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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2022 was a fantastic year for television, so making this list was harder than usual. Picking 15 to rave about on this website was nearly impossible. You do not know what I have been through, making this thing. So I picked 20. TV of other genres was excellent as well, and if you’re looking for recommendations in that department, try Season 1 of Pachinko, Season 4 of Stranger Things, Season 2 of Abbott Elementary, Season 4 of What We Do in the Shadows, Season 3 of Derry Girls, Season 1 of The Bear, Season 4 of Atlanta, Season 1 of Fleishman is in Trouble, and Season 3 of The Boys. But if you want crime TV, keep reading! This was a great year for “the miniseries,” a great…
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The CrimeReads editors select the year’s best critical nonfiction / biography books released in 2022. * John le Carré (Tim Cornwell, ed.), A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré (Viking) This collection of the author’s letters, assembled by his son, revels in much the same suggestive restraint as his best fiction: on nearly every page what is left unsaid begins, gradually and surely, to evoke another world. In this case, it’s not the world of spies, but that of a man of letters. Le Carré’s great concern was, it would seem, carving out the proper time and space to get down to his writing. Some of the more whimsical letters involve invitations to friends to vis…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Nick Medina, Sisters of a Lost Nation (Berkley) Nick Medina’s debut is told from the perspective of Anna Horn, a young Native girl who works at her town’s local casino and starts to notice a pattern when it comes to the reservations’s many missing women. A gripping and timely novel informed by a rich tapestry of myth and legend, Sisters of the Lost Nation marks the entrance of strong new voice to crime writing. –MO Vanessa Cuti, The Tip Line (Crooked Lane) A woman takes a job at a tip line thinking she’ll work alongside some local law enforcement types and find hers…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut crime fiction. * Samantha Jayne Allen, Pay Dirt Road (Minotaur) A young woman returned home to a small Texas town, adrift, working waitressing shifts and waiting for the next piece of life to come rushing along, joins up with her supposedly retired grandfather as a private investigator. That’s the intriguing setup to this powerful new novel from Samantha Jayne Allen, a major new talent on the crime fiction scene, whose evocative descriptions of the Texas landscape and brooding atmospherics make for a new kind of noir you won’t soon forget. Get a copy of Pay Dirt Road now and expect to be hearing a lot more from S…
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The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. Katie Gutierrez, More Than You’ll Ever Know (William Morrow) This book is full of so much love. Lore Rivera has everything a woman is told to want: a husband who loves her, two children who work hard to succeed, and a career that values her. When her husband’s business falls prey to a recession, she finds herself suppressing her own success to make her husband feel better. Meanwhile, she meets another man in Mexico City who finds her success a turn-on. Soon enough, she’s got two husbands; soon after that, one husband finds out and kills the other. Forty ye…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Michael Bennett, Better the Blood (Atlantic Monthly Press) Michael Bennett is a much-lauded Maori screenwriter and director, and this, his debut, brings his skills of storytelling to a new medium and introduces a compelling new heroine. Hana Westerman is a Maori CID detective with a rebellious teenage daughter, uncooperative colleagues, and now a truly puzzling case—someone’s been killing the descendants of a group of men responsible for an early 19th-century lynching, and it’s up to Hana to track them down while proving herself once again to her department. –Moll…
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The CrimeReads editors make their picks for the month’s best debut fiction. * Harini Nagendra, The Bangalore Detectives Club (Pegasus) A truly auspicious beginning to a new series featuring an amateur sleuth, Kaveri, operating in 1920s Bangalore, aided by her sharp mind, her husband’s medical practice, and the preconceived notions about who she should be and where she should go. Her first case stems from a murder at a distinguished club, pointing to a nearby brothel and a wealthy Englishman, an investigation that allows Nagendra to show off her skills as a social critic and a first rate mystery novelist. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief Isabel Cañas, Th…
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The CrimeReads editors select the year’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl (Atria) Zakiya Dalila Harris’ scathing debut, The Other Black Girl, was inspired by the author’s chance meeting with another Black editor at the publishing company where she worked, the novelty of that experience sparking an inventive psychological thriller that pillories the extraordinarily white world of NYC publishing. Nella Rogers couldn’t be happier when another Black woman starts working at her prestigious publishing company, but she quickly finds the other woman’s extreme code-switching off-putting. Meanwhile, someone’s been l…
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The CrimeReads editors make their choices for the best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Sasha Vasilyuk, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury) Vasilyuk’s powerful debut tells the story of Yefim Shulman, moving between his death in Ukraine in 2007 and his experiences during World War II and its aftermath, when Shulman fought Germany for the USSR but soon ended up ensnared in the KGB plots, hiding his secrets from his family. Vasilyuk manages to capture both the story’s intimate drama and its epic qualities, telling the story of a double life and its reverberations across borders and generations. –DM Sara Koffi, While We Were Burning (Putnam) In…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Jamison Shea, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me (Henry Holt) In this ballet horror novel, a young ballerina is given a chance at power after a star of the company takes her under her wing. But all power comes at a cost, and this power derives from an ancient source with its own agenda. I’m not sure what it is about dance that lends itself so well to horror—think Black Swan or Suspiria—but add this one to the list of stories that take the bloody feet and brutal precision of the dance world and turn them into visceral horror. –MO Kyle Dillon Hertz, The…
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CrimeReads editors make their selections for the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Andrew Boryga, Victim (Doubleday) In Boryga’s debut novel, Victim, a young hustler on the rise learns to manipulate the currency of identity as he bends the truth about his past and establishes himself in the world of New York media and letters. The satire in this novel comes in sharp and merciless, but the friendship at the story’s center steals the show, rounding out all the complexities and contradictions of two young men on different sides of the truth. Boryga is a keen observer of culture and a storyteller with style to spare. –DM Jennifer Croft, The E…
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CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Yasmine Angoe, Her Name is Knight (Thomas and Mercer) This action-packed origin story introduces one of the most kick-ass heroines I’ve ever encountered. As a child, Nena Knight lost her family and most of her village to violence. Taken in by an elite family of movers and shakers, Nena becomes a highly effective assassin, fulfilling her duties to her adoptive clan with nary a stray thought. But when her latest assignment—coupled with the appearance of an old nemesis—causes Nena to question the pattern of her life, no one is safe (especially Nena). –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior E…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Paz Pardo, The Shamshine Blind (Atria) Paz Pardo’s The Shamshine Blind is one of the more exciting debuts to hit in early 2023, a heady mix of high-concept speculative fiction, alternative history, and hardboiled detective fiction. In an alternate 2009, a new chemical compound that can elicit targeted human emotions has been weaponized in war and made ubiquitous for recreational purposes, upending the global and social orders. Amidst the new chaos, a small city enforcement agent gets put on the trail of a new product, a trail that points in the direction of a much…
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CrimeReads editors make their selections for the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Jenny Hollander, Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead (Minotaur) A young woman with an enviable media job and a seemingly perfect relationship goes into survival mode when an old classmate reappears, making a big movie about events that she would rather not be dredged up again. Hollander parcels out the truth about what really happened in their grad school days with a perfect sense of pacing and enough twists to keep readers on the edge of their seats. –DM Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, A Fire So Wild (Harper) Ruiz-Grossman’s ambitious debut is set in Berkeley, C…
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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * C.E. McGill, Our Hideous Progeny (Harper) In this innovative debut, Victor Frankenstein’s grand-niece, Mary, is determined to make her own way in the bustling science scene in mid-19th century London, but is running into obstacles at every turn. But soon, she comes across the family mystery: what really happened to her great-uncle? The search for that answer will take her on a dangerous journey. McGill paints a vivid period landscape and unfolds a story that resonates across the generations. –DM Vanessa Walters, The Nigerwife (Atria) In this pitch-perfect psychological thr…
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The CrimeReads editors round up the year’s best espionage fiction. * Kathy Wang, Impostor Syndrome (Custom House) This is the Silicon Valley spy novel we’ve all been waiting for, with a side order of biting satire and furious feminism. In 2006, Julia Lerner is an orphaned Muscovite with a computer science degree. 12 years later, she’s one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley, sending sensitive information to her Russian handlers when she’s not busy crushing the competition to her social media company employer or being the keynote speaker on work/life balance at yet another conference. Things start to heat up when an underling stumbles on a suspicious use of …
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The CrimeReads editors select the year’s best espionage novels. * Tom Bradby, Yesterday’s Spy (Atlantic Monthly Press) Bradby’s historical novel manages to be a nuanced meditation on a father and son’s relationship and a dizzying, entertaining swirl of international politics and spycraft. In 1952, an old hand from British intelligence, recently retired and widowed, travels to Tehran to search for his vanished son, a reporter who has published highly damaging information about government officials and the opium trade. The search takes him through an odyssey of backroom deals, foreign power jockeying, and political tensions that are quickly on their way to a boil. Bra…
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My 27-year career as a diplomat in countries around the world, and the U.S. State Department, has quite naturally drawn me to espionage fiction writing. I actively dealt with issues in Europe, Asia and the Mideast, with Latin America and Asia, focusing on national security and arms control issues and negotiated with the then-Soviet Union. I have been tutored through real world experience on how diplomacy and intelligence operatives work. This world is marked by officials of intelligence, courage and others who may be personally flawed, who often face high personal risks and choices marked by moral ambiguity. Fiction affords a superb platform to explore such themes. Night…
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I’ve always enjoyed books set in or about the theatre, particularly for adults. My novel, The Whalebone Theatre, features several: one, created by children from the ribcage of a whale on the English coast; one in London in 1928, where the legendary Ballet Russes perform, and one in Nazi-occupied Paris during WWII. My research into the theatre in London and Paris drew primarily on historical records and social histories, but for the theatre that serves as the title of the book, I drew on my own experiences as a child who liked putting on shows with her friends and a young student who briefly trod the boards at university. Here is a list of the best books about theatre. …
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The Gothic Revival continues! And this year, Southern Gothic joins the fold in our roundup of the most haunted, atmospheric stories of 2022. Here’s a quick definition of what Gothic fiction does, courtesy of Faye Snowden’s wonderful article: “Through stories of transgression and depictions of the grotesque, [Gothic fiction] evokes anxiety in the reader, leaving them to question society’s institutions, religions, politics, familial and other relationships…” While European Gothic novels mostly featured women in distress in dilapidated houses, Snowden distinguishes two particularly American evolutions to Gothic fiction once it crosses the pond in the 19th century: “The firs…
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I know, I know, this list is so 20th century it’s embarrassing (although maybe we’re now far enough into the 21st century that the 20th has at last taken firm shape in our imaginations). Perhaps I was just more interested in reading about a century characterized by sweeping historical changes, rather than novel diseases, or perhaps there were just a lot of really good books out this year and I can’t read everything, ok? For whatever reason, the books below lean heavily interwar and midcentury, yet diverge significantly in what they choose to explore and reinterpret from these eras, as well as which silenced voices they bring to the fore. These books also range all over th…
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The inspirations and concerns informing this year’s historical mysteries and thrillers may be grim, but the fiction crafted to explore them is luminous. The 1920s continue to loom large, as do their preoccupations with inequality, excess, and grief (including a great number of novels featuring seances and spiritualists, peaking post-Pandemic as a way to access historical methods of reaching loved ones as both comforting and deceitful). You’ll find multiple titles on this list split between the past and the present, or the further recesses of history spliced together with the more recent past, emphasizing that historical tales are, like all culture, an ongoing conversation…
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It’s been an amazing year for historical fiction (just like every year is an amazing year for historical fiction!), so I thought I’d round up some of the best, most richly textured tapestries of history that the fiction world has to offer. As always, I noticed a bit of a 20th century bias when putting this together, so please put older settings that you’ve enjoyed recently in the comments! As a funny note, there are not one, but two books on this list set in Los Angeles in 1981, one featuring the preppies and the other following LA’s burgeoning punk scene. There are alas no crossovers, although I imagine the characters in the punk novel could easily beat up the character…
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We’ve had real trouble this year narrowing down our lists, as is evidenced by yet another grouping of 15 instead of a top 10, but hey, it was a great year for subgenres, okay? 2022 was, in particular, an excellent year for new works set during three time periods: the 1920s, the early 1960s, and the long 19th century. Each has its own relevance for today—the 1920s, and for that matter the first half of the 19th century, both share uneasy parallels with today’s increase in activism and (in the case of the 1840s) barn-burning millenarianism. The 19th century has been called the era of the con artist, in which successive economic panics and booming fraud made swindlers into p…
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2021 has been an epic year for horror thrillers. Innovative takes on the genre rule the scene, with new voices and old favorites alike reinterpreting an ever-evolving genre that, it turns out, has a lot in common with crime writing, especially when it comes to slashers, serial killers, and the ghosts of the past. This list is composed of books I read and loved, and apologies for any important releases missing from either the list below or the notable selections following. I may be a newb when it comes to this genre, but now that I’ve started reading horror, I’m never stopping again. LaTanya McQueen, When the Reckoning Comes (Harper Perennial) This book details, in fu…
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