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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Readers and writers alike come to crime fiction for different reasons, and critics usually break those many reasons down into two: a desire to control the monstrous or a desire to envision social change. But few of us fall simply into either category, and some of our interests in reading and writing about crime are private. Whatever personal compulsion brings me to the genre, I want crime fiction that walks the blurry line of circumstance. I want crime fiction that explores how any of us takes one step off a curb, realizing too late we don’t know the streets’ secrets. We suddenly need to, maybe need to and desire to, learn those secrets for ourselves. But this oblique or…
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Enter for a chance to win one of 20 copies of The Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz! Welcome to today’s giveaway! Enter your email and home address below for your chance to be one of twenty winners of Anthony Horowitz’s novel The Magpie Murders courtesy of the publisher, Harper, and Masterpiece Mystery. Magpie Murders premieres Sunday, October 16 at 9/8c on MASTERPIECE on PBS. Giveaway ends Thursday, October 13th at 5 pm EST Enter * indicates required Email Address * First Name Last Name Address * Address Line 2 City State/Province/Region Postal / Zip Code Country Yes! I want to receive newsletters, special offers and other promotio…
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We’re currently living in a new golden age of horror—social horror, folk horror, body horror, haunted house horror, psychological horror, gothic fiction, and slasher fiction, just to name a few of the subgenres that have exploded with new voices and now-classic titles over the past few years. It took me a while to notice—I’ve always loved creepy, terrifying narratives, but I only started seeking out horror over the past few years. Once I stared into the abyss, however, I noticed something interesting: the abyss not only stared back, but welcomed me, and in fact, saw into my soul. There are several converging factors for the rise in horror. First, we can’t underestimate t…
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Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. –Rumi (1207-73) Several months ago, everyone I knew seemed to be watching Bridgerton, and a friend described it fondly as “a bonnet drama—one of those historical shows that are pure escape.” This was around the time I was revising Under a Veiled Moon, the second historical mystery in the Inspector Corravan series, and I found myself mulling over the notion that an “historical show” was a “pure escape.” What did that mean? Was it a “pure escape” because we are emotionally removed? After all, none of us has a dog in the fight in Regency England. Or perhaps it was because the main roma…
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My mom was diagnosed with melanoma in 2015, and, after a surgery to remove lymph nodes, the cancer lay dormant for about three years—hidden in scans and bloodwork—until exploding across her skin again in 2019 and leading to her death last February. In that span of seven years, treatments, trials, hospital visits, surgeries, and holidays drew me across the country again and again—pets in the backseat and husband beside me, a mystery audiobook playing through our speakers as we crossed the Smokies or headed south toward swamps and palms. When I was a kid, we’d go on long road trips to visit my older sisters. My mom and dad would rent audiobooks from the library—first casse…
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Turpentine workers’ cabins. Valdosta, Georgia. 1937. Dorothea Lange. Library of Congress. The heart of my horror novel, The Hollow Kind, is the story of northern-born journeyman August Redfern, who marries into one thousand acres of longleaf pine forest. The year is 1917, the setting southeastern Georgia. Here, Redfern hopes to build a vast turpentine estate, but soon he discovers that the land he’s been gifted comes with a terrible price. His father-in-law, a timber baron who stole the land from poor farmers, has made a pact with a monster, and now the evil that dwells among the pines demands new tribute. Heedless of the past, Redfern plunges ahead with his venture, and …
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‘She says, “I tell you another thing: I cannot abide this milk you’ve got here.” I says, “Woman, it comes straight from the cow!” She says, “Aye, and that’d be bad enough in this day and age, but what makes it worse, you carry the stuff in old wine bottles!” I says, “Well, what’s wrong with that?” And do you know what she said? She reckons it taints the milk.’ Miss Claiborne harrumphed at this, but it was an essentially rhythmic response that didn’t necessarily indicate that its maker was listening. ‘Well, to cut a long story short, in the end I refused. I just flat-out refused to put bread on the list when there’s plenty of it, and of a superior quality, available in t…
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Imagine crime fiction without the freedom to explore different perspectives to change point of view. Think of the omniscient voice of the author giving us a distant third-person account of events. The friends had decided to spend the Whitsun weekend at Goodseaves, one of England’s finest stately homes. Jill and Jane were in the Alderton Room when Jill stabbed Jane through the heart. The all-knowing, all seeing author perspective that was once fashionable and can be found wholly or intermittently in classics such as The Lord of The Rings by JRR Tolkien makes for a short and unsatisfying crime fiction read. In fact, without shifts in points of view, it’s arguable crime fi…
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Antihero: A central character in a story who lacks conventional heroic attributes such as idealism, courage, patience, generosity, intelligence or morality. Why do we love antiheroes? One reason is because while we love to read about unbelievably talented and morally spotless protagonists who do things to save the world (looking at you, Scot Harvath), we can’t relate to them. But we find it inspiring to read about deeply flawed people doing great things because it gives us a chance to think we might be able to do them ourselves: Hey! I drink too much, too! I can save that orphanage from a nuclear attack! Or, Gosh, I didn’t realize someone like me who spends most of my t…
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Political intrigue, death on the beach, murder most poison… such is stuff that books and movies and TV shows are made from. Ripped straight from the headlines. It makes sense, then, that while I was plotting No Way Home, my young adult thriller, in which an American exchange student faces a life-or-death situation in Rome, I considered going that route. In the end, I didn’t (or sort of didn’t), but it got me to thinking. When we travel, we generally sightsee in typical travel-guide mode, taking in hotspots at face value. Yet, do a deeper dive into the true-crime histories of so many sites, and watch how it sheds additional dimensions to any experience. Here’s a peek at…
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On the book’s front cover, a white-shrouded figure with hollow eye sockets menaces from beneath a gothic arch. On the back, a hooded shape retreats into a snowy landscape. Both unsettling images are surrounded by a darkly cross-hatched sky. Both are imagined as reflections in oval mirrors whose frames seem to be trimmed by patterns resembling heavily lidded eyes—all in keeping with the book’s title, The Haunted Looking Glass. This volume, published in 1959, was my first introduction to the matchless Edward Gorey and to many of the classic ghost stories found within that he had chosen. One of best of these stories, to my mind, is “The Signalman” by Charles Dickens. While …
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Sienna and Prez arrive together in the Astro van outside EditedPets’s 6th Avenue building. It is Saturday, December 24, 5:57 a.m., 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Empty offices await them upstairs. Prez holds a cardboard cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Sienna hasn’t drunk alcohol since Prez plucked her from the Midnight Lounge, but caffeine would be counterproductive; she wants a buffer of dullness today. For ten seconds, they look up at the building while New York rises from sleep. “You ever heard of Phineas Gage?” Sienna asks. “Who hasn’t? Backup QB for the Giants, 1980–1985.” Sienna smiles to show appreciation for the joke, any joke. “I read up on him last night. He was this …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Val McDermid, 1989 (Atlantic Monthly Press) “McDermid has fired up her time machine again and is taking us back to 1989 . . . A riveting look backward from Scotland’s Queen of Crime.” –Booklist Raquel V. Reyes, Calypso, Corpses, and Cooking (Crooked Lane) “As she proved in her 2021 debut, Miami author Raquel V. Reyes has found the right recipe for an engrossing, light mystery that blends Cuban-American culture, a love of food and appealing characters.” –Oline H. Cogdill, Sun-Sentinel Karen Odden, Under a Veiled Moon (Crooked Lane) “[An] exceptional sequel . . . Fans of Lyn…
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It’s an exciting era for indigenous and First Nations voices in crime fiction, horror, and suspense. “To say that there is a Renaissance in Native American fiction is an understatement,” according to Erika Wurth in an article for Lit Hub penned this January, and genre fiction has in particular seen a huge influx of Native writers over the past few years. In honor of Indigenous People’s Day, we’ve assembled a list of 14 new and upcoming releases to keep you reading well into the next year, featuring noir, mysteries, and so much horror. Wayne Johnson, The Red Canoe (Agora Books, March 15, 2022) “Heart-warming and gut-wrenching. A nuanced, superbly written justice thril…
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When I started writing my novel, The Storyteller’s Death, I didn’t plan on putting a murder mystery at its heart. In fact, if you had asked me when I’d first started in this craft if I’d ever write a murder mystery, I would have said, “Oh HELL no! They’re too hard. So much to keep track of and you have to mete out all the clues…” Instead, this book started with a comment I made during a conversation with some writer friends many years ago. We were talking about how cultures treat their elderly, and I was talking about Puerto Rico: “There was always an old woman dying in the back room of my childhood.” From there I dove into treasure trove of stories from my Puerto Rican…
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There’s something about winter in the Midwest, where the darkening days can oscillate wildly between cozy and menacing, snow-day, Christmas morning joyful and late March, still-frigid-here dreary. The season is full of beautiful contradictions, pregnant silences and angry squalls, comforting nights by the fire and wild adventures out on the frozen lake. And what about the tedium of being shut up with the same people day after day in a house that smells like wet wool? Stephen King might have set The Shining in the Rockies, but he could just as well have dropped the Torrance family in an abandoned vacation home on Lake Erie in the middle of February and no one would be surp…
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It is a widely circulating question in our current cultural moment: what to do when great art is created by terrible people? However, we do not need to broach this issue in the case of Amsterdam, the new film from David O. Russell, because it is not great art at all. Amsterdam is boring and pointless, so obvious and cumbersome and vapid, that it would not be worth your time even if Russell had not previously revealed himself to be a bad man. Russell admitted to molesting his nineteen-year-old transgender niece in 2015, afterwards attempting to defend himself by saying she was acting seductively towards him. I am not trying to be glib about his crime by packaging it briefl…
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In the United States in the year 1949—when the country, having survived the ravages of a second world war, was hurtling and hustling its American way toward the middle of a bloody century—it had been six long years since Raymond Chandler, successor to Dashiell Hammett as the Crime Boss of the hard-boiled boys, had published his last detective novel, The Lady in the Lake (kind of a highfaluting title, that). During that lengthy intermission between novels, Chandler had gone to work in Hollywood, writing scripts for two classic American crime films: Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, based on the James M. Cain crime novel, and The Blue Dahlia, for both of which he received Ac…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Erin E. Adams, Jackal (Ballantine) As Jackal begins, Liz Rocher has reluctantly headed home to Johnstown, Pennsylvania for her childhood best friend’s wedding. She’s prepared for the micro-aggressions from her friend’s racist family, but during the celebration something far worse happens—a beloved child goes missing, and the key to her disappearance stretches back over decades of missing children, all of them young Black girls last seen around the summer solstice. Meanwhile, a spirit in the woods is close to taking corporeal form and rejecting the bonds of its human maste…
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Fear has been a constant companion of mine. It lives rent-free inside my brain. At bedtime, when I was little, it told me that I had to sleep with my bed butted up to a wall and my body facing the rest of my room so no one and nothing could sneak up on me from behind. The minute the sun went down, it nudged me to turn on every light in the house. It made climbing the basement stairs an Olympic event. Slow down, and something was bound to sink its claws into me. The dark was where monsters lived, and the shadowy spaces under beds were quicksand, liable to pull me down to some terrifying netherworld. Covers were nonnegotiable no matter the season. No way was I letting an ar…
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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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Greater Copenhagen, October 1, 1943 There were twenty of them, huddled together in a truck that Lars Hansen used to transport vegetables from the farm to the market in Copenhagen. Rumbling down the road in the middle of the night, they were en route from Copenhagen to Hansensgård, the Hansen farm in Helsingør. Annemarie was cradled on her father’s lap. Sitting on the metal bed of the vehicle, he leaned against a sack of onions and garlic, the scent of which tickled Annemarie’s nose. No one had spoken since they had started to drive. Although Annemarie had only just turned seven, she already understood how important it was to remain silent when she was told. She knew the…
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October is a strange month around Crime Reads HQ, Canadian division. In my usual sorting of the galleys by month it was a hefty stack, but not that many domestic thrillers were in the stack or in the mix. I found more—there are always more books—but it does make me wonder if the future of the thriller is not as domestic as it used to be. As the world’s incursions into our safe spaces has become impossible to ignore and difficult to figure out, or to make into plot. But that doesn’t mean people have stopped trying to make meaning from all of this, including me. Laurie Lico Abanese, Hester (St. Martin’s) I’m always torn about prequels to a book or movie that has made a…
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I’ve been frustrated for a long time. For ten years I was an editor at Scientific American, where I wrote articles and editorials about climate change, urging the government to crack down on planet-warming pollution. For the most part, the reaction was paralysis. Just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court stripped away the U.S. government’s most powerful tool for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, and now the threat of a hotter, stormier, increasingly uninhabitable Earth seems almost inevitable. So, in desperation, I decided to try something new. I wrote The Doomsday Show, a novel that dramatizes the most ruthless and effective way to curb global warming: assassinating the …
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On December 10 2019, two shooters opened fire at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey, in a targeted antisemitic attack. Six people, including the assailants, were killed. The shooting at the market followed months of growing tension between a long-established community, and a new influx of Orthodox Jews. Within a week of the shooting, I started outlining my debut young adult novel, The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen, about Orthodox Jewish teen who finds himself caught in the middle of antisemitic violence. But I didn’t set my story in Jersey City. Because that attack could have happened anywhere. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents…
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