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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It’s been a little more than a year since George Floyd Jr. was killed by police in Minneapolis. His death—at the time the latest in a string of high-profile deaths of men and women at the hands of police—galvanized a nation and a movement and caused many people to reconsider how they feel about policing and some police officers. It’s also been a little more than a year since “Bosch,” an outstanding police series streaming on Amazon Prime Video, aired its most recent episode, the sixth season finale. When the seventh and final season of “Bosch”—based on the popular and long-running series of crime novels by Michael Connelly—debuts on June 25, will the series reflect the …
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new nonfiction crime books. * Margalit Fox, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History (Random House) Margalit Fox crafts a rollicking good tale of spiritualism, deception, and escapades in her latest foray into narrative history. In 1917, two prisoners of war in a remote Turkish POW camp during WWI—Harry Jones, the son of a gentleman, and Cedric Hill, an working-class Aussie—managed to dupe their captors into letting them escape, using only a ouija board, rumors of treasure, and their own skills at sleight-of-hand. Read here about the construction of the prisoners’ ouija…
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What’s it like to see your debut novel, Suburban Dicks, come out the same year you turn sixty? Pretty cool. What’s it like to wonder why you waited thirty-five years to write it? Pretty vexing, I’ll admit. But the source of that vexation is complicated. I am a comic book writer. I have written lots of other things, but I am best-known (where I am known at all) and have had my greatest success on that platform. I made my bones in the late `80s through the mid-90s, during a time of tremendous quantitative success and questionable qualitative output. I was party to quite a bit of both of those categories. I came of age in an industry that had just begun to fight back again…
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Historical settings can give mystery and crime novels added depth and texture. In this list, set everywhere from a post-WWI Welsch village to the freezing Arctic, our protagonists have to navigate the threats of clever murderers. But they do so on frozen tundra or in an early Plymouth colony already on life support from disease and scarcity of food, and it raises the stakes in such a dramatic way. I’ve always been drawn historical fiction with a mystery or suspense undertow, ever since my gateway book back in 2001, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks. Set in 17th century England in a village that quarantines itself to stop the spread of the disease…
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When Petrina arrived at Coney Island, she headed straight for the Cyclone roller coaster. You couldn’t miss it, looming above the other rides, roaring like thunder. It was made of wood, and its elegant curves had a certain beauty, if you liked that sort of thing. She felt a bit guilty; Mario had peppered her with eager questions about it when she was home for Easter, only a scant ten days ago. She’d put him off with vague promises. “You’re too young for that,” Petrina had said. “Wait until you get a bit older.” The truth was, she found amusement parks slightly silly. They were always noisy and filled with riffraff. She couldn’t see the point of eating a lot of terrible …
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“[Humans] cannot tolerate not knowing the cause of things that effect our lives.” —Lewis Wolpert, British developmental biologist. In November of 1970, a pair of young brothers discovered 18-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling’s body just beyond the mouth of a culvert adjacent the Cedar River in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It’s been more than 50 years, and her homicide has never been solved. The first time I read through Paula’s investigation file, I—balanced on a too-small chair in a subterranean Brooklyn coffee shop—unintentionally engaged in a sort of biased digestion of the material. Specifically, I was doing all I could to force each clue I encountered into supporting my o…
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The CrimeReads editors pick the month’s best new books out in paperback. * S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland (Flatiron) “A roaring, full-throttle thriller, crackling with tension and charm.” –The New York Times Book Review Lisa Jewell, Before She Disappeared (Dutton) “A masterpiece of post-modern noir….A riveting stunner of a tale where the rare appearance of the sun shines down on what is certain to be one of the best thrillers of 2021.”—Providence Journal Shari Lapena, The End of Her (Penguin Books) “Shari Lapena’s latest thriller The End of Her will keep you guessing right up to the end . . . And so begins a nonstop page-turning that has become a hallma…
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Apart from love, one of the largest emotions in any of our lives is grief. In the natural course of events, we will grieve for our grandparents and our parents and perhaps for friends as well. It is something we have to learn how to do, learn how to live with. There is so much death in thrillers. To take the most flagrant examples, there are far more murders in Norwegian thrillers than there are actual murders in Norway. (In 2018 there were only twenty-five homicides.) But where is the grief? Obviously there is plenty of grieving in the margins of stories. We witness the distress of victims’ families. But what about the main characters? There is trauma, anger, bitternes…
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Imagine this scenario: You’re in your home after a long day. Dinner is done, the dishwasher whirring in the kitchen, the children are in bed and finally, you and your partner have time to sit down, put your feet up and watch something on your streaming service of choice. After some discussion, you find a movie about a woman who discovers her husband is secretly a serial killer—you know the kind of movie I’m talking about. An hour and a half flies by and you’re entranced, entertained and then it’s done. Satisfied with the conclusion you click off the television and turn to your partner and say, ‘That would never happen to me. I’d know if you were out killing people while…
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In the early 1930s, James Joyce’s Ulysses was the most notorious banned book in the United States. Using a stream-of-consciousness style to describe twenty-four hours in the life of a lower-middle class Dubliner named Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s classic, published in 1922, was brilliant, dense, convoluted, complex, and legally obscene. Ulysses was the “only volume of literary importance still under a ban” in the country, Morris Ernst declared. He set out to “liberate” it, and the celebrated case, resolved by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1934, was not only a landmark in the law of literary censorship but also a turning point in Ernst’s career. (Featured image: Ernst …
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Noel A. Obiora, A Past That Breathes (Rare Bird Books) A Past That Breathes is an urgent and timely addition to the new pantheon of the courtroom novel. Set in 1995, Noel Obiora’s debut begins with the murder of a prominent Los Angeles musician. Her Black ex-boyfriend is quickly arrested and looks to be soon railroaded for the crime, unless two young attorneys can show he’s being framed. Obiora’s decision to set the novel in 1990s LA allows for a nuanced and deeply resonant exploration of racism in the American justice system. –MO Fabian Nicieza, Suburban Dicks (Putnam) Fabien…
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We don’t want to admit it but many of us benefit from a social hierarchy. Look at the people you casually cross paths with day to day. I bet you’ve assigned a story to them based on their level of education, where they were educated, how they dress, their age, their occupation, and if you’re really uptight you might snub your nose at the food choice in their hand as you wait to pay for your lunch. The ego likes labels just as much as it likes stroking. This makes for easy story telling if you’re a storyteller. Your characters can be easily defined and placed based on where they fall in the hierarchy. That one is good and that one is bad. Don’t get me wrong. When I say l…
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The people of Jones County had defied the confederacy during the Civil War, but by 1965, the KKK flourished, drawing its membership from both die-hard racists and those who saw the KKK as merely necessary for success in politics or business. The FBI needed someone ready to infiltrate the Klan, someone who would be accepted by them, but who had enough strength and integrity to resist them. What follows is the story of how Jones County everyman Tom Landrum came to join the FBI’s efforts to take down the Klan. Excerpted from Curtis Wilkie’s new book, When Evil Lived in Laurel (Norton). ___________________________________ Leonard Caves, the Circuit Clerk of Jones County, pr…
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“After the Bentley murder, Rose Hill stood empty two years.” I read the first line of the great Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen’s 1934 short story The Cat Jumps late one January night almost exactly sixty years after it was written, lying on my stomach on the floor of the University College Dublin library. I was working as a live-in au pair for a family who lived nearby—an American raised on Long Island, I had moved to Dublin somewhat impulsively the previous summer—and many evenings, after I was off duty, I’d walk to the library and pull books at random off the shelves, flopping in a corner to inhale as many words as I could before I had to walk home. I’d just graduated fr…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Laura Lippman, Dream Girl (William Morrow) “Lippman never stops twisting the plot into a deliciously intricate pretzel, right up to the jaw-dropping finale. This is both a beguiling look at the mysteries of authorship and a powerful #MeToo novel, but that’s only the tip of a devilishly jagged iceberg…” –Booklist Nicci French, What To Do If Someone Dies (William Morrow) “Crisply written, intelligently plotted and has plenty to say about the necessary selfishness of grief.” –The Guardian Joe Lansdale, Moon Lake (Mulholland) “Lansdale nails the storyline, nails the susp…
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The American comic book is inseparable from foreign policy, the great twentieth-century battles between capitalism and totalitarianism, and the political goals of the world’s preeminent military and cultural power. The history of the American comic book is a story of visual culture, commerce, race, and policy. These four fields are analogous to the four colors used to print comic books: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. They lie atop one another, smearing, blending, and bleeding to create a complete image. To separate them is to disassemble a coherent whole and to shatter a picture that in its entirety shows us how culture and diplomacy were entangled during the mid-twent…
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In 1952 a 29-year old Somalian man was hanged at Her Majesty’s Prison Cardiff in Wales by Britain’s best known public executioner Albert Pierrepoint. After a long drawn-out detention, a highly questionable police investigation, and a speedy trial at the Glamorgan Assizes in Swansea, Mahmood Mattan had been found guilty of murdering shopkeeper Lily Volpert in the then notorious Tiger Bay area of the Welsh capital. Despite arguments from his lawyers Mattan was refused leave to appeal by the Home Secretary. Forty-six years after Mattan’s execution, and 34 years after the death penalty was finally due to increasing public outcries and distaste, the Court of Appeal (the highe…
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I have discovered the secret to making a great roundtable: Alex Segura. If Alex is involved, or I get interested in a book by someone Alex has introduced me to, it’s a breeze to fill our imaginary table. This time I wanted to focus on the positives and negatives LGBTQ+ writers face. I’ve been thinking about it ever since we did the sex roundtable: if we rarely see any vanilla sex, then all of the other flavors are probably not being served either. Anyway, this came about because of PJ Vernon’s excellent new thriller, Bath Haus, and his enthusiastic participation at the aforementioned sex roundtable where he was suggested to me by…Alex Segura! The rest of our distinguish…
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– by Laura Lippman, author of Dream Girl, coming Tuesday, June 22 My mother the (retired) librarian read my latest book while visiting me over Memorial Day weekend. We are WASP-y people—well, she’s 100 percent WASP, I’m 75 percent—so I did not expect effusive praise and I was not disappointed. She said that Dream Girl kept her attention and she would be curious to see what reviewers said. “It’s so different from your other books,” she added. I will unpack a lot of this at my next therapy session. (For the record, the book has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal, the last of which called it a “masterpiece.’) But the comment that…
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I won’t say noir. And not because I can’t bear any over pronounced French since we lost Alex Trebeck. And not because the villains of my adolescence were always drenched in its Drakkar. But because noir has rules, the same way irony does, and I really don’t know what they are. There are factions who squabble over including hard-boiled detectives or excluding any hint of redemption, and those are arguments I want no part of. I’m not a purist, in any sense of the word. For me it’s a voice and some dark stuff happening, something withheld, maybe a curl of smoke in there somewhere. So I won’t say noir. And I can’t call this list Not Quite Noir, as google just told me that’s …
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Many of the greatest stories about fathers and children are, at heart, crime stories. Think Laius and Oedipus, or Oedipus and Antigone, think Abraham and Isaac, Hamlet and his Ghost, Fyodor Pavlovich and the sons Karamazov, Pap and Huck Finn. These relationships are built as much around murder, madness, betrayal, revenge and attrition as they are genetics and lineage, to say nothing of love. Crime lit is no less interested in the darker aspects of parenthood, although it does seem that mothers are often more central to these types of stories. Still, there are plenty of the bad dads to be found in the mystery and suspense section of the bookstore, as well as good ones tha…
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New Jersey’s most dangerous women can be found in a four traffic-light town not reachable by public transportation. From Newark, take Interstate 78 to Clinton, turn left at the traffic light. Across from the Walmart Plaza lies the entrance to the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility. EMCF is a two-hour trip by car from Manhattan, but for those visitors without vehicles there’s a prison bus that leaves from Midtown on Friday evening and arrives eight hours later. All must prepare to be searched and to stow their possessions in a locker before visiting an inmate. No water, no sodas, nothing but your flesh covered appropriately, i.e., no halter tops or bustiers. Seen from th…
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In my last two posts in this series, I have joked that living in New York City during the summer makes me want to go somewhere else (take a road trip or go to the beach). But actually, no, living in New York City during the summer also just makes me want to stay here, because I love summer in New York City. I do. What’s not to love? I love almost getting hit by a barreling ice cream truck every time I cross the street. I love that I can’t take a stroll down to the river in the evenings without six old Italian men blowing cigar smoke in my face. I love wondering “leaf or cockroach?” every time I step on something crackly in the dark. You would love it all, too, if you, lik…
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Whether you’re packing a locked-room mystery for that long-delayed vacation, seeking the perfect thriller to keep you up at night, or looking for a noir so bleak and beautiful you’ll be weeping under your sunglasses, 2021 has plenty of books to choose from. Notable trends this year include a revitalization of rural noir, the continued revival of intricate espionage fiction, and increasingly blurred boundaries between the psychological thriller and the social justice thriller. In short, we’ve got a ton of great books to celebrate this year, even though it’s only halfway through. So here are our favorites, so far, in 2021. Kathy Wang, Impostor Syndrome (Custom House) W…
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When I first began working on what is now my debut novel, Shutter, I set out to write the obsessive novel that I was always searching for in a bookstore. I wanted to read about a young woman who was going through a similar turmoil to my own—which, at twenty-four, was navigating life outside of my usual definitions of daughter, student, employee. I wanted to read about someone who was distinctly untethered, as I was. For three years, my safe harbor, the only thing that felt truly mine, was this novel, this protagonist, Betty Roux, whom I believed needed my help. Recently I heard Betty described as a classic millennial. At first, I was taken aback. This definition felt sim…
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