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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I was only nine years old in 1947, when The Fabulous Clipjoint was published, so it was probably another eight years before I read it. I discovered Fredric Brown during my freshman year at Antioch College, and I must have read a half-dozen of his Bantam paperbacks, along with a few hundred other books I tore through back then. Most of the others had at least some claim to consideration as serious literature, which was a phrase that meant rather more to me than it does now, but I don’t know that anything I read was more engaging or entertaining than Fredric Brown’s fiction, and even then I knew that was important. Was The Fabulous Clipjoint one of those early reads? It se…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephen Spotswood, Murder Under Her Skin (Doubleday) “Just like his mystery-writing ancestor [Rex Stout], Spotswood understands that the detective story should be sound, but spending time with unforgettable characters is paramount.” The New York Times Book Review Elly Griffiths, The Midnight Hour (HMH) “Halloween provides the perfect setting for another triumph of misdirection from Griffiths in this sixth Brighton Mystery.” Booklist, Starred review RV Raman, A Dire Isle (Agora) “Raman continues to channel Agatha Christie in book two of his India-based Harith Athreya series…
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‘There’s no market for it over here,’ said my New York agent. ‘I thought you were delivering a thriller but what I got was a very English black comedy.’ He was turning down ‘Hot Water’, my latest crime novel. My agent is a piece of work; ruthlessly honest, charismatic and usually right. ‘I got halfway through and stopped reading.’ This time he was talking about ‘The Foot on the Crown’, the epic that has taken me ten years to write. ‘It’s too earthy, too eeeuw for delicate US editors.’ ‘Things must be pretty bad when your own agent fires you,’ my friend Deborah said. ‘Why don’t you write to their market?’ I considered the idea. ‘I’m not sure I know what their market is…
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When he tracked her down in the winter of 1931, the trappings of her once-vast wealth—seaside villas, jewels, a fleet of fast cars—were gone. Roger Normand, billed as “an eminent French authority on law and finance,” found Marthe Hanau in a spartan apartment on the fifth floor of a run-down building in Montmartre that, he was dismayed to discover, had no elevator. The interview was conducted in a room that served as her office, furnished only with a writing desk, typewriter, and a leather chair that, like its owner, had seen better days. Her defiance and sangfroid—the traits that catapulted her into the financial stratosphere before reality and allegations of orchestrati…
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Just before the first lockdown, I went to see a performance of Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House in London. I was halfway through writing Watch Her Fall, a thriller about two rival ballerinas and settled into the red velvet chairs under crystal chandeliers, grateful that I got to call this ‘work’. For the most part, I had the same response to the Swan Lake as the rest of the audience: awe at the dancers’ beauty and gravity-defying leaps; immersion in the dark fairy tale and the twisted love story; and of course, Tchaikovsky’s score tugged my tears from their hiding places. But I’m willing to bet my next book deal that I was the only one thinking about the logistics of c…
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Is spooky season over already? No sooner had I un-donned my Elizabeth-Holmes-at-Burning-Man costume than it was time to crank up those holiday tunes, cue up the Hallmark holiday movies (30 all-new flicks to check off your list this year!), and trade in my PSL for a peppermint mocha. (Just kidding: I’m an iced-coffee-all-year-round kind of gal.) No matter the season, I’m always down for a bursting cornucopia of brand-spanking-new (and returning) pods. Get ready to drown out “Jingle Bells” and “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (sorry, Mariah) with these eight spine-chilling shows. An Absurd Result (Mopac Audio) – Premiered October 27 I will listen to (read: devour) ab…
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There’s nothing quite like a murder mystery. Learning all the juicy secrets behind the suspects, flipping the page and revealing a plot twist, coming up with theories as you read, staying up way too late to find out if you’re right…I love it all. When I set out to write Killer Content—my third novel but my first murder mystery or thriller—one of my main goals was to create this sort of experience for my future readers. Killer Content is a murder mystery set in a house of famous teenage TikTokers. The six members of the house seem to have it all—millions of followers, lucrative content deals, striking good looks. But behind their perfected social media image, there are hi…
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My first thought was, well dang! That’s a HUGE compliment. My second, well dang. What a lot to live up to. Because if I think about my character Nena Knight. I don’t know if she’s better than Bond or any other guys in the club. What I know is she’s a woman. And she’s Black. And she’s an immigrant from a country no one would ever consider in a Bond-esque role. And yeah, that’s really badass. Isn’t it? But why is that badass? Is Nena Knight different than every action hero of spy, espionage, and action you see and read? She’s not different than them. She’s their every match…and then some. Nena Knight is an “and then some.” Hopefully, that makes sense. I have always been a…
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If setting is a character, there is none more mysterious—and duplicitous—than an ocean beach, especially at night. The fearsome roaring of the waves, the pounding crash of breakers and the dreadful sucking sound of the undertow provide haunting backdrops to sinister intents. They remind the reader that much like those we love and assume love us in return, the ocean is never to be trusted. It can be serene one moment and violent the next. In so many excellent novels of suspense, the ocean is a cold killer that lures its victims to murky depths, disposing of their remains quickly and permanently. It randomly crashes boats against cliffs, pulverizing passengers on a whim. I…
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One day in the summer of my sixteenth year I was riding around my hometown in my best friend’s car. It was a jet-black sports car with flashy rims and a spoiler wide enough to be an airplane wing. We were listening to music, talking about the girls we liked and the dreams we had as young black boys who were trying to learn the ways of men. I was the one who first noticed the blue lights. My friend didn’t panic. We both knew he wasn’t speeding. We weren’t drinking and neither one of us smoked weed. He pulled over and lowered the window then put both his hands on the steering wheel. I put both of mine on the dashboard. This was the way our parents had told both of us t…
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By day, Alex Segura is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Oni Press, with previous stints at Archie Comics and DC Comics. By night, he’s the acclaimed author of award-winning novels, comic books, short stories, and podcasts. Somewhere in the midst of such a heavy workload, Alex is also a husband and a father. If that sounds like a lot, then you don’t know Alex Segura. You don’t know his secret… Alex Segura is a superhero! Shhh. Don’t tell anybody, but I’m serious. This guy is magic, especially when it comes to other authors and their work. It’s fitting, then, that Alex’s next book, Secret Identity (Flatiron Books, March 2022), features “The Lethal Lynx…
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I’ve always loved superficial fear, the tickle of anticipation or drop of my stomach before a book’s plot twist, a jump scare in a slasher movie. I was watching Stephen King adaptations at age nine, inhaling R.L. Stine before I finished second grade. Maybe it’s schadenfreude for those poor characters who are on the verge of decapitation or about to receive a letter blackmailing them into doing unspeakable deeds. Perhaps it’s a way for me to convert my generalized anxiety into something ephemeral that I know will dissipate when I close a book or watch the credits roll. But pathologizing aside, I have always loved edge-of-your-seat suspense, immersing myself in the unknown …
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In the first few moments of the black-and-white pilot episode of Get Smart, the camera hangs over an audience in a concert hall—Symphony Hall, the narrator tells us, in Washington D.C. Somewhere in the city is the headquarters for a secret counter-espionage organization known as “CONTROL.” And as the camera moves around the audience, capturing the group in evening dress, watching in rapt silence as the orchestra plays, the narrator informs us, that somewhere in the audience “is one of CONTROL’s top employees, a man who lives a life of danger and intrigue, a man who has been carefully trained never to disclose the fact that he is a secret agent.” At that very moment, in t…
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On Florida’s Gulf coast near Fort Myers lies a sparkling island named Sanibel with about 7,000 residents. The island is known for two things. One is the dazzling array of seashells that wash ashore on its gleaming white beaches. For more than a century, shell collectors from around the world—including such big names as Thomas Edison, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Raymond Burr—have visited Sanibel to search the sands for the finest coquinas, lightning whelks and lion’s paws. The locals joke about the popular tourist “dance” move, the Sanibel Stoop. Sanibel’s other claim to fame is as the home of novelist Randy Wayne White and his hero Marion “Doc” Ford, a marine biologist …
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At long last, December is upon us, and so, too, are the slow, creeping days of winter, ready to be filled with crafting, mulled wine, and of course, mystery novels. Few novels are released in December, so this is always a nice month to draw attention to subgenres we don’t as often explore, including supernatural thrillers and some sexy, sexy suspense. Get ready to wait out the rest of the holiday season/surge with these 10 entertaining and moving takes on the crime genre. Robert Justice, They Can’t Take Your Name (Crooked Lane) In this moving race-against-time thriller, an innocent man faces his impending judicial murder by a state that refuses to examine new evidenc…
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Faith Jones has had a challenging life. She was born into the Children of God cult, left in her late teens, and later, reconnected with her family after they, too, left the cult. Her new memoir, Sex Cult Nun, is clear-sighted and inspiring; she doesn’t need to forget the past to move beyond it, and that’s an amazing lesson for our amnesia-challenged society. I asked Faith a few questions over email to go along with the publication of her new book. Molly Odintz: The story of a cult seems to be, in some ways, the story of domestic violence writ large—do you find the same parallels? Faith Jones: Yes. Domestic violence involves stripping away boundaries and using manipulat…
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It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that when murder was committed in early nineteenth century England, the first men called to the scene were the famous Bow Street Runners. This intrepid squadron of proto-detectives would investigate the crime, collect evidence and uncover witnesses. At least, that’s how I thought it worked. When I started writing my Rosalind Thorne mysteries, I assumed that the “runners” were the foundation of what would become the Metropolitan Police force. But the more I read, the more I discovered how wrong I was. Law enforcement in early modern and Regency England operated as a disorienting patchwork of services and jurisdictions. It was als…
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Imagine a male character in a book who kicks ass and stands up to bullies. He has chiseled abs and lifts heavy things. He keeps his worries and emotions to himself, but has a vulnerable side and a heart of gold, tucked in deep and shared only with the most deserving. You’re swooning, right? Now, change “he” to “she” and consider how your feelings change. I ask because the idea of “strong women” in fiction seems to be everywhere these days. When I first started as a writer, this wasn’t the case. I was shopping a manuscript that kept getting rejections due to the “likeability” of the heroine. This was a heroine who rescued abused and neglected pit bulls for a living, whi…
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Many who read this will have read Nightmare Alley. But it is to be hoped that others will be drawn to read this singular work for the first time. I envy the latter, and I don’t want to interfere with the experience that awaits them by delving into matters that would reveal its plot, which grows increasingly more powerful and bizarre from beginning to end. But, to paraphrase Ezra Pound, a little knowledge can do us no harm. This book, first published in 1946, was born in the winter of late 1938 and early 1939, in a village near Valencia, where William Lindsay Gresham, one of the international volunteers who had come to defend the Republic in the lost cause of the Spanis…
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Cozy mysteries often feature small towns because they’re, well, so cozy. An intimate setting offers something comforting with its predetermined town layout and its recurring cast of characters. It’s like visiting a safe, known community every time you flip through the pages of a cozy mystery. Even in a series like my own Sassy Cat Mysteries, which is set in urban Los Angeles, there is a sense of community. I achieve this in my books by highlighting fun neighborhood enclaves and featuring quirky but loveable side characters. Also, I try to keep the suspects list narrow, so that the mystery can be feasibly solved by the star sleuth. With a small cozy setting in a mystery,…
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I love a good psychological thriller. Something engaging to play on my psyche and keep me on the edge of my seat. Throw in a little sex and you’ve got a recipe for one salacious read! Being able to balance equal parts thrill and romance is a fine line. The genre is fairly niche, and authors have to perfect that delicacy of equal parts thrill and equal parts romance. But it’s these types of books that, I feel, make for a more immersive narrative because the story is able to play on a wide range of emotions. One minute, I’m haunted by the mind games of a psychopath. The next minute, I’m soothed by the intimacy with his first kiss. The best of both worlds. If you’re in the m…
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The FBI, as America’s top law-enforcement agency, has always depended heavily on informants to bring to justice all manner of criminal organizations—be they the Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia, or an international drug cartel. But along the way the efforts had sometimes gone appallingly awry, with agents undertaking illegal bugging operations or committing rampant civil rights violations—Martin Luther King Jr. had been one well-known target of gross FBI malpractice during the civil rights era. In another, the worst known informant scandal in FBI history, the legendary Boston crime boss James J. “Whitey” Bulger was protected by a band of corrupt agents in the FBI’s Organized Crime…
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In the summer of 2015 a rough beast slouched out of the shadows and into the waking nightmares of an unsuspecting world. His name was Dark Mill South, but that wasn’t the only name he went by. Cowpoking through Wyoming, working the feedline, as they used to call it, he’d been the Eastfork Strangler. Not because he ever hung his hat in the Eastfork bunkhouse or rode their fences, but because he’d somehow come into possession of one of their 246 branding irons, and had taken the time with each victim to get that brand glowing red, to leave his mark. For that season he’d been propping his dead up behind snow fences, always facing north. It wasn’t a Native American thing—Da…
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Humans have been using dogs for hunting, protection, and herding for at least 14,000 years. Dogs were domesticated in China by 12,000 BCE for hunting, companionship, and occasionally as a food source. Analysis of canine DNA suggests that humans began domesticating dogs nearly 20,000 years ago. Earlier still, dogs may have begun domesticating themselves by scavenging garbage and alerting humans to potential intruders. Currently, canine service dogs are widely used by national, state, and local governments for community policing, guarding infrastructure (ex. airports, prisons and jails, power plants and nuclear facilities), and providing security at public venues like scho…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Hannah Morrissey, Hello, Transcriber (Minotaur) “Former police transcriber Morrissey brings her expertise to this suspenseful debut. The story of an introverted, troubled woman, isolated in a bleak small town, will appeal to fans of Jess Lourey’s atmospheric books.” Library Journal, starred review Flora Collins, Nanny Dearest (MIRA) “Nanny Dearest is not just an entertaining suspense novel but a therapeutic one for any adult who has faced disturbing holes in the family tree. Unsettling, compelling, elegantly paced—Flora Collins’ debut is a slick, contemporary novel that explores …
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