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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Lunatic fans! Teens run wild! Unlikely assassins! Twisted twins! And that old favorite, trouble in paradise! September is a festival for thriller fans, with many delights to sample. Don’t fill up on bread—let’s get straight to the main course. Meg Elison, Number One Fan (Mira) Elison’s premise is a little rocky: a popular fantasy novelist, Eli Grey, gets into a car she thinks is taking her to a speaking engagement. Assuming the car has been provided for her, she accepts a drink from the driver and wakes up in his basement. Light on family and friends who would miss her, Grey is left to her own wiles to figure out who her captor might be and what the motivation is for…
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I’m sitting in a room that has an abundance of plastic flowers. There are two mugs of tea on the glass-topped, round dining table, and the plastic wrap around its wrought iron frame is still unpeeled. I’m in Priyanka’s apartment––one she shares with two other girls. They are escorts, who, not too long ago, worked in a brothel in Shonagacchi, Kolkata’s largest red-light district and purportedly Asia’s too. I’m calling her Priyanka because Priyanka Chopra is her favorite actress. There is a large cut-out of the actress, from her early, comparatively less glamorous days, pasted to the wall next to the door. When you enter this apartment, Chopra, in a magenta saree, welcomes …
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Natural disasters are the drama queens of weather. Actually, that’s not true. They’re inherently terrifying and are accelerating because of climate change—so much so that to call them “natural” may actually be a misnomer. CO2 is at its highest atmospheric level in two million years. The earth now loses 1.2 trillion tons of ice annually. Extreme weather is widely considered to be a direct consequence of climate change and scientists are certain this is the result of human activity. If that’s not enough to frighten someone, nothing is. Is it any wonder depictions of severe weather make their way into art? Particularly art that evokes dread and fear? I hope to explore this…
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Around seven thirty on the evening of Thursday, September 14, 1922, two nights before Edward Hall’s body was found beside an unidentified female corpse, on a lover’s lane outside of New Brunswick, New Jersey, the phone rang at 23 Nichol Avenue, a Victorian mansion where Hall had lived with his wife, Frances, for a little more than a decade. One of the couple’s maids, twenty-year-old Louise Geist, paused her work in a bedroom on the second floor and scurried across the hallway to answer the call. A woman on the other end of the line asked for the reverend. “Is that for me?” Edward called out from the bathroom. “Yes,” Louise replied. “I’ll be out in a minute.” Louise …
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Shortly after my discharge from the US Marine Corps in 1979, I returned to my home in Ireland and joined the Irish Republican Army. Sometime after that, I was ordered back to America by the IRA leadership to acquire weapons. When I got to Boston, I was introduced to republican sympathiser called John Connolly, an old man who hailed originally from County Galway. John didn’t have a criminal bone in his body, but after living a lifetime in Southie (the local vernacular for South Boston), he knew who some of the major criminals were. The IRA needed money, guns, and false driving licenses to buy more guns. Law-abiding citizens are a poor source for these items. If my mission …
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If I’d been told in advance about the blood sacrifice, I would have made up an excuse not to attend the bachelorette party. I wasn’t too enthused about going in the first place. I resented group activities, especially ones where everyone else involved seemed delighted to participate. It made me wonder if I was just a miserly curmudgeon for not wanting to shell out my hard-earned income on someone else’s idea of a good time. Did no one else find it all ridiculous? The engagement party and the bridal shower and the bachelorette weekend and the wedding week. “I’m going to end up dropping five K on someone else’s wedding,” I complained to my mother over the phone as I packed…
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On some fundamental level, HBO’s Irma Vep was a seven-episode meditation on the allure of a woman in a catsuit. Director Olivier Assayas based the show on his 1996 film of the same name, and both film and series dig into our longstanding obsession with sexy women criminals on the screen. Both film and series are also about filmmaking: each depicts an attempt to remake Louis Feuillade’s silent film serial Les Vampires. Feuillade’s serial, at least in part, owes its place in film history to its indelible images of Irma Vep, its ravishing anti-heroine, slinking her way across the rickety rooftops of Paris. In both Irma Veps, this femme fatale is a complex sign that embodies …
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A look at the week’s best new releases. * Yasmin Angoe, They Come At Knight (Thomas and Mercer) “A second round of action-packed, high-casualty intrigue for professional assassin Nena Knight. A lethal tale of an all-but-superhero whose author promises that ‘in this story, there are no heroes.’” –Kirkus Reviews Rijula Das, Small Deaths (Amazon Crossing) “[Rijula] Das’s searing debut centers on the plight of sex workers in contemporary Calcutta, India…This devastating novel is in turn touching and painful to read. Das, a Bengali-to-English translator, is definitely a writer to watch.” –Publishers Weekly Erica Blaque, Among Wolves (Polis) “Readers will f…
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The Lakes, the northwestern English county of Cumbria and close to a thousand square miles of pristine countryside. A popular holiday destination, perfect for a late summer getaway, a chance for Crime and the City to recharge away from the mean streets. When you think of the English Lake District and literature you probably recall the Lakes poets—William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey. Romantics, often joined by their friends and lovers Dorothy Wordsworth, siblings Charles and Mary Lamb, Thomas De Quincey. And somewhat later Beatrix Potter and her cast of cuddly characters. Peace and quiet, the rolling hills, mountains, and the beautiful lakes t…
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One of my favourite scary movies is The Changeling. George C. Scott stars as a famous composer who relocates from New York to a small town after his wife and daughter die in a tragic car accident. Desperate to remove anything from his life that reminds him of his family, he rents a turn-of-the-century Victorian manor. The move is eventless, until he comes across his daughter’s favorite ball; it’s blue and red with a white strip down the middle. He hides it away in a desk and slams the drawer, crippled with grief as he cries himself to sleep. Odd sounds begin that night. At first, he thinks it’s only air in the pipes, but then other strange occurrences continue in the foll…
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When I set out to write a thriller in which my protagonist was in mortal peril no later than the end of the first paragraph, I knew I wanted to include something about the Enigma machine, the encoding device used by the Axis during World War II, and about the successful British effort to break the supposedly unbreakable Enigma code which took place at Bletchley Park. Like most people, I didn’t know much about Bletchley or Enigma twenty-five years ago when I became friends with a British woman named Mavis Batey. We bonded over our mutual interest in Lewis Carroll and met at several conferences. Then I discovered Mavis had been at Bletchley—not as a secretary or a transcrib…
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Bouchercon is once again upon us. For the first time since the pandemic began, the crime fiction conference is happening in person, with one of the CrimeReads editors already here and typing this in their Minneapolis hotel room. Ahead of the convention, we asked nominees for the Anthony Awards to answer a few questions about the most pressing issues facing the world of crime literature. Below, you’ll see 17 writers reflect on the past, present, and future of the genre, for a fascinating discussion that runs the gamut from highly amusing to immensely relevant. Thanks to the folks who contributed, and best of luck at the awards! __________________________________ WHAT DOE…
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Both readers and authors of crime fiction are likely to be drawn towards “bibliomysteries,” a word which is unlikely to be found in a dictionary, despite supplying the title for a fascinating monograph by the legendary American editor, publisher, bookseller, and bibliophile Otto Penzler. Penzler readily accepted that the term is apt to be defined in a subjective way, and said: “If much of the action is set in a bookshop or a library, it is a bibliomystery, just as it is if a major character is a bookseller or a librarian. A collector of rare books…may be included. Publishers? Yes, if their jobs are integral to the plot. Authors? Tricky… If the nature of their work brings…
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I love messy women. I always have. There’s just something so compelling about a female character trying to fix her life when it, or she, is in shambles. When I wrote my debut novel Other People’s Secrets I had this kind of character in mind, but with a weirdo twist. The hero is a dumpster baby who grows up in a world struggling to understand who she should be. This lack of a family history helps enable her to become a bit of a booze-soaked disaster. A truly chaotic and messy person who is forced to confront herself before she can solve the mysteries that are eating away at her hometown. I created my character, Baby, because I’ve always, always wanted to see more female …
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So, the world closed in on us, right? And while lockdown may have had less of an impact on writers than it did on office workers, chefs, or elementary school teachers, it did mean that those of us who need a crowded coffee house to focus, or who depend on travel for research (honest, it’s entirely for work!) found a lot of doors slammed shut in our faces. The book I’d intended to write was to take place in Paris and the Dordogne. I had been to both places before, and I thought I might be able to fake it, but I knew I’d have trouble when it came to the things that matter—the sensory elements, the geographic oddities that aren’t apparent until you walk the city streets, th…
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Continuing our coverage of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Rian Johnson’s hotly anticipated sequel to his 2019 whodunnit Knives Out, we are thrilled to report that the film now has a teaser trailer AND an official poster! Johnson tweeted out both this morning. The poster is nice and simple, while the trailer (although a teaser) promises a little less niceness and a little less simplicity: The film, which is premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, which takes place from September 8th to 18th, 2022, will be released on Netflix this holiday season. View the full article
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Somehow, after publishing a dozen and a half historical novels, including two successful Victorian mystery series, I’ve found myself at the age of 54 a thriller writer. Nobody is more surprised by this than I am, I promise you. The truth is, I’m a complete chicken when it comes to thrillers. I like my murders cozy, served up in a poisoned teacup in a tidy country village with a redoubtable English spinster sleuthing out the solution while she knits baby blankets as fluffy as her hair. I like eccentric spinsters and locked rooms with gentle death administered in a toxic teapot or a spoonful of sinister jam. Anything involving blood or gore, and I’m out. At least I was unt…
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In June 1934, when a war with Germany seemed a remote prospect, one of Philip Conwell-Evans’s English colleagues found himself in a Berlin suburban garden having dinner with Heinrich Himmler. Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the elite unit created as Hitler’s bodyguard, and already one of the most powerful men in Germany, Himmler would later be responsible for the conception, direction and execution of the Holocaust. The English colleague was Ernest Tennant OBE, a businessman, decorated Great War veteran and amateur butterfly collector. Their host was Tennant’s closest German friend, Joachim Ribbentrop. A politically and socially ambitious businessman, the forty…
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While Pupetta sat in prison for killing her first husband’s assassin, her guards had to play traffic cop to the many suitors who clamored to visit her. Love songs and poetry were written about this brave and beautiful murderess, and she reveled in the attention she says helped her bide the time. Pupetta shuddered when I asked her about raising a baby in Naples’ notorious Poggioreale prison. She was allowed to keep him in her dark corner cell until he turned four. I told her about my own children, both sons, and she asked to see photos of them. As I scrolled through some old ones I kept on my phone, she seemed grandmotherly. I explained to her that my children were rais…
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What happens when a well-known children’s book author switches genres after decades of writing fantasy and historical fiction for middle grade and young adult readers? Kathryn Lasky the award-winning children’s book author is doing just that. As the author of Guardian of Ga’Hoole the New York Times bestselling series that was turned into a Warner Brothers film The Legend of The Guardians directed by Zack Snyder, she is now writing an adult mystery Light on Bone (Woodhall Press). The story is set in New Mexico and features Georgia O’Keeffe as an amateur sleuth. ___________________________________ The first thought that sometimes comes to some people’s minds might be, ‘W…
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Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal snuck a final look at his notes before the cameras rolled. Trim, early forties, with piercing blue eyes, van Rosenthal was an anchor for Nieuwsuur, a highly popular news show in the Netherlands. He had been a correspondent for the network and had reported from all over the world, including six years in Washington covering the Obama presidency. He spoke fluent English and had a reputation as a dogged interviewer, and he knew he would need to be on his game for the guest now dialing into the studio. Van Rosenthal had dealt with Julian Assange before, once spending a maddening week in Iceland, where WikiLeaks had a temporary base of operations, t…
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One of the great joys of discovering a skillfully constructed novel is the story’s ability to put the readers inside the skin of the characters. We get to live in the place and time in which the fictional world unfolds. In the case of Frances Crane’s The Turquoise Shop, readers travel back to the 1940s and a small town in northern New Mexico filled with pleasantly quirky folks and a pair of murders to be solved. Novels give us the gift of seeing the world through new eyes, the eyes of strangers or, in the case of a series, the eyes of characters we’ve come to know. Well-crafted books entertain and, if we are in the hand of a writer of Crane’s caliber, teach us somethin…
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At some point, I quit true crime. I quit because I’d lived too close to one. In 2003, my father murdered his girlfriend, her teenage daughter, and committed suicide. I was twenty-seven years old. As his oldest surviving heir, I inherited his crime scene of a house. And the cars that littered the lawn. The Petri dish of a swimming pool. The stink of decomp. Blowflies. Nightmares. For seventeen years after my father’s crimes and death, I worked on a book about it—my memoir, No One Crosses the Wolf. Psychologist Carl Jung suggests we occasionally cross “the swampland of the soul”—we should consider our darknesses from time to time. A life examined, and all that. But Jung d…
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Eventually, my inner Charlie came up with something. As my dad used to say, “I’m going to do something, even if it’s wrong.” I decided I wouldn’t wait around for Felix to finish his business. I coasted into May Town right before noon, parked near the bank, and walked across the street to the donut shop. There was a red open sign made of curlicue neon in the large display window. As I watched, it went out, and one that said closed came on. By eleven a.m., the donut crowd thinned so much, Saucer Donuts wrapped things up. I knew that much from reading about them online. I hadn’t made as good a time driving over as I had hoped to. The door was not locked. When I went insi…
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Why do some murder mysteries sell more copies than others? There are countless possible explanations. I’d like to focus on one: the impossibility of the murder. Perhaps the most recognizable example of an impossible murder is the locked-room mystery. But there are infinite possibilities. At the heart is a murder that, based on what the reader knows coming into the novel and at least in the early pages, seems utterly impossible based on the known laws of science and first impressions of the characters. So why do impossible murders sell? I have a few theories. #1: They blend genres Stories featuring impossible murders go beyond the well-worn paths of police procedurals. T…
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ALGONKIAN SUCCESS STORIES
What should you accept as credible?
Where it All Began
