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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On New Year’s Eve in 1942, Hitler acknowledged to the German armed forces that it had been a challenging year and that challenges remained ahead of them. “Hitler looks tired,” Galeazzo noted. “The winter months in Russia have borne heavily upon him. I see for the first time that he has many gray hairs.” Hitler was tired, but he was also “strong, determined, and talkative.” “The year 1943 will perhaps be hard but certainly not harder than the one just behind us,” Hitler admitted to the troops, as he confidently predicted a decisive Axis victory on the near horizon. One step in that renewed surge toward victory was a shake-up in the German security service at the end of …
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Richard O’Rawe debuted last year with the breakneck noir Northern Heist, based on an infamous and still-unsolved bank robbery, and informed by the author’s own experiences as a former operative in the IRA. Now he’s back with a second novel to feature James ‘Ructions’ O’Hare, the Provo-turned-independent-operative who graced the pages of Northern Heist with foul-mouthed eloquence. In Goering’s Gold, Richard O’Rawe took on a different unsolved mystery: the disappearance of a vast Nazi hoard of pilfered treasures. O’Rawe was kind enough to answer a few questions about craft, genre, dialogue, and Irish history. Molly Odintz: Your last book was inspired partially by your own …
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Julie Mayhew, Little Nothings (Raven) “Mayhew explores both the affirming side of female friendships and the darker currents of judgmental talk, financial peer pressure, and neediness. . . . Driven by an honest, authentic main character who is imperfect and damaged.” –Kirkus Reviews Javier Cercas (transl. Anne McLean), Even the Darkest Night (Knopf) “Cercas delivers masterful storytelling here, weaving a compelling drama . . . Moving . . . A winning choice for both literary—and crime-fiction book groups.” –Christine Tran, Booklist, starred Rosalie Knecht, Vera Kelly: Lost and…
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Gone Girl is ten, and the virtual ink of the think piece is spilling all over the internet. As I read them, I sank into a familiar disappointment. The monotony of one writer after another discussing the book as a publishing phenomenon, the near ancestor of a proliferation of books categorized as domestic suspense or psychological thrillers, is not only not a novel observation it’s dismissive of Gone Girl as literature. Of course, Gone Girl has spawned a genre’s worth of books about troubled marriages and pretty missing white women. If anyone knows from this phenomenon, it’s me: I cover these books, and month after month I sort through a pile of them and find a few to reco…
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As a reader, I’ve always been drawn to first person fiction. I love that it allows such a deep dive into a character’s mind while limiting my access to information, which I find crucial in building suspense. Mostly, I love that first person narration is conversational. It’s as if I’m pouring myself a couple fingers of bourbon, pulling up a rocking chair alongside an old friend, and listening to their most intimate, honest recollections. Of course, an hour in, I might feel that the narrator wouldn’t make much of a friend at all and that they’re completely full of shit, but that’s left up to me, the reader, to decide. And I like that responsibility. Since my personal libr…
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Honestly, if you are reading this essay, I probably already know one thing about you: You devoured the Nancy Drew mysteries as a child. And from that moment on, you were hooked on the female amateur sleuth (aka, the FAS). What drew you to her? Why did you progress at speed from the gateway drug of Nancy to Miss Jane Marple, to Amelia Peabody, to Blanche White, to… the list goes on and on. I would argue that it is because there is something about the female amateur sleuth that is, at heart, radical. Radical as in, to quote Merriam-Webster, “very different from the usual or traditional.” First of all, she consistently upends society’s traditional view of women and girls as…
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Within St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium stands a masterpiece. Not the first work ever painted in oil, but definitely the first to maximize all of the advantages that new medium offered. In total it is a sublime example of Northern Renaissance expression and has the distinction of being the most stolen, damaged, and vandalized work of art in the world. It’s name? The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb or, as it is more widely known, the Ghent Altarpiece. Which takes center stage in my new novel The Omega Factor. It was created by two brothers. Started by Hubert van Eyck in 1426, and finished by Jan van Eyck in 1432. This is known thanks to a Latin poem inscribed on th…
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In his new creation, Investigator Melchor Marín, the Spanish author Javier Cercas has created an almost unique character in the history of contemporary western crime writing. A hardworking, honest, police officer in the Mossos d’Esquadra (Catalonia’s autonomous police force), who doesn’t have a drink or drug problem, doesn’t womanise, and isn’t in a constant daily battle with his bosses. He’s a family guy, devoted to his wife and young daughter, pays his mortgage on time, works hard to get home in time for dinner, stays in at night and reads. Melchor Marín appears to be a content man, living and working in a rather dreary far flung and anonymous suburb of Barcelona, a hun…
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It’s time for a summer weekend of international thriller binge watching, which means get ready for some picturesque location shoots where the characters get to wear interesting sun hats while solving mysteries. That’s what summer shows are all about. Below you’ll find a few suggestions for the hours ahead, or if you haven’t seen Slow Horses yet, do yourself a favor and ignore these suggestions and go watch Gary Oldman chew it up for a few hours, then if you have time leftover you could try these. Murder in Provence Seasons: 1 Streaming on: BritBox Roger Allam and Nancy Carroll are having themselves a hell of a good time in this mystery series, the first from Britbox…
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What is it about a baffling poisoning that is so—dare I say?— intoxicating? For me, it’s the mystery of figuring out where the poison came from. Was it something deadly mixed up in a lab, or something pretty growing in a garden? And how does one find out? Poisoning has long been one of the most popular ways to rid oneself of a person, mostly because there was so little means of proving not only who had done the crime, but that poison was used at all. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that science began to even the odds between poisoners and those tasked with bringing them to justice. While I write mainly about botanical poisonings in the Saffron Everleigh Mystery …
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My first hero as a kid was Nancy Drew. My English teacher dad had handmade bookshelves in the den (1970s word for study or office) where he’d grade papers and work on lesson plans, and they were filled with hardcover Nancy Drew by Carolyn Keene novels. He also had most of the Hardy Boys mysteries and tons of classic literary fiction, but from the first few pages of The Hidden Staircase, I was hooked. I know now that I read the second book first, but it didn’t matter at the time. Accompanying Nancy Drew on her secret, compelling adventures, I reveled in the idea that a girl could take it upon herself to solve mysteries while aiding her dad in the process. A girl. Nancy was…
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Reading romance novels made me a better mystery writer. And I don’t just mean by enhancing the bits of sexy times I wove into my debut, Her Dying Day. Romances and mysteries are mirrors of each other. Sound crazy? Hear me out. Romances give us the roadmap of how a relationship blossomed. Mysteries are essentially about a relationship rotting. Once you can visualize how your characters initially connected, you can write about their destruction with more nuance. Motives become more believable and complex. But how did I, a lover of gritty true crime and eschewer of fluff, come to believe mysteries and romances are two sides of the same coin? COVID. During the height o…
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It is hot out there, so why not read a YA mystery or thriller? Young adult crime and suspense is booming, and this list is the proof, with 18 riveting, thrilling, thought-provoking, new and upcoming YA novels. From summer camp slashers, to gothic romance, visceral horror to devastating psychological thrillers, powerful social issue dramas to crackling social parody, you’ll find everything you’re looking for on this list, and more. Check out part one of this list, which ran back in January. Jessica Goodman, The Counselors (Razorbill, May 31) Now, I am way more a fan of a good summer camp slasher than I ever was of actual summer camp, and Jessica Goodman’s The Counsel…
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Want to talk about one of the strangest, if not the strangest American crime film to emerge in the first half of the 1970s? Then, let’s talk about Michael Ritchie’s neo-noir Prime Cut, as it turns fifty this year. It would be going too far to describe it as a neglected classic, but it is a fascinating film about a divided America that, as a result, finds obvious echoes today. Prime Cut’s at times surreal nature is signalled in the opening credits. To a Lalo Schifrin score, deliberately engineered to sound like calming elevator muzak, we follow a cow being slaughtered and fed into the mechanised process of creating hot dogs. At some point, one of the male workers adds what…
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Steven James is unlike almost any writer you’ll ever meet. He has a master’s degree in storytelling. Not an MFA. Not just another undergraduate degree in English. An honest-to-God Master of Arts Degree in Story Arts from East Tennessee State University. Yep. There is such a thing and he is living proof. And if you’ve read any of his thrillers with all the suspense, serial murders, and conspiracies, then you know he can tell a story. But what you probably don’t know is James is a devout Christian. “I’ve actually written books on how to tell stories for Sunday school kids and I write serial killer novels,” he says. And how does that work? Some of his books “are pretty …
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A young mother’s mysterious death and her son’s subsequent kidnapping blow open a decades-long mystery about the woman’s true identity, and the murderous federal fugitive at the center of it all. Lit Hub and CrimeReads have an exclusive first look at the new Netflix documentary, Girl in the Picture, directed by Skye Borgman, produced by Jimmy Fox, working from source material by executive producer and investigative journalist Matt Birkbeck, who wrote two non-fiction books (Finding Sharon and A Beautiful Child) about the documentary’s subject, the young woman known as Sharon Marshall. Girl in the Picture releases globally on July 6, 2022. In addition to the documentar…
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At the cross streets of Sixth Avenue, West 10th Street, and Christopher Street in New York’s Greenwich Village sits a small oasis of a garden. Bordered by a fence on three sides, the garden is adjacent to an impressively ornate 19th century brick building that is the Jefferson Market Public Library. Few who pass by the library’s distinctive, stocky clock tower know that it was originally a courthouse, or that the fenced in garden was once the site of a massive, art-deco designed women’s prison, known as the Women’s House of Detention. In his new book The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, Hugh Ryan recovers the complex history of the build…
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The poet David Kirby once said that “only shallow people and charlatans begin with perfect knowledge of what it is they mean to say. An honest writer begins in ignorance and writes his way to the truth.” The word “truth” is a bit controversial when it comes to historical fiction. Some authors of historical novels claim they only “stick to the facts,” while others acknowledge and celebrate their expansive creative license. When I wrote Oleander City: A Novel Based on the True Story, I did so with the understanding that our notions of “truth” are complex, and that what we accept as historical actuality is often incomplete or misguided. We all know about eye-witness tes…
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Since we are spoiled for choice here at the Psychological Thriller department of CrimeReads HQ, I decided to do an experiment. There are no dead girls to put the plot in motion. There are no uncomfortable moments of sexualizing girls. There are no determined moms with empty nurseries. There are no fields of unidentified corpses that turn out to be women who were in the wrong place and took a worse turn, ending up in a mass grave. There is no gratuitous blood and gore, no mandate to raise the body count, and no sexual violence. When asked, I usually say that I don’t really react much to reading about terrible things because I do it so often, which is true. I’m not easy t…
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I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer, but every time I say this to an actual lawyer they tell me to be grateful I’m a writer instead. They may be right. Do I really want to spend three more years in school only to work 80 hours a week as an associate doing document review all day? Maybe not. But I’d love to argue for the rights of the accused in a small Southern courtroom created by John Grisham or Harper Lee. I’d love to work in Scott Turow’s Kindle County, or practice law out of the backseat of Michael Connelly’s Lincoln Town Car. If I’m being honest with myself, I think I want to be a lawyer in a story. I may never know how wide the chasm is between real lawyering and fic…
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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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Excerpted from Ghost of the Hardy Boys: The Writer Behind the World’s Most Famous Boy Detectives, by Leslie McFarlane ___________________________________ This example of calmness in the face of disaster didn’t really help. It was all very well for Dave Fearless to meet catastrophe with aplomb. He could count on Bob Vilett and Captain Broadbeam to haul him to the surface, while Pat Stoodles lent encouragement by bellowing “Heave-ho, bejabers!” I couldn’t count on anyone—except, perhaps, Edward Stratemeyer. It turned out that I could count on Edward Stratemeyer. Before the week was out a long envelope brought another outline, accompanied by a letter explaining his “oth…
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that January babies love the summer and absolutely despise the winter months. Okay, while I can’t speak for Amanda Peet (a.k.a. Betty Broderick in Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story – Jan. 11), Regina King (whose crime-related star turns include The Harder They Fall and American Crime – Jan. 15), or Patricia Highsmith (if you’re reading this publication, I take it you’re already familiar with the ur-queen of the psychological thriller – Jan. 19), I can speak for myself (also Jan. 11), when I say that this particular Januarian is not about the cold. You know who—or, rather, what—else is a January baby? Roe v. Wade, the landmark…
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In the fall of 1961, the Agency moved from its shabby scattered offices in Foggy Bottom to a gleaming seven-story office block tucked in the woods of suburban Langley, Virginia, five miles northwest of the White House. It was one of the largest office buildings in the country, a keystone of America’s imperial ambitions as memories of World War II faded and the president proclaimed a New Frontier. The new headquarters signaled the Agency’s ascendancy in the structure of national power. Yet the modernist gleaming architecture could not erase the existential humiliation of the Bay of Pigs defeat. After a decent interval of seven months, Kennedy eased Dulles and Bissell ou…
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Despite billionaires’ obsession with space tourism, I think I would pay even more to time-travel back to one of George Plimpton’s legendary parties. I’d shell out at least a grand to be a fly on the wall on a Friday night in the fifties or sixties, preferably one of the nights Truman Capote or Jackie Kennedy were parked on the sofa, or the time Doc Humes wrestled Norman Mailer on the balcony, or that evening when Terry Southern propositioned William Styron’s wife, Rose. Plimpton—blue-blooded Yale man, co-founder of The Paris Review and inventor of what he termed “participatory journalism”—had the money, the connections, and the charm to host a damn good party. The cockt…
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