what happened and had physical evidence to prove it, all of which was untrue. They aggressively commanded that he tell the truth while simultaneously befriending him, saying things like, “We’re here to help…” They offered a rationale for the alleged killing, telling Brendan that it wasn’t his fault, and directed the blame onto his uncle, the man they did the killing.. After hours of interrogation, Brendan, with an IQ of 70 and his perception of events muddled by the persuasivene…
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One of our favorite things, over at the CrimeReads desk, is when a character in a movie grabs a pen and uses it as a weapon in a fight scene. Don’t ask me why we enjoy it so much. Maybe it’s because we’re writers. I wouldn’t read too much into it. Anyway, for fun, we picked the ten best movie scenes where someone gets offed by a pen. What are the criteria? Well, first of all, I’m accepting “pencils” in lieu of pens. They might not be interchangeable on a Scantron, but they are for the purposes of this list. Second, we are not counting staking vampires or other undead entities with pencils, so this rules out From Dusk Til Dawn and Fright Night. Third, and this is the b…
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Over several years in the early 1930s the spousal writing team of Gwen Bristow (1903-1980) and Bruce Manning (1900-1965) published four crime novels: The Invisible Host, which possibly inspired Agatha Christie’s classic mystery And Then There Were None, The Gutenberg Murders, Two and Two Make Twenty-Two and The Mardi Gras Murders. The couple later went on to enjoy highly successful careers in entertainment, she writing historical fiction, including her bestselling Plantation Trilogy, he writing screenplays in Hollywood in Hollywood, including most of the scripts for the hugely popular films of youthful star Deanna Durbin. Before turning to writing crime fiction and these …
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