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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CrimeReads is pleased to unveil a first look at the cover of Amina Akhtar’s upcoming thriller, Kismet (July, Thomas & Mercer). To celebrate the first glimpse at the novel—which sets its sights on the Sedona wellness industry with Akhtar’s definitive, biting voice—acclaimed crime author Alex Segura sat down with Akhtar to talk about her inspiration for the book, the challenges of second novels, and much more. ALEX SEGURA: Amina, for the uninitiated – what’s the high concept/elevator pitch for your new novel, KISMET? AMINA AKHTAR: Live, laugh, die. Wellness run amok in the desert mountains. I figured since I moved out this way, it’d be insane to not use it as a se…
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No one can claim the movie version of West Side Story hasn’t been given its full and proper due. When it premiered 60 years ago, it opened to huge critical and commercial success, becoming the highest grossing film of 1961 and winning 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. A modernized retelling of Romeo and Juliet, in which its star-crossed lovers come from two warring New York City street gangs (the all-white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks), it remains one of, if not the greatest of all movie musicals, as well as one of cinema’s most beloved romantic dramas and best, most inventive Shakespeare adaptations. Currently, the film—co-directed by Jerome Robbins and Rob…
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The CrimeReads editors round up the year’s best espionage fiction. * Kathy Wang, Impostor Syndrome (Custom House) This is the Silicon Valley spy novel we’ve all been waiting for, with a side order of biting satire and furious feminism. In 2006, Julia Lerner is an orphaned Muscovite with a computer science degree. 12 years later, she’s one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley, sending sensitive information to her Russian handlers when she’s not busy crushing the competition to her social media company employer or being the keynote speaker on work/life balance at yet another conference. Things start to heat up when an underling stumbles on a suspicious use of …
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In December 1957, Elvis was preparing to ship out for military service early the next year, and he wanted to go out with a bang. Quite literally. On Christmas Eve, Elvis and his cousins piled into a limousine and crossed the state line into Mississippi, where fireworks were legally sold (fireworks were outlawed in Tennessee). The group hit four different fireworks shops, spending a total of $1,800—upward of $16,000 in 2021 dollars. One clerk, after seeing the King’s collection of rockets, buzz bombs and Roman candles, asked, “What’re you going to do? Start World War II all over again?” “I’m thinking about it,” Elvis said. Back at Graceland, the press came calling. “E…
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Like pretty much everyone in the United States, I’ve watched two things since the pandemic began in March 2020: Tiger King and Ted Lasso. Let’s ignore the first show, because it’s embarrassing and absurd, and focus on the second. Ted Lasso, about an American college football coach hired to manage an English soccer team, is like a television hug. It’s a meditation on kindness and grace at a time when those two qualities are sorely lacking in our society. I wasn’t prepared to enjoy the show as much as I did. I’m not a soccer fan, and I’m lukewarm on comedies. Even though I write cozy mystery and romance—and demand a happy-ever-after in the books I read—I’m not a fan of g…
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I know, I know, this list is so 20th century it’s embarrassing (although maybe we’re now far enough into the 21st century that the 20th has at last taken firm shape in our imaginations). Perhaps I was just more interested in reading about a century characterized by sweeping historical changes, rather than novel diseases, or perhaps there were just a lot of really good books out this year and I can’t read everything, ok? For whatever reason, the books below lean heavily interwar and midcentury, yet diverge significantly in what they choose to explore and reinterpret from these eras, as well as which silenced voices they bring to the fore. These books also range all over th…
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A respectable book might’ve cost a dollar, but so-called dime novels could cost even less than a dime. These sensational stories of romance and adventure were written in a direct style for the less-sophisticated working classes increasingly cramming into industrializing cities—though Abraham Lincoln and Henry Ward Beecher were also said to be fans. The books were a publishing-industry phenomenon from the Civil War to World War I, when they were superseded by even more lurid pulp-fiction magazines. Myriad factors gave rise to the dime novel in the mid nineteenth century. Reform movements had raised literacy rates, and new technologies made printing faster, easier and chea…
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The key to pulling off a good con is to keep things moving briskly—pause for too long to collect your thoughts or give extra information and you’ll end up showing your marks exactly how you’re playing them. Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s splashy new film about a shifty carnival huckster-turned-famed mentalist, doesn’t follow its own guidelines about pacing or economy; it is too slow and too long—clocking in at 150 minutes—and by the end of the film, you’ll have counted enough of its seams to confuse it with a striped big-top tent. But this isn’t so grave a sin, because the film isn’t trying to trick its audience into thinking it’s something it’s not; ultimately, t…
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Before I began writing plays and fiction, I served for over twenty years in the United States Foreign Service. During much of that time I was engaged in international negotiations based mostly in Washington and United Nations Headquarters in New York and Geneva, primarily dealing with the law of the sea and with the peaceful uses of outer space. In between negotiations, which took me to many of the capitals of the world, I served in four U.S. embassies abroad as a Foreign Service officer in a wide variety of jobs. I have drawn, loosely, on these experiences in the creation and depiction of places, characters and plot elements, in my novels The Reflecting Pool and Head Sho…
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The CrimeReads editors select the year’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl (Atria) Zakiya Dalila Harris’ scathing debut, The Other Black Girl, was inspired by the author’s chance meeting with another Black editor at the publishing company where she worked, the novelty of that experience sparking an inventive psychological thriller that pillories the extraordinarily white world of NYC publishing. Nella Rogers couldn’t be happier when another Black woman starts working at her prestigious publishing company, but she quickly finds the other woman’s extreme code-switching off-putting. Meanwhile, someone’s been l…
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Once while in college I woke to something shadowy sitting on my chest. It was so heavy that I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Through my shock I saw it was a blackbird, its wings flapping fast in front of me, covering my face. It was feathers and dust and darkness and underneath it I felt paralyzed. I wanted to scream but couldn’t. Out of desperation I started to say a Hail Mary and then the bird lifted from my chest and I sat up in bed. The window beside me was shut. I wasn’t suffocating. I was in a room with five other “sisters” at a sorority house; basically the least terrifying place you could imagine. And yet I had been close to death, I was convinced of that. The b…
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There’s a reason the romantic subplot is a mainstay in mystery/thriller. It can give the reader a break from the non-stop death-defying action, and it lets us see another side of our hero. Or maybe there’s no real relationship involved – our Jane Bond might just be picking up a hunky henchman for a quick roll in the hay, or two characters have more of a prickly love/hate connection going on. Either way, a sex scene is a chance to mix up the action and add new stakes. “Sex scenes are devised to nudge a character in a different direction and change the trajectory of their journey,” says Tessa Wegert, author the Shana Merchant series of mysteries – and yes, Tessa says we’ll…
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Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino is set on a street of shops in Tokyo, not too different from the street where Newcomer takes place. What do Higashino’s books tell us about Tokyo and the people of Japan? I spoke with two of Higashino’s English-language translators, Giles Murray and Alexander O. Smith, about how the world in Higashino’s crime novels reflect the real Tokyo—how it feels, how it operates, and how it’s changing. Giles Murray was born in the United Kingdom, lives in Tokyo, and has translated various works of Japanese fiction and non-fiction, notably by Tetsuya Honda and Keigo Higashino. Alexander O. Smith was born in the United States, got his degrees at Dart…
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A pale sun was shining outside, and Martin hadn’t bothered to clean up the breakfast dishes. Instead they’d gotten dressed and gone out to the yard. It was nearing noon now, and they had been out for two hours. Martin had cleared the tools they never used from the shed, raked the frostbitten, half-rotted leaves from the lawn and the garden beds, and shored up a collapsing wall of the compost bin. A thick, evenly white layer of clouds covered the sky. “Are you hungry?” he asked Adam, who was at the play kitchen, making snail soup with pine needles and glitter. “I’ve got food right here.” “Are you sure you don’t want something besides soup?” “A little. A bun. I want a b…
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It’s always interesting to learn about the hobbies of geniuses. The late Stephen Sondheim famously had two: the cinema (two of his musicals, A Little Night Music and Passion, were adapted from films), and crossword puzzles (he wrote the puzzles for New York magazine for a year). But Sondheim was also a big fan of crafting whodunits. He started planning murder mystery games for his friends in the ‘60s. Playwright Anthony Shaffer based Andrew Wyke, the ingenious, murderous plotter in his play Sleuth, on Sondheim. (At one point, the play was entitled Who’s Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?, but Sondheim suggested Shaffer change the title because not enough people would know who h…
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The CrimeReads editors select the year’s best crime nonfiction books. True crime has been going through a monumental shift in tone and topic over the past ten years. The genre has turned away from sensational storytelling in favor of victim-focused narratives, examining murder not as the purview of brilliant psychopaths, but as, instead, a failure of policing to protect the most vulnerable communities from harm. There’s also a renewed focus on crime in the context of history, where criminalization was a mechanism of social control, not a way to protect individuals from harm. Finally, you’ll see several titles on this list that use illicit trade as a lens on the semi-lega…
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Classic thrillers have a real virgin/whore problem. A quick glance at the canon, and you’ll find plenty of wide-eyed ingenues—the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca comes to mind. But where would our ingenue be without her foil, the femme fatale—Rebecca in Rebecca? Even the more complex depictions of women rarely go beyond a woman who appears to be one and is actually the other (think: any Hitchcock blonde). So when you want to find a thriller about a mad woman, your options tend to be relatively contemporary. That is, unless we reconsider what a thriller is in the first place. In a recent interview, I—along with six other debut authors—had to define the genre. My definit…
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For eight seasons and almost 200 episodes, “Mannix” was the epitome of the TV private investigator. Sure, there have been cool P.I.s (Craig Stevens’ “Peter Gunn” with Henry Mancini’s theme music, full of smooth menace) and affably hot P.I.s (our boy Thomas Magnum) and cerebral consulting detectives (“Sherlock”) and the most charming, hard-luck P.I. on the California coast (“This is Jim Rockford, at the tone leave your name and message …”) But as far as a play-it-straight-down-the-middle investigator who could take a blow to the head and come back swinging, nobody topped Mike Connors’ “Mannix.” And the show had a hell of a theme too, by Lalo Schifrin. “Mannix” is more t…
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During my long writing career, I’ve spoken to many groups, and when it gets to the Q&A part of the program, I can usually count on being asked at least one of two very common questions. Probably the most common one is, “Where do you get your ideas?” This question always comes from readers who aren’t also writers (aka Normal People). Storytelling can be a mysterious process if you weren’t born with the storytelling gene, and it’s easy to understand why people would ask this question. I don’t know if they’ve identified the storytelling gene on the DNA string yet, but I know it exists. It also seems to be hereditary. I can actually trace it in my own family tree. My …
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The CrimeReads editors select their favorite crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers of the year. Check back in the coming days for more of the Best Books of 2021. * PJ Vernon, Bath Haus (Doubleday) The great age of the gay thriller has arrived!!! For so long, gay characters were either either extremely problematic villains or overly respectable charmsters designed to soothe heterosexual audiences, as Vernon writes about here, but lately, gay thrillers are finally allowing queer characters the moral range of, well, real people. In Bath Haus, the perfect exemplar of this trend, restless Oliver knows he should be happy with his long-time doctor partner, but he finds hi…
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Back in the 1980s, Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke declared the town “the city that reads.” While that phrase was hyperbolic at best, Baltimore has always been a city that produced, adopted, inspired and aided many excellent writers. A few favorites include detective/ horror pioneer Edgar Allan Poe, essayist/Black Mask founder H. L. Mencken, novelist Laura Lippman, Harlem expat Barry Michael Cooper (who penned the script for New Jack City in the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library), screenwriter Barry Levinson, essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates and former Baltimore Sun journalist/The Wire creator David Simon. However, one name that was always missing from the list of B-M…
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We are living through an epidemic of wrongful convictions. As I write, almost 2,500 wrongfully convicted men and women have been exonerated, totaling more than 21,000 years lost. Conservative estimates are that only one to two percent of all convictions are of innocent people. That’s an impressive success rate, and it’s comforting to think that our criminal justice system incarcerates the correct person 98–99 percent of the time. However, this is not good news if you are among the one to two percent. Think about what that means in actual numbers. There are approximately two and a half million people incarcerated in the United States, which means there are thousands of…
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Art reflects life, none more so than in literature, IMHO. And I’m pleased to report that cozy mysteries are no exception. Sure, this delightful subgenre still adheres to many of the rules that initially defined it. A plucky amateur sleuth; a hook such as a bookstore, craft shop, or, in my case, winery; a setting with a small-town vibe and close-knit community; and, of course, a puzzling mystery. And longtime readers continue to find a gratifying escape, a warm and fuzzy feeling along with a sense of justice, the subject matter never growing too heavy, with any violence or heated romance happening offscreen. But modern cozies are very much a capital-T thing. I talked ab…
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One by one, I examined the photos sprawled out on the table in front of me. They were divided into three sets, each a standard forensic collection of overviews, midranges, and close-ups. In the first set, labeled “Danny 9.21,” the setting of the overviews painted an almost idyllic scene in the quiet Nebraska countryside. But the landscape was only for context. The real focus of the pictures was the small body hidden within them, partially covered by tall grass growing along an unpaved road. The midrange photos were even more unsettling. These depicted the lifeless male victim—a child or young teenager—bent backward in an unnatural slump. His wrists and ankles were bound w…
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Her stepbrother’s voice isn’t as soft as the hypnosis recording, but when he counts down slowly—five, four, three, two, one—an image comes to Rylie: a boulder, gray in the moonlight. The one she fell from. And then she’s back in the memory. It’s all coming back to her and she’s there, lying on the ground next to the boulder—rocks are digging into her arm from how she landed. She scrambles to her feet, feeling dizzy. A few feet away is a coyote, watching her. Another is at the edge of the boulder. They seem . . . especially large. Their paws look dark, almost cloven. She crouches down and grabs a loose rock. Just in case. Then she steps back. Another step. She feels col…
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