My cat has nothing in common with Maisie Dobbs. Let me back up. Picture the scene: it’s December 2021. My first nephew had just been born, and because of the pandemic, I couldn’t meet him in person or help my sister the way she’d helped me after my sons were born. I was feeling h … | Continue reading
This is a transcript of a talk that was given, by Dr. Olivia Rutigliano, at New York University Law School’s Poe Room Event, on May 19th, 2023. Briefly, from 1845-1846, Edgar Allan Poe lived in a building on the site where NYU Law’s Furman Hall now stands. The Poe Room Event is a … | Continue reading
A look at the month’s best new releases in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers, via Bookmarks. * Don Winslow, City in Ruins (William Morrow) “Winslow has written a near-perfect saga: He’s created great characters who grow and develop while remaining true to their essence, and a … | Continue reading
My theory is that everyone has one of these stories. Perhaps it was a place you grew up in where random objects would vanish – you swore you put your keys on the sideboard and now there’s just a blank space where they were. Maybe your girlfriend lived in a house that produced une … | Continue reading
Would the real Australia please stand up? Are you a tropical paradise of blue skies and golden beaches, the Great Barrier Reef, koalas and kangaroos? Or are you the perilous continent of venomous snakes and enormous spiders, dense bushland and parched desert where travellers vent … | Continue reading
Recently, Paul Giamatti received an Oscar nomination for his performance in The Holdovers—Alexander Payne’s period film about three loners stuck at a boys’ boarding school during holiday break. He was previously nominated for a supporting role in Cinderella Man in 2005. Many, inc … | Continue reading
For three months after its launch in May 2023, I.S. Berry’s spy novel was flying under the radar, as most debut novels do. Then a rave review from The New Yorker set off a firestorm of other favorable notices that resulted in numerous publications and National Public Radio naming … | Continue reading
During my career as an investigative reporter – and as the wife of an expert in the field of computer-assisted investigative reporting – I have experienced situations that could be distressing if you didn’t realize this is all great material for writing mysteries! The first occur … | Continue reading
Leo Tolstoy, author of my favorite novel, War and Peace, said that the purpose of art is to teach us to love life, an observation that has pleased me since I first read it. But on reflection, I think it fair to say there are other things that art can do in relation to life; […] | Continue reading
I grew up in the former USSR surrounded by books on shelves built by my grandfather. The books came in multiple numbered tomes – grey, brick red, pale green – and bore the names of the authors in gold lettering that glistened under the light of the lamp. Chekhov. Pushkin. Akhmato … | Continue reading
Given how much I love reading and writing about dysfunctional families, it’s no wonder I would soon turn my attention to evil mothers! While my new book, Darling Girls, is about the relationship between three women who grew up in foster care together and call each other sisters, … | Continue reading
If you follow the news at all—on TV, newspapers, social media—you are aware of crimes perpetrated both at home and in faraway places. You might read them, feel a pang of grief for the victim or a flare of rage at the villain. But our fast-moving media often gives us only a glimps … | Continue reading
The beetles could help her disappear, but not in the same way the others had. She would do it for a better life. This was why, even though someone had trashed her van, even though her cell phone was now one big useless glitch and even though her mother was probably sick with worr … | Continue reading
The Bond Girl. The phrase itself is a source of celebration and contention. Few other thriller writers before Ian Fleming placed such emphasis on creating rounded female protagonists with their own backgrounds, motives and agency. Few other action films attract such attention wit … | Continue reading
Statically speaking, when someone hurts a woman, her intimate partner, whether current or former, is the most likely culprit. We don’t protect teenage girls from this reality, either. They’re exposed to its foundations during one of the most emotionally vulnerable periods of thei … | Continue reading
The phrase “people often ask me” sounds like a setup here, but it’s true that people often ask me why it is I’ve chosen to write about small-town Texas. And every time, the question sort of takes me aback—not because it’s an unusual one, but because the setting of my books feels … | Continue reading
It was an introvert’s paradise. Two weeks after Fidel Castro forced Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959, Justin Gleichauf found himself as the one and only employee of the new CIA operation in Miami. Part of the Domestic Contacts Division of the Directorate of Intelligence, the … | Continue reading
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows …” / Insert sinister laugh here. The Shadow, a proto-Batman who, unlike the Caped Crusader, was more than willing to gun down the bad guys, began as a character on a 1930 radio show and then backtracked into his ow … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Victoria Houston, At the Edge of the Woods (Crooked Lane) “A rollicking comedy of errors combines mystery and romance.” –Kirkus Reviews Ava January, The Mayfair Dagger (Crooked Lane) “For fans of roma … | Continue reading
I recently came across the first pages of a crime novel, written when I was eleven. It was called The Hair of the Dog and was about an author who steals someone else’s plot and is subsequently murdered. At this point in my life I’d never met a writer or written a book. Why was [… … | Continue reading
When I first picked up Matthew D. Lassiter’s groundbreaking new text, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs, I knew I had to interview him and bring the book’s essential reframing of an oft-misunderstood history to our readers. Lassiter makes a profound and nece … | Continue reading
It’s spring. It’s officially spring in New York, where CrimeReads is based. Maybe you, like me, wear sunglasses year-round. But maybe you are just busting yours out for the season. There can be no denying that accessory’s association with warm weather. Nothing elevates a look lik … | Continue reading
When Prohibition came into force in 1920, it was meant to end the production, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages. Instead, it was the beginning of perhaps the most infamous criminal period in US history because, very simply, most Americans liked a drink – and many did … | Continue reading
Each month, CrimeReads/me celebrates the art of the translated novel with a roundup of the best new international crime fiction releases. The list below is divided between horror, thrillers, dystopia, and satire, each driven by a moral force, for one of the most wide-ranging sele … | Continue reading
Part One: An Unkindness of Ravens It was almost three years to the day after the great quake had laid waste to so much of San Francisco’s pride that the first of the extortion letters arrived, dated April 21, 1909. This one appeared at the door of the home of Mr. James O’Brien Gu … | Continue reading
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 experien … | Continue reading
Prague in the 1990s was a magical place. Communism had fallen, a seat at the opera cost a few bucks, the city’s magnificence had yet to be sullied by hordes of tourists or chain restaurants. Playwright and former dissident Václav Havel was at the helm, transforming and privatizin … | Continue reading
“The city is strong in the memory, no matter how much it decays and gives way to the sea.” –Elaine Perry, 1990 Since I’ve started writing about out-of-print and “lost” Black authors, I occasionally get suggestions from writer-friends who turn me on to their favorite neglected aut … | Continue reading
At the beginning of my new novel The Hollow Tree, a man stands on the roof of a Scottish hotel. It is night, and the distant mountains are hidden. It is rural Argyll, and the stars above are clear in their spiralling array. The nearby sea murmurs, but in the dark it is invisible. … | Continue reading
Over the past few decades, we’ve seen exponential growth in both creative writing programs and the true crime storytelling industry, so perhaps it should come as no surprise to find so much beautiful writing about terrible events. Just so, as true crime has matured, those who tel … | Continue reading
The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michael Dirda has chosen 12 of the best weird tales ever written for a new collection from The Folio Society titled, appropriately enough, Weird Tales. Our editor Olivia Rutigliano spoke to Dirda. a longtime aficionado of t … | Continue reading
The Reaper Follows arrives out in the world this week, and I’m certainly hoping that it’s a suspenseful novel readers will enjoy! It’s the last in my ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ series—which, naturally, includes four books. Each book stands on its own, of course, a case tha … | Continue reading
Anthony Horowitz is missing. Not the real Anthony Horowitz, of course. He’s exactly where you’d expect him to be—hunkered down at his desk, toiling away at the next novel even as his newest is hitting bookshelves around the world. But more than sixty pages into Close to Death (Ap … | Continue reading
By the 1950s, Wheaties had gained massive popularity as the “Breakfast of Champions.” Packaged in a bright orange box with famous sports figures on the cover, the iconic breakfast cereal was marketed to consumers as a healthy way to nourish a fit and active lifestyle. According t … | Continue reading
The world is terrifying. It seems like such an obvious thing to say, right? Of course, the world is terrifying! Turn on the news! Look around! The world’s always been terrifying! Still, when I think about what that means in practice, not in theory, the terror becomes sharper, mor … | Continue reading
Allan Pinkerton is a storied figure in the American imagination. Most know his agency for its violent anti-union mercenary work, but few realize that Pinkerton was an Abolitionist, as well, who ran a stop on the Underground Railroad and headed Abraham Lincoln’s secret service dur … | Continue reading
Most of the generation of authors that produced the Golden Age of detective fiction–that brief era when the puzzle plot purportedly reigned supreme in mysteries–had departed not only from the field but from life itself when, over a half-century ago in the Spring of 1972, British … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death (Harper) “An absolutely engrossing tale…written with the abundance of whimsy and dark humor that seems to permeate nearly everything that Horowitz creates. Kudos to an … | Continue reading
The prisoner hauled before a Brooklyn judge in 1928 did not look the part of one of the most notorious criminals in history. He squinted at the world through round-framed spectacles. When he removed his broad-brimmed hat, the sudden exposure of the baldness beneath added years to … | Continue reading
I can’t write crime. That’s the troubling discovery I made while drafting my second novel Sing, I. As a discipline of the crime genre for decades, particularly detective fiction and more recently true crime, I initially found my inability to write crime deeply frustrating and sur … | Continue reading
Spring is here, summer is coming, and June is Pride Month. What does this mean? Lots of great new queer mysteries and thrillers to read on the beach or at the park on a lazy Sunday. This season, many beloved characters return: Katrina Carrasco’s queer 19th-century outlaw Alma Ros … | Continue reading
Throughout the shooting of The Exorcist and into postproduction and publicity, a half-dozen crew members would insist that Linda Blair had emerged from the experience unscathed, but barely a year after the film wrapped, she was burning rubber in the Hollywood fast lane and, befor … | Continue reading
Three years ago, when I ranked 100 Sherlock Holmes performances in an article for this very website, I had thought that I had landed upon the most challenging project I’d ever undertake at CrimeReads. Watching countless film and TV adaptations, attempting to ascribe value to vari … | Continue reading
“I’m a firm believer that things happen when the time is right,” says USA Today bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan. She should know. Her time to write psychological suspense didn’t arrive until she was 55 years old. Ryan was in America’s early 1970s class of female broadcast … | Continue reading
“What a rotten writer of detective stories Life is!” By the time he wrote these words, Nathan Leopold, Jr. was middle-aged and balding. But in the American consciousness, he was forever immortalized as the sullen teenager he had been in the sweltering Chicago summer of 1924, infa … | Continue reading
Here is a short list of things that are easy: –Brunch. –Turning on the television for your children instead of reading to them. –Looking at your phone and checking some vacuous app some deem crucial. –Sleeping in. –Eating too much. –Making love. And so on and so on. The “easy” li … | Continue reading
Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That’s the easy way to remember what happened to Henry VIII’s six wives, and even though four of them died natural deaths, he’s most known for executing two of them—both for treason and adultery, although only one was guilty … | Continue reading
In my teenaged years, when I traveled to my parents’ native Greece for the summers, I brought with me an entire duffel bag full of books. In high school, and taking myself seriously (too seriously) as a future novelist, I packed this second bag with entire bodies of work by autho … | Continue reading