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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Grady turned his attention to the landscape on his right. Lots of cactus, dense thickets of saplings like overgrown weeds, a tree massed with neon-pink flowers that reminded him of Halloween as a kid, the girls all dressed as Disney princesses or fairies. “Bougainvillea,” said Dalita. “Not a native. Those prickly pear aren’t, either, or the Koa haole. Believe it or not, this used to be wetland. Someone worked out a deal in the 1980s and they drained it. That was when the drug money came here, in the Eighties. Before that it was hippies, and before them surfers from the mainland. But the Eighties, that’s when everything really changed, when they built the resorts that sto…
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Michael Connelly, The Dark Hours (Little, Brown) “A masterpiece… Meticulous about actual police procedure, Connelly makes the fundamentals of detective work engrossing while providing plenty of suspense and action.” Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Rex Pickett, The Archivist (Blackstone) ”Take a deep dive in the dark archives with intrepid, independent, indefatigable project archivist Emily Snow as she excavates deadly secrets in Pickett’s exhilarating debut literary thriller. With deftly woven narrative threads and intrigue worthy of Hitchcock, The Archivist is immersive and r…
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tl;dr: Research is hard, rabbit holes are interesting and twisty, and electric cars were invented a long time ago. Also, crooked cops are bad, whatever the era. Spoiler alert: Wow, electric cars sure were invented a long time ago! And some serious points are made. I spent this last week down a rabbit hole. We’ve all been there. My last big dive before this was when I was looking up DNA for my upcoming mystery novel, He Wasn’t There Again Today, which will be the third in the Epitome Apartments novels, following last year’s The Adventures of Isabel and this year’s What’s the Matter with Mary Jane? (I’m tempted to post the results, but this travelogue is already pretty l…
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The soft-boiled mystery is real, relevant, and required. I hereby proclaim this as fact on behalf of all the vibrant females over 50 like me, who want to read books starring lead characters like us. In crime fiction, the soft-boiled genre is embedded firmly between the cozy and the hard-boiled, like middle-aged and elder women ensconced between siren and senior. When I first began shopping around my humorous, soft-boiled mystery novel, How To Murder a Marriage, featuring a fifty-year-old female protagonist, I pitched it as “Modern Janet Evanovich meets middle-aged Bridget Jones.” I had one editor tell me that soft-boiled is not a recognized genre of crime fiction, and an…
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It was getting dark when I left the Boston hospital after working the day shift. My sister was coming to town to see my new apartment, and I still had to hang the last pair of curtains. If I hurried, I could get to the Mission Hill hardware store to buy the rods and brackets I needed before it closed. I felt my bag being yanked from my shoulder before I saw that the person attacking me from behind was practically a child. As soon as I realized what was happening—that I was being robbed—I let go of my purse. The kid, who couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, and looked as scared as I felt, had full possession of my bag when he kicked me squarely in the knee. Pe…
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In the time since I last wrote this column Squid Game became the world’s favorite show and with good reason, it’s an incredibly exciting ride, but I’m going to just go ahead and assume that by now, the start of November, you’ve already filled up on Squid Game and all the explainers and message board theories that followed, and you’re in search of something new. You’ve come to the right place. Perhaps you’d like another twisty, stylish Korean thriller? Or how about some German grad students solving the mysteries of the human body? November streaming has all that, plus the tried and true British mysteries your parents are going to want to talk about at the holidays. If you…
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Since the publication of Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale” in 1953, James Bond has been synonymous with a particular brand of escapism. A naval intelligence officer during World War II, Fleming leveraged his experience to create an idealized version of a spy, one who wore great suits and drove fast cars while he rendered the West safe for freedom and commerce. The James Bond films doubled down on the character’s fantasy potential, boosted immeasurably at the beginning by Sean Connery’s magnetism in the leading role. Who wouldn’t want the glories of saving the world from unambiguously dastardly villains, all while possessing boundless sex appeal and an array of cool gadgets? …
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When I saw Last Night in Soho, the vivid new film from Edgar Wright, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a film that came out a decade ago, Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris. In Last Night in Soho, a young London fashion student named Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) discovers that, at night, her apartment has the power to transport her into the 1960s. This is ideal, because she has always longed to experience the glamour of this bygone decade; wandering around downtown London, shadowing a glamorous wannabe-starlet named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), she feels that she finally is where she belongs. Similarly, in Midnight in Paris, a writer named Gil (Owen Wilson) travels to Paris,…
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The first question was always the same. And there was only one acceptable answer. “Did you win?” Trial lawyers are gladiators and the metric of success is unambiguous, often instantaneous, and always unforgiving. Whether arguing a pretrial motion or awaiting a jury’s verdict, the range of outcomes is blunt and binary: you either win or you lose. As a litigator for the venerable firm of Isham, Lincoln & Beale in Chicago, founded by President Abraham Lincoln’s surviving son, this was my professional life. I loved it. But I found myself needing more than just the challenge of winning a case. Increasingly, I needed the satisfaction of winning cases that others thought co…
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As a character, Los Angeles police detective Lt. Columbo was famous for turning, just as he was about to leave a suspect, and asking, in a faux-confused tone, about “just one more thing.” But in the years before Peter Falk helped “Columbo” creators William Link and Richard Levinson forge one of the most memorable characters in all of fiction, Link and Levinson seemed to have repeatedly stopped just short of the door to the office of Hollywood producers and executives and, in effect, proposed “just one more” early version of Columbo. It’s not unlike how “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry returned to the concept of an “emotionless” being learning how to be human, from S…
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As the greatest-selling author of all time, in line behind only Shakespeare and the bible, Agatha Christie undoubtedly has a good deal to teach writers of mystery and suspense. But she never would have written a craft book—not about writing, which she considered a job, one at which she worked hard but put away gladly. Once drafts were turned in and contract obligations were met, Christie happily retreated from vocation, withdrawing to her beloved holiday home, Greenway, in an area known as the English Riviera. Greenway is, in Christie’s words, a perfect house, a dream house. It is situated on more than 30 acres of lush, verdant land criss-crossed by paths down to a boath…
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I like nothing better than building the A Dickens of a Crime story world of pre-Victorian London with real objects. My young amateur sleuth, Charles Dickens—yes, the real novelist—was awfully fond of possessions. He decorated his homes, rather than having his wife do so, and his letters are full of thoughts about furnishings. I suspect for him, these objects represented order in his world, as he had a chaotic childhood and was, by modern parlance, a thorough control freak. Even by the standards of his time, he kept an unusual degree of oversight over the domestic sphere, which was commonly managed by women. His obsession with things says a lot about him. Have you ever s…
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“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.” (Mark Twain) I call this Red-Lining Reality, because these are things editors put a red line through; readers won’t find them believable. My family travelled to Italy a few years back. We were going anyway, but this conveniently provided me with information for the story I had in mind for my fourth book, Cecilian Vespers, about the murder of a renowned theologian. Some of the clues related to the lives of long-dead saints, including Saint Philomena. I’d never heard of her till I began my research, So. My husband and daughter and I were in Italy, in Treviso,…
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CrimeReads editors select the best new crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers coming out in October. * Hannah Morrissey, Hello, Transcriber (Minotaur) I’ve been looking forward to Hello, Transcriber for months, just based on the cover design alone, but the plot is just as compelling. Hazel Greenlee works the graveyard shift as a police transcriber in Black Harbor, Wisconsin, a rustbelt city plagued by addiction and hopelessness. Her days are filled with her husband’s hunting exploits, and her nights are taken over by clinically precise descriptions of lurid crime scenes. She tries to keep her emotional distance, but one case in particular—and the mysterious detectiv…
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Mothers are like the Roman god Janus, one face looking to the past and one to the future. They exist in a duality because motherhood is temporal, themselves transitioning from maiden to crone while ferrying their charge from infancy to adulthood. That duality and journey make them delightfully complex characters for authors. And dare I say the perfect amateur sleuth. In Nursery Crimes, the first of Ayelet Waldman’s Mommy Track mysteries, the reader meets Juliet Applebaum, a public defender with a preschool-aged daughter and another on the way. Waldman illustrates Juliet’s Janus status in this passage from chapter two. “Awash in ambivalence, alternately bored and entrance…
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Under an Outlaw Moon follows the true story of Bennie and Stella Mae Dickson. He’s reckless and she’s an outsider longing to fit in. When they pull off a bank robbery to celebrate her sixteenth birthday, their lives take a turn that they never could have imagined. In late August, 1938, Bennie and his new wife, Stella, walked into the Corn Exchange Bank in Elkton, South Dakota. With guns drawn, they were faced with having to wait thirty minutes for the vault’s time lock to release. Keeping their cool, they assembled employees and customers against a wall, and without a shot being fired, they robbed the bank of just over twenty-one hundred dollars. Driving to his family’s …
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Family is messy, and let’s face it: literature thrives on mess. Fiction, it seems, is chockfull of unpleasant and even twisted family relationships. As both a reader and writer, I don’t mind mess, of course. But, when it comes to father-daughter relationships, I prefer complex and tender over destructive and perverse, and I must confess: I’ve always been a sucker for the books that capture that particular relationship with just the right tenor. My newest book, These Silent Woods, has themes of love, sacrifice, and redemption at its core, and I hope readers will fall in love with the father and daughter who inhabit the pages. Cooper, a flawed but dedicated dad, and Finch,…
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My new novel, Shoot the Moonlight Out, opens with two epigraphs. One comes from the great Garland Jeffreys song that gives the book its name, a New York City ramble that feels partly like a Tunnel of Love carnival ride and partly like following a map to an uncertain destination, providing a jolt of tone and atmospheric energy right out of the gate. Everything I wanted in my book was right there under the surface of that title. The other epigraph comes from a favorite poem of mine, “Riding the D Train” by Enid Dame. In the poem, Dame’s narrator is on the subway, noticing the passing rooftops and people in the windows of buildings and other riders in the car, scarred and sc…
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I confess to the almighty reader, and to you, my friends and colleagues, that I have sinned through my own faults, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do with my novel, and I ask, blessed reader, and you, my friends and colleagues, to pray for me to the deities of writing. I confess that at first I was reticent to write a detective novel, but that I overcame that hesitation quickly and confidently, so confidently that I embraced every detective fiction trope in existence with the audacity only the unenlightened possess. I confess that in my novel there is a beautiful corpse, and that she is female. I may have chosen not to cr…
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The pandemic derailed pretty much every aspect of regular life – office jobs moved home, shutdowns and social distancing became standard, and a sense of chaos and insecurity permeated those early months. The comic book industry was no different, and acclaimed writer Ed Brubaker found himself turning to a certain kind of crime novel for comfort – which, in turn, provided him with a bit of inspiration. “When the pandemic and the lockdown hit, I found myself turning to old favorite pulp and detective books for comfort reading. Parker novels, Lew Archer, Travis McGee, and I had this realization that American comics and graphic novels never really had anything like that,” Bru…
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