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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Tension is the jet fuel that propels a thriller. From the slow burn to the shocking reveal, I strive to pack as much of it as possible into my stories. I am often labeled as a medical thriller writer, but I don’t view myself as such, because I also write psychological thrillers and historical suspense. Besides, it’s a deep rabbit hole to fall down to try categorizing suspenseful novels into specific genres and sub-genres of mystery, thriller, or crime fiction. For the sake of this article, and my sanity, can we lump them all into one giant category of suspense fiction? Because, regardless of which of those sub-genres you put a novel into, I guarantee you’re not going to …
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Is someone a liar if they tell you something that isn’t true—but they think it’s true? Is a person guilty of misleading you even if the false information they’ve given is a sincere effort to convey something to the best of their understanding? These are the sorts of questions I think of every time I hear the term “unreliable narrator.” In what ways are they unreliable, and what does it mean that we call them that? Is a confused person unreliable? An inebriated person? A traumatized person? Is a character unreliable because they’re manipulating other characters? Or because they’re manipulating you, the reader? Perhaps the term was originally reserved for characters who w…
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Sweden has a proud tradition as a country of exports. American homes are not only decorated with furniture from IKEA— their bookshelves are bursting with suspense novels from a morbid country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean with a disproportionate number of crime writers per capita. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö paved the way with detective Martin Beck in their socially critical novels, published back in the sixties. Hennig Mankell walked the same path a couple of decades later, and then, in the beginning of the 21st century, Stieg Larsson took the sensation of Swedish crime to a completely new level. His Lisbeth Salander novels have sold close to 100 million copies…
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A landlocked republic of 26 “cantons” bordering Italy, France, Germany, Austria and Lichtenstein (apologies, we have yet to do a Crime and the City on Lichtenstein or its capital of Vaduz—and that’s a world capital city I bet most of you have learnt today!). We’re talking eight and half million peace loving people, skiing, chocolate, discreet banking, cheese full of holes, fancy army knives, and a fair amount of crime. Yes, this Crime and the City is all about Switzerland. And you’ll note in my stereotyping list above of all things Swiss I made none of the same mistakes as Harry Lime in The Third Man (original book and movie script both by Graham Greene): ”For 30 years u…
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For a new book to take flame, a writer needs a bit of kindling: a story overheard at a party, a couple observed in a restaurant, an odd fact glimpsed in a newspaper. I think what sparked Pesticide, the first mystery in my Polizei Bern series, was noticing how fast the organic food sections in Swiss grocery stores were expanding. I wondered how many farms in Switzerland were organic and what farmers had to do—or not do—to qualify as what the Swiss call bio. Interviewing organic farmers, I developed a great respect for them: they are men and women who work very hard both to feed and to save the planet (well, feed and save a small part of it, since only 15% of Switzerland’s…
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With the tagline, “I’m Cruella, born brilliant, born bad, and a little bit mad,” the marketing for the villain-revision vehicle Cruella, which landed in theaters this summer, invites a compelling challenge to the viewer: “Watch this film,” Disney dares us, “and fall in love with one of our most vicious villainesses!” Dodie Smith’s dog-killing, dog-skinning heiress sets a high bar on unlikability. For me, a fan of the unlikable, a lover of the hard to love in fiction, the prospect was thrilling. During the film’s first minutes, however, young Estella, who will eventually transform into the vengeful fashionista Cruella, witnesses her mother being forced off a cliff by trai…
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“The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains…none were free.” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol Supernatural fiction and ghostlore isn’t exactly short on miserable and pitiable spirits. A few of the more famous examples include, La Llorona, the infanticidal “weeping woman” of Latin American legend, Jacob Marley, the sorrowful, chain-bound harbinger of A Christmas Carol, and the unfortunate, murdered mother-son tandem Kayako and Toshio from Ju-On: The Grudge. These and more are trapped in a hellish afterlife that is presumably endless. For Marley and La Llorona—in the traditi…
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Tamron Hall is an Emmy-Award-winning talk show host who is also an advocate for domestic violence awareness. She brings all this impressive experience to her debut psychological thriller, As the Wicked Watch (now in paperback from William Morrow), the story of a crime reporter who becomes consumed with her need to bring attention to the murder of a Black teenage girl, the kind of victim who never gets their fair due in the news. As the Wicked Watch eviscerates the news industry as the home of Missing White Woman Syndrome, and combines a driving narrative with a fierce main character for a novel that will keep you turning pages well into the night. Thanks to Tamron Hall fo…
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In The Hunter, her ninth novel, Irish-American author Tana French takes us back to the small West Ireland village that she introduced in The Searcher. Retired detective Cal Hooper has made a home in Ardnakelty at the foot of the mountain, away from police cases and the city bustle. It’s a blazing hot summer, and while farmers worry about their crops, Cal’s life seems to have settled in a peaceful groove. His relationship with local Lena is going strong; meanwhile Cal keeps a watchful eye over teenage neighbor Trey, his now trusted carpentry assistant. But Cal’s makeshift family comes under threat when Trey’s father, Johnny, marches back into town with a scheme to find gol…
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Crime and the City has been to Morocco before. Then we talked mostly about the crime writing coming out of, or set round about, the capital Rabat and the cities of Marrakech, Fez and Casablanca. We only briefly mentioned Tangier. But Tangier is a very special place, both within Morocco and also internationally. It sits in a key location—on the Maghreb coast of North Africa, at the western end of the Straits of Gibraltar, facing Spain and just about where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic. This unique location gave Tangier its unique history. From 1923 to the mid-1950s Tangier was an international city, controlled by foreign colonial powers, a port gateway between Europ…
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Every once in a while, a story appears in the media about a “time capsule” in the form of the contents of an apartment, unchanged in all the years a recently departed tenant lived there, or a house left vacant while ownership has been tied up on the courts, sometimes for decades, that has finally been awarded to an heir. Many an old house is sold with some of the original owner’s possessions still stored in the attic—a treasure trove for the inquisitive buyer to explore. My own time capsule story, Murder, She Edited, grew out of a fascination with such tales, combined with the traditional question writers ask themselves: “What if . . . ?” My senior sleuth, Mikki Lincoln…
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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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Among the many tropes associated with the Old West, environmental activist hero isn’t one of them. But the world has transformed since the days of range wars, road agents, and train robberies and so have the dangers. If it wasn’t obvious before, then it certainly is now, that there is an unavoidable interdependence between metropolitan and rural America—and it’s all the more relevant due to the public’s focus on headline grabbing issues such as climate change. In the twentieth century, totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Communist Russia arguably posed the greatest threat to human civilization. And fiction authors Jack Higgins, Tom Clancy, and Joh…
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Happy New Year, book lovers! For me, January 1st came and went like a flash, and my TBR pile hasn’t budged one iota since the start of 2022. Not ONE. SINGLE. MILLIMETER. In fact, it’s grown even taller. And the pileup on my e-reader? At this stage it’s reached monumental proportions—a traffic jam of delectable books just waiting to be unleashed. I should begin by confessing that I never make New Year’s resolutions. I only end up disappointed and mad at myself, and who needs more of that? Even where reading books is concerned, especially where reading books is concerned, I simply can’t commit to powering through all of them within a set time frame. My physical TBR pile i…
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Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I’m not sure I fully buy that—my cell phone is pretty advanced, and yet, when I access the internet on it to double-check this quotation, I don’t feel like I am doing a spell. It might look impressive, but I’m pretty sure no one working at Apple is an actual wizard, and I don’t imagine any of my contemporaries would mistake what I was doing for magic. Still, it’s pretty clear that we are living in a technologically advanced world, so much so that things that might have once looked magical, or even miraculous, are now quotidian. One might even wonder w…
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Oscar, for the twentieth—maybe even thirtieth time since he got here—is lost in the medina. The problem this time is that his phone has died, so he can’t use it to navigate, and he has no cash, having given it to a man whose wife was dying and needed medical care. (A man who, in retrospect, might not have been telling the truth.) The medina is a maze as mysterious to Oscar as the many branches of his own misfiring neurons. Circlings; dead ends; occasional, unexpected connections. Above it all, the call to prayer, rising and undulating, in a language he can’t interpret.Which means Oscar can’t have grown up here. Useful information. One country, Morocco, ticked off the li…
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The moment Noel Moore stepped through the front door and put his bags down, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. It was a couple of hours past midnight, so the house was supposed to be quiet, but on top of that stillness was an unease that told him things were not as he’d left them. The bottom floor was a maze of interconnecting rooms full of furniture and fixtures that his wife, Mindy, had picked out with their interior designer. He stepped around overstuffed couches and wingback chairs as he wove through the formal living room, then the dining room, the family room, and the kitchen. Nothing seemed out of place in the darkness. Everything appeared as it should ha…
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You can tell me anything. When you’re in this room, and we’re sitting across from each other, and your mind is reeling with all the bad things you’ve done to people, and all the bad things they’ve done to you, you can let it all out into the air between us. All the weird sex stuff, the compulsive jerking off, the period blood staining the gym shorts when you were thirteen, the infidelities, the regret about having kids or not having kids. You can tell me about the time you did mushrooms and made out with a window for three hours, or that time with your dad’s friend, that time you felt a stranger’s boner press against you on the subway, how you wish your mother would just…
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So you finished And Just Like That, binged all six seasons of Sex And The City, yet again, and you’re still (Samantha) Jonzing for more Manhattan? Here are ten books guaranteed to fill your quota of New York minutes until season two arrives. Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote Before single girls flocked to NYC in droves in search of the perfect cosmopolitan, they sauntered past the windows of Tiffany & Co. with the perfect cup of Joe in homage to Truman Capote’s most famous creation, Holly Golightly. Both Sex And The City and Breakfast At Tiffany’s are testaments to New York and to fashion in a lasting and iconic way. Did you think Holly Golightly should en…
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Since I was a young child I’ve been fascinated by the identity people get from their families, good and bad, being part of a ‘gang’. The idea that for some people being in a large family gives them protection from the real world. I remember an interview with one of my favorite novelists, Kate Atkinson, who was frequently bemused at being told by adults: you’re an only child, you must be spoilt. She’d think about the houses she’d go to where the children fought and smashed each other’s toys, the constant, multi-layered land wars of siblings and she’d go home and calmly play with her unbroken toys and think: but none of this is spoilt—I’m not the spoilt one. I was once wi…
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Most crime writers love to torture their characters and put them in impossible situations—it’s what we do best, and that’s why isolated settings work so well. Whether it’s a group of strangers on an island, or friends who find themselves cut off from society due to extreme weather, staging a murder in a situation where those left behind are unable to escape or to contact the outside world for help adds an extra layer of threat and increases the tension. It allows for a closed cast of suspects—they’re the only ones there, so one of them must have done it—and provides the opportunity to bring in unreliable narrators so the reader is unsure of what really happened until the …
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I have long had a love affair with the Robin Hoods, scapegraces, and well-meaning criminals of the literary world. Given the popularity of western gunslinger and super hero movies, I’d venture to assume I’m not the only one with a fondness for good-hearted, well-meaning characters who are at odds with the laws of the land. Nickle, the main character in my new novel, Other People’s Things, is one of these. She’s quick to admit she has a problem with sticky fingers. But she’d also tell you—even though she’s been labeled as a thief and a kleptomaniac and by the age of thirty has accumulated an alarming rap sheet—that she’s not really a thief. Instead, she runs what she call…
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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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Stephen King, the master of horror, is also a big crime reader… * ARIEL S. WINTER First-novelist Winter stunned readers with his mammoth 180,000-word debut, The Twenty-Year Death, which tells the story of a disintegrating marriage as told, successively, in the manner of Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson. Stephen King called it “bold, innovative, and thrilling,” writing “The Twenty-Year Death crackles with suspense and will keep you up late.” DONALD E. WESTLAKE “A book by this guy is a cause for happiness,” King wrote about the man who, under the pseudonym “Richard Stark,” wrote the dark-as-dark-gets Parker novels and inspired the name of the mur…
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Christopher Nolan is one of those writer-directors who critics like to accuse of being too “cerebral,” even “chilly.” Nearly all of his films are puzzle-boxes, playing with time and space and memory, and these commentators argue a good deal of human warmth is lost in the plots’ coolly whirring components. Such were the criticisms leveled against his most recent film, “Tenet,” which proved especially challenging for audiences to embrace—but if you give its complexities a chance (and a second viewing), you might find it one of his better works. “Tenet” has the foundation of a globe-trotting espionage movie, but the relatively standard-issue spy-vs.-oligarch plotline is …
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