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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For writers of fiction and non-fiction, serial killers are the gift that keeps giving. Recently, the New Yorker profiled a French “researcher” and “expert” on serial killers who turned out not to be, and that lovable psychopath Dexter is back on TV for another round of sick mayhem. As a subgenre of both crime fiction and the true crime narratives, serial killer stories provide a vicarious pleasure for readers with the confidence that “it won’t happen to me.” But what if it did? What if the unsolved murder from 1978 of your beloved, vibrant sister may well have been committed by one? In the new book (published in Canada in 2020), Wish You Were Here, John Allore and Patr…
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Whether you are a timid twelve-year-old, a sixteen-year-old trying to fit in, or a parent, teenagers are terrifying. They love and hate with intensity and often at the same time. Surging hormones, irrational logic, and desire for connection leads to overwrought secrets, volatile relationships, and bad decisions. When I started working on my novel, Sinkhole, I thought a lot about the dangerous emotional lives of teenagers. Ironically, as I worked on the final edits of my book, my son would get involved with someone who was even more dangerous than my antagonist, which is saying something. Sometimes evil appears wearing pink Crocs. In many cases, truth is often more shocki…
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When I decided to write a cozy mystery, I purposely set out to read a whole bunch of them in a row in order to figure out what type of cozy I wanted to focus on. There are so many, after all—cozies set in cupcake shops and centered around crafts like knitting or quilting, even cozies featuring witches (which would seem like a natural fit, since I’ve written both fiction and nonfiction books about witchcraft). It turned out that there were two different subgenres of cozy mystery that I liked the best. Anything to do with books, like those set in bookstores or libraries, immediately goes to the top of my to-be-checked-out list. But most of all, I loved cozies with animals …
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The CrimeReads editors make their picks for the month’s best debut fiction. * Harini Nagendra, The Bangalore Detectives Club (Pegasus) A truly auspicious beginning to a new series featuring an amateur sleuth, Kaveri, operating in 1920s Bangalore, aided by her sharp mind, her husband’s medical practice, and the preconceived notions about who she should be and where she should go. Her first case stems from a murder at a distinguished club, pointing to a nearby brothel and a wealthy Englishman, an investigation that allows Nagendra to show off her skills as a social critic and a first rate mystery novelist. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief Isabel Cañas, Th…
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I just realized I’m overdue in paying the very expensive storage fee for my frozen eggs—a fee I have committed to paying into perpetuity, I guess. Five years ago, at age 33, I sat in front of my friend and former boss at a coffee shop and explained that I needed more money. “Why?” she asked, surprised. “Weren’t you just promoted?” I replied that yes, I was just promoted (to a just-over-mid five figure salary), but that being a single person in New York City was difficult, and “What if I want to be a single mother someday?!” “Well,” she said, after a pause. “Let’s get you more money, then.” I am not sure why I became so preoccupied at that time in my life with the hypot…
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My father, a formidable wrestler and boxer, told me more than once, “Guys size each other up the moment that they meet.” This may not happen consciously; but on some level, they predict the outcome of a fight between them. Men size up other qualities, too: intelligence, talent, competence. Always, a power-heirarchy emerges. Best hitter, fastest runner, best student, most popular—the ranking starts young, and—police chief, pop star, billionaire, President—it never stops. When I worked as a professional musician, power-struggles went on constantly. When I worked as a psychotherapist, most of my male clients were contending with issues of power, or its lack. When I began to…
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Imagine a walled garden buried deep in the English countryside where every flower or plant has been chosen to send you a message. Now imagine that the person who sent you the message is dead and that the key to deciphering the message has been lost. Loosely speaking, that’s the idea behind my debut novel, The Walled Garden. Halfway into my novel, I realized I needed a code that two gardeners writing to one another in the 1950s might use. Elizabeth Blackspear, a deeply reserved English poet who’s dealing with a potentially scandalous personal crisis, needs a way to express her feelings to her friend and only confidant, Amanda Silver, in California. I’ve always been fasci…
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How difficult it seems, gazing back just seventy years to the late 1940s and 50s, to truly appreciate what a confusing and fraught era it was for our grandparents. The Soviet Union, recently an ally in the Second World War, was increasingly viewed as a threat with Stalin’s imposition of the Iron Curtain and acquisition of an atomic bomb. While on the home front, and quite suddenly—or so it seemed at the time—congressional inquiries and headline grabbing confessions of ex-Soviet spies were turning up KGB agents everywhere. Spy fever, it was called, especially after the “Red Spy Queen” Elizabeth Bentley went to the FBI in 1945 and named nearly 150 agents working for the Sov…
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In honor of Asian-American and Pacific Islander heritage month, we’re highlighting the incredible array of crime books and thrillers by Asian-American authors publishing in 2022, so you can keep reading these stories all year long. JANUARY-APRIL Mia P. Manansala, Homicide and Halo-Halo (Berkley) “While the follow-up to Arsenic and Adobo is a cozy mystery, it’s darker, dealing with PTSD, predatory behavior, dismissive attitudes toward mental health, and other issues. Filipino American food and culture, as well as family and community, remain essential elements in the story.”—Library Journal, starred review Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers (William Morrow) “The Ca…
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I have stared into the glassy eyes of a killer and seen myself reflected back. As a college senior, I pulled into a disheveled driveway – with pen and pad in trembling hand – to meet the teenager whose best friend had been slain by mysterious gunmen the night before. It was standard fare for a 20-year-old grateful to see his byline in the pages of the Miami Herald. No one was eager to cover routine crime stories. No one was overjoyed to descend into inner-city Fort Lauderdale. Send the intern. His mother should not have let me, a blood-sucking reporter, into her home. But the sight of this boy journalist must have disarmed her, as her son and I were no more than a few …
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In Adrian McKinty’s new breakneck thriller, The Island, an American family visiting Australia takes a chance on an afternoon’s diversion, paying for an hour’s time on a private island outside Melbourne, hoping that the sight of a few koalas will help heal their rifts. But a tragic accident soon changes everything, with the family pushed to the very limits of safety, endurance, and morality. For several hundred pages, your heart will not stop pounding. McKinty, a veteran noir writer, has brought tremendous style to his new turn as a thriller author. Above all he has a way with characters – of finding the core of their humanity, and putting that core to the test. With The I…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Adrian McKinty, The Island (Little, Brown) “Expertly choreographed and breathlessly exciting . . . both the peril and the family are like no other. The Chain was McKinty’s breakthrough novel and this one could be every bit as big.” –Booklist, starred review Robin Peguero, With Prejudice (Grand Central) “With Prejudice is a brilliant debut, full stop. Written with warmth, humanity, and raw emotion, this is a both a gripping thriller and an insightful look at the complexities of American crime and punishment. Robin Peguero has written a modern-day 12 Angry Men.” –Harlan Coben R…
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In the summer of 2021, a tweet made the rounds claiming that anyone who comfort-watched Criminal Minds needed help. We were in the midst of a pandemic that still hasn’t gone away and I was in the midst of a binge of that very show. I laughed, sent it to fellow fans, and forgot about it. Sort of. Because here’s the thing: for many of us, that show is the comfort we need, especially when the world is ending. Now, for the sake of the argument, any fiction-based crime show can be subbed in for Criminal Minds here, but true crime is a different beast and I do not claim any parallels between it and the fictional worlds I’m going to discuss. It also must be noted that my …
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Doctor Cassandra Kuba is a PhD biological anthropologist, and a university professor focusing on the study of the human skeleton (osteology). She is a forensic consultant—an expert on-call with police, at the ready to analyze human remains. Dr. Kuba also helps creative types—television script writers, crime novelists—get their forensic and procedural matters right. She’s consulted on TV crime dramas including the long running series CSI, and Bones. Today I have the pleasure talking with Dr. Kuba about her experiences with crime, real and fictional. (Hawtrey is the author of the new novel, And by Fire.) Evie Hawtrey: Welcome Cassandra! Let’s start with the real-life nit…
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Serial killers and cult leaders. I’m not sure how many times I’ve Googled either of these true crime sub-categories in conjunction with the word “podcast” or “documentary” or “non-fiction.” Having cut my teeth on Stephen King and Dean Koontz and Unsolved Mysteries, this interest in the macabre has long been very on-brand for me. But since my twenties, it’s been rather important that the murder stories I consume be true, real-life stories. The fact of them having actually happened is what I apparently crave, the knowledge that fellow human beings lived through (or didn’t) that sort of darkness. It’s pretty distinctly fucked-up, hey? But I’m not prone to moralizing, partic…
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In writing my crime novel What They Don’t Know, I wanted my lead character to have an unusual relationship with her collection of dolls. As a psychological thriller, what better than to include haunted dolls? Not knowing a lot about haunted dolls and wanting to learn more, my research took me to Alabama where I met with Kevin Cain, ghost hunter, haunted doll collector, and author. There we discussed real doll-infested crimes, proving once more, that reality is sometimes stranger than fiction. Here are a some of the questions I asked Kevin: SF: You’re a member of Alabama’s Spirit Communications and Research team. Can you tell readers a little about S.C.A.R.e. And what ty…
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Dad and some men from the neighbourhood have congregated in our living room to toast the birth of my brother with a glass of rye, but mostly the conversation is about the trouble that’s happened down the highway at the Tremblay’s. It’s all anyone has talked about for days. I’m on my front step because Jennifer, my best friend, is walking over from her house a few blocks away. Mr. Pendergrass, her next-door neighbour, is escorting her—kids haven’t been allowed to go anywhere alone since the afternoon it happened. Before supper Jen called and said she wanted to come over to talk about high school, so, because grade nine is weighing heavily on my mind, I rushed through dishe…
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__________________________________ From MIND MGMT. Used with the permission of the publisher, FLUX HOUSE. Copyright © 2022 by MATT KINDT. View the full article
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You’ve Got Mail is a many splendored thing: a fascinating, variegated film that braids together themes of hope and despair, friendship and heartbreak, love and hatred, preservation and destruction, resistance and surrender, technology and analogs. It is a depressed capitalist critique, a doting literary pastiche, a valentine to New York City, a paean to mom-and-pop-shops, a tortured love story, a nervous prognostication about the digital world to come. It is everything, except maybe a murder mystery. It is not a murder mystery. Except it almost was, a little bit. This undeveloped twist relates to one of (I think) the most relatable moments in You’ve Got Mail—or, really, …
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We’ve got a few big spring weekends coming up and while maybe you want to watch The Little Drummer Girl for the third or fourth time, hoping that this go around it might actually be good, that Michael Shannon won’t undermine the whole thing with his bizarre choices, that in this viewing it’s just going to be Pugh and Skarsgard on a cross-European iridescent spy romp, but no, it won’t be, it can’t be. So we need some new shows. Here we go. (Or if you don’t want new shows, you want the old, the good, and the le Carré, opt for The Night Manager instead; that one really holds up.) The Informant Streaming on: HBO Max Seasons: 1 Here’s a worthwhile new series about 1980s…
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Who could have known that newspaper comic strips and crime stories, including noir, were a match made in heaven? Newspaper comic strips are an artistic genre that’s largely forgotten now. The strips that remain are for the most part humor strips like “Garfield.” A handful of dramatic strips are still published. But serial dramatic strips were once a staple of the newspaper comics page. Many of them were soap opera-ish strips like “Mary Worth” and “Apartment 3-G.” To say that drama strips were slow moving is an understatement. I wish I could remember who joked that they came back to read “Apartment 3-G” after decades away and the caption read, “Later that afternoon …” B…
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What is the ideal medium for a true crime story? In the last decade, we’ve seen countless examples, from longform podcasts to feature films. Sometimes things converge in unexpected ways — a podcast begets a television miniseries (Slow Burn and Gaslit, respectively); a fictionalized account leads to a documentary (All Good Things and The Jinx, respectively). A true crime story can expose societal inequality or venture into a troubled psyche. It can thrill or enlighten; it can also take readers or viewers to places they never thought they’d go. From 1997 to 2001, a trilogy of works by writer Gary Indiana were published, each in its own way a work of true crime. Over the la…
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First, a mention of a book that I decided is not quite in the purview of this list but I need to recommend: Chris Holm’s Child Zero (Mulholland). I enjoyed Holm’s previous books about a righteous hit man, and I knew that he had a science-y background (as us English majors call it). Some will say Holm has been gifted the perfect time for his medical—specifically, bacterial—thriller, in which antibiotic resistance causes all kinds of nasty diseases to infiltrate the world population. Holm’s book is remarkable in the way it details what could happen and methodically explores what could happen after that; the fear and paranoia is never unearned. This is a truly scary psycholo…
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The bells of St. Mary-Le-Bow toll eleven o’clock. The narrow streets of London’s East End are strangely deserted. Out of the swirling fog comes the clip-clop of horseshoes on cobble. A carriage appears. I squint, struggling to decipher the crest on the carriage door. From within the passenger compartment, a gloved hand emerges. Wait—is that a gun? I flip the page, my heart in my throat, as the modern world vanishes in the foul-smelling mist. It’s London, 1850. Soon a body will turn up—floating in the Thames or sprawled in one of the brick-walled alleys. I settle in for another blissful sojourn in Victorian England. “Sexual repression, dark alleys, great detectives, orn…
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In 1996, a young couple – Julie Williams and Lollie Winans – were brutally murdered while backpacking in Shenandoah National Park. The case quickly became front page news nationwide; that media attention only intensified five years later, when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that not only had an individual been indicted in the case, but that that person would be the first to be tried under new federal hate crime legislation. A few years later, the case against that man, Darrell David Rice, was quietly dismissed. In her new book, Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders, investigative journalist Kathryn Miles details both the crime itself and h…
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