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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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Thomas Perry, The Left-Handed Twin (Mysterious Press) “Perry seasons the fast-moving chase narrative with engrossing details about becoming a new person, from constructing a false identity to relearning how to move through daily life in an unrecognizable way. This time, though, there is a stunning extra: with the mobsters closing in, Jane hopes to lose her pursuers by hiking Maine’s Hundred-Mile Wilderness, the most arduous stretch of the Appalachian Trail…Another stunner from a modern master.” ― Booklist (starred) Kevin Birmingham, The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentl…
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You would be forgiven for having missed one particular news story that did the rounds in August this year. ‘Briton suspected of spying for Russia arrested in Germany’ read the BBC headline, and the accompanying article, describing the arrest of a Scottish security guard working at the British embassy in Berlin, suggested that the same old shadow games were still being played. One of the most remarkable things about the story was that journalists who visited the suspect’s apartment in Potsdam peered through his window and saw ‘two Russian flags alongside scores of military history books, some in Russian.’ Two Russian flags? Isn’t it astonishing that someone working for th…
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There’s something very cozy about Savannah, Georgia. Could it be the weather, the food, the cocktails, the folk down there? It’s an easy city to feel very comfortable in. Major General Sherman’s decision not to burn down the city of Savannah was bad news for Atlanta but remains good news for heritage lovers. The old town historic district has restored houses, park squares, cemeteries, cobblestone streets and the incredible Live Oaks draped in moss. It’s a history overload and a major reason cozy writers are drawn to Savannah more than most other cities in America. Savannah is a place, we like to imagine, of good manners, porches at sunset, Mint Juleps, romantic Gothic par…
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Given the enduring passion of the reading public for Christmas murder mysteries, I am prompted to ask, What is it about Christmas and crime? It can’t just be the alliteration (although I love me some good alliteration, as will become obvious as you read on). No, I’m convinced it has something to do with that moment we’ve all had at least once when, at a holiday gathering, you think, “I wish someone would put us out of our misery and just kill Great-Uncle Albert/Cousin Bertha/[insert family member’s name here].” What? You’ve never felt that way? Well, then, this essay isn’t for you. But for the rest of us normal people, there is something wonderfully satisfying about a boo…
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The two cubs stopped abruptly and stood staring. As the biologists approached, one of the cubs moved toward them, curious. The cubs were tiny and probably fresh out of their den, putting them at a little over three months old. A female polar bear reached sexual maturity when she turned five. She could have cubs from then until she was twenty. The cubs stayed with her for two to two and a half years, so females tended to have a litter of only one to three cubs every three years. Over a life- time, a mother bear typically had ten cubs. However, cub mortality was so high, with only a 40 to 60 percent survival rate, that polar bear populations grew very slowly. Alex hoped t…
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Between podcasts, documentaries, and books, the true crime genre is more popular and prolific than ever. Women account for nearly 75 percent of true crime podcast listeners and in 2019, organizers of CrimeCon reported that approximately 80 percent of attendees were women. There’s been plenty of speculation about why women gravitate towards true crime — compassion for the victims, wanting to learn more about motives, the desire to solve a real life mystery. And more recently, some people have noted that certain survivors of sexual violence are especially drawn to true crime, with some even taking their interest a step further by pursuing podcast and book projects in an ef…
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The fighting had been vicious in the Carolinas since the start of the war. And it was the more vicious for pitting not American against Briton, nor even American against Hessian, but American against American. John Adams would say that the American Revolution was in the “minds and hearts” of the American people before it produced the armed struggle between the United States and Britain; what Adams neglected to mention was the degree to which those minds and hearts were at odds, one American against another. In every colony, and then every state, were thousands of men and women who wanted nothing to do with independence. They valued the freedom and security they had enjoye…
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Welcome to the CrimeReads Streaming Guide, where we spotlight a very specific category of crime movies we think you should be watching right now. ___________________________________ It’s November! A month traditionally full of seeing family and friends and getting stuff for family and friends. The holiday season is almost upon us, so while you take precautions to maybe safely gather with a (vaccinated) group or two, and while you navigate the millions of emails from retailers promising slashed prices at online flash sales, take some time to sit on the couch and imagine a life in which these kinds of interactions were EVEN MORE chaotic. Treat yourself to some peace and q…
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And so it’s early November, a good time to start dreading the holidays and hoping we have some semblance of normality in the new year. By all means don’t work too hard; nothing else is going to happen before then. I mean, I hope nothing happens. It will be fine. Seriously. Here are some books to ride out 2021 on. Wanda M. Morris, All Her Little Secrets (William Morrow) Ellice Littlejohn has buried her past and built a good life (I feel like I could recycle that sentence, so it might come up again). She’s an Ivy Leaguer and an African American attorney at a corporate firm in Atlanta. Oh, and she’s seeing a rich, fancy white guy—her boss, Michael. That’s the set-up; w…
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In 1974 when I published The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, I had two distinct advantages: though there had been occasional Holmes pastiches before, I essentially had a clear field, my only real competition being Doyle himself, and… I had the novelty of a story in which Holmes encounters and joins forces with Sigmund Freud. As much as any innate quality the book possessed, I believe it was its novelty that startled and delighted. No more. Nowadays my competition is a host of imitators imitating me imitating Doyle. Novelty per se is no longer the criterion by which Holmes pastiches are judged. What those criteria now are, I suspect, is subject to endless debate. The word pastic…
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Rachel Howzell Hall is the critically acclaimed author and Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist for And Now She’s Gone. A New York Times bestselling author of The Good Sister with James Patterson, Rachel is also an Anthony, International Thriller Writers and Left Award nominee. There’s more, a whole lot more to Rachel’s amazing bio and her rise to the very tip top of the crime-writing scene. Take for example, the eleven-year gap between her first published book and her second, or the birth of her daughter and a breast cancer diagnosis. Through it all, Rachel held tight to a passion for writing unlike any I’ve ever encountered before. Rachel’s process is truly inspiring…
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Before he created Winnie-the-Pooh at the age of forty-four, English author A. A. Milne had a varied writing career. Born in 1882 in London as Alan Alexander Milne, he grew into his love of writing as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, writing articles for Granta and occasionally collaborating on projects with his brother. His work drew attention from the well-known humor magazine Punch, and after graduating in 1903, he contributed articles, eventually becoming an editor in 1906. For the next few years, Milne wrote various pieces for Punch and elsewhere, including the novel-length works The Day’s Play and Lovers in London, until he enlisted to fight in World War I. A…
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The days are cold, the nights are long, and the Scandinavian noir flows freely in this month’s edition of our regular international thriller column. With few releases coming up in December, we’ve included one title from next month in the list as well. Stay tuned next month for our annual quixotic attempt to define the best international thrillers of the year! Eva Bjorg Ægisdóttir, Girls Who Lie Translated by Victoria Cribb Orenda Icelandic newcomer Eva Bjorg Ægisdóttir’s new novel, in the capable hands of experienced translator Victoria Cribb, is a twisty and thrilling ride that promises to leave readers stunned—and wanting more immediately. However, the strangest …
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Prior to the founding of the Metropolitan Police of London in 1829, policing in England was a fairly haphazard business. In the provinces, most law enforcement fell to part-time, unpaid (often resentful) parish constables and to poorly paid watchmen (“Charlies”), who patrolled the streets. Then there were “thief-takers,” who pursued lawbreakers—although they were known to collude with criminals, resorting to blackmail and intimidation to frame innocent people. There were also private services (akin to private investigators) and “voluntary associations” that people could subscribe to, for protection from burglary. In 1748, under London’s Chief Magistrate and novelist Henry…
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I’ve been doing a lot of interviews around the publication of my novel Five Decembers, and one question I keep encountering is what I plan to write next. The true answer is, I’m not sure yet. But in all the research I did for my novel, I learned things that filled out the details of a tale I’d been aware of for a long time. It’s a war story and an international crime saga with connections to the Philippines, Japan and Hawaii. It stretches across eight decades, involves war crimes, torture, treasure, and courtroom drama. I’m talking about the Yamashita Treasure, the Golden Buddha, and the everlasting Hawaii legal saga of Roxas v. Marcos. It’s a story so wild that if someo…
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From MURDER BOOK: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR OF A TRUE CRIME OBSESSION by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell. Copyright ©2021 by Hilary Davidson Campbell. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Andrews McMeel Publishing. All rights reserved. View the full article
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For four decades, nobody has worked the Los Angeles crime beat better than Michael Connelly. Connelly’s “watch” started in the 1980s as a crime reporter with the Los Angeles Times and continued, since 1991, with the publication of 36 crime novels set in the city. He has covered everything from the chaos that gripped the city after the 1992 acquittal of four LAPD Officers charged with the savage beating of African American motorist Rodney King to the imposition of a federal consent decree over the LAPD in 2001 after another scandal in the Rampart Division, and from the shuttering of the dilapidated Parker Center on Los Angeles Street to the opening of a gleaming new LAPD h…
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In this current phase of life, one I like to uniquely call, “The Era of Absolute True Crime Insanity!”, it seems we have delved into nearly every subject on every podcast, documentary and book. We’ve explored so many wronged victims, and even more wrongly accused. We’ve mourned the loss of Michelle MacNamara, we’ve wondered if Scott Peterson was innocent (This confuses me but I’m trying to remain level-headed!), and we claimed to have uncovered the Zodiac killer for the upteenth time! But in all of this, I find myself still angrily screaming into the void… What about Ann Rule? Have we forgotten the actual queen of True Crime? The woman who did it all, before you could do…
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On April 9th 1957, at the close of a sensational 17-day criminal trial at the Old Bailey, the British newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook picked up the telephone receiver to speak to one of his employees: the chief crime reporter of the Daily Express. “Percy,” he rasped (Beaverbrook was famously not a man to waste words). “Two men were acquitted today. Adams and Hoskins.” And then he rang off. Nearly thirty years later, in 1984, Percy Hoskins was still so proud of that short, nine-word call from his ultimate boss and paymaster that he wrote a book about the case and called it Two Men Were Acquitted. If you are puzzled by what Beaverbrook meant, he was saying that a) …
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When I incorporate folktales into my contemporary-set novels, it feels like I’m taking my place in an ancient tradition: re-telling old stories, updating them for a modern audience. While I’m not literally holding fort around the fireside, I like to think that creating and publishing a novel with roots in ancient folklore is the modern way of passing these tales on. Folklore itself exists everywhere, and there are many beautiful examples of novels that incorporate elements of these beguiling stories, bringing to life themes and characters that have captivated us for centuries. Selkies, which feature in my novel The Hidden, are shape-shifters: seals in the sea, human on la…
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The late novelist Ed Gorman once talked about how excited he was when his first novel received a positive notice, one that included the phrase “transcends the genre.” He was very excited to have defeated the strictures and audience expectations of the mystery novel and to have created something new. Then he read the rest of the bullet-point reviews in the column and saw that three of the nine novels that week had transcended the genre. Well then, how hard could it be? Crime fiction is far more capacious than people who don’t read the genre give it credit for. The field of play is so wide that it is difficult to transcend the genre, but it is possible to break it. A relat…
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It’s more or less impossible to describe the new true crime podcast “Hemingway’s Picasso” in a few lines, but here it goes: there was a man named Steve Kough who probably played in the NFL, but that’s beside the point, or it’s the essence of the point, one or the other, and later on when he was no longer probably playing in the NFL he started smuggling drugs across the Caribbean, mostly from Jamaica into the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, but also to and from Cuba, and one time when he was in Cuba he got his hands on an artifact—a ceramic, possibly collateral on a drug deal—that may or may not have come from Hemingway’s house and may or may not have been created by Pablo Pic…
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We’ve all heard people say of various books, “The setting was like a character in itself.” But can a setting really be a character? Unlike a character, a setting doesn’t have motivation or intention or dialog. Yet we hear this statement time and time again. So how does a setting become so alive in readers’ minds that they declare that it was “like a character in itself?” Most of the time, setting is simply that—setting, a place where characters live and experience life. But it can be a lot more than a passive place where action occurs. The physical environment, either human-made or natural, can profoundly affect the course of a story and the choices that characters make.…
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