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
One night in 1970, Rena Pederson, a young wire-service reporter organizing news bulletins printed by the Dallas office’s teletype machines, came across a dispatch about an audacious crime. The so-called King of Diamonds was at it again, absconding from a local mansion with jewels … | Continue reading
A better world is a near future story told through the perspective of a doctor, mother, and wife, who moves with her family to a protected company town where she thinks they’ll all be safe. She soon discovers that this town is hiding secrets about how it was founded, and upon who … | Continue reading
Most of us have experienced a bad neighbor or two in our lifetimes. From dorm life to 20-something apartment life, I remember a lot of neighbors with loud music, pot wafting through the halls, wild parties, and some squeaky bed frames I’d like to forget, but those were simply sli … | Continue reading
On August 10th, 2023 I was given a small metal chip to celebrate a year of sobriety. It was the first full year of sobriety I’d experienced since 1977. I’d gotten high for the first when I was ten, courtesy of a lung-busting hit off a device called The Neutron Bong. Despite that … | Continue reading
In the late 1960s, the screenwriter Jack Whittingham, who had collaborated on the writing of Thunderball, started to write a screenplay based on the life of Ian Fleming. Whittingham’s daughter Sylvan says: ‘He had Fleming as a Reuters correspondent travelling on that train across … | Continue reading
Some books take longer than others. In my case, I first heard about Dr. Paul Volkman – a med-school classmate of my dad who was charged with a massive prescription drug-dealing scheme that led to the deaths of numerous patients – in 2009, about a month before my 24th birthday. I … | Continue reading
I’ve always loved reading books set in mysterious houses. A great mystery is filled with ambiance, and some of my favorite novels are ones where the setting sets the tone for the book. When I was writing my new novel The House on Biscayne Bay, I wanted to honor the rich tradition … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Langan, A Better World (Atria) “An apocalyptic thriller that becomes more terrifying with every turn of the page.” –Booklist Megan Miranda, Daughter of Mine (S&S/MarySue Ricci) “Miranda, a consu … | Continue reading
McKenna Jordan is the owner of Murder By The Book in Houston, Texas, and a consultant for Minotaur Books at Macmillan Publishers. ___________________________________ Bookselling is this weird world where it’s kind of like rainbows and unicorns and magic, but it’s also a business. … | Continue reading
When I first started writing Bless Your Heart and the Evans women, it was a goodbye letter, not the start of a new series. I’d recently lost my grandmother to a brief but brutal sickness, and not long before that, my great-grandmother in one of those sudden-but-expected sorts of … | Continue reading
Nothing keeps me flipping pages late into the night like a twisty who-done-it mystery or a fast-paced thriller, but my absolute favorite genre mash up is when those elements are mixed with a little bit of magic. There’s something about the addition of magical elements that adds a … | Continue reading
The thing about the new Ripley limited series, which premiered on Netflix this week, is that its leading actor, Andrew Scott, is incredibly good. He’s incredibly good in it, and he’s incredibly good in everything. I might even say that he’s the best actor working today. We don’t … | Continue reading
April is the cruelest month, so perhaps that’s why all the thrillers coming out this month are so delightfully vicious. In the list below, you’ll find new works from top writers in the genre and some rising voices to round out the mix. You’ll also find the adage “hell is other pe … | Continue reading
Doug Liman’s “Road House” remake spends most of its runtime keeping things as sunny and breezy as its Florida Keys setting. Elwood Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal, replacing the original’s Patrick Swayze) is chief bouncer for the eponymous establishment, the kind of happy warrior who’ll … | Continue reading
There is no stronger bond in this world than family, and a caring, loving parent will do just about anything to keep his or her loved ones safe. Dive into a lake to save a drowning child, or step in front of a train to rescue a toddler who’s fallen onto the tracks. Go up […] | Continue reading
As a society we are not just interested in jewelry heists: you might even say we are obsessed with them. Books, films, TV shows abound decade after decade from Robin Hood to Lupin. From the Moonstone to the Oceans franchise. We love jewelry robberies the point that we seem to eve … | Continue reading
Over the past few years, there’s been quite a few novels popping up featuring translators solving crimes. Some of the books are by authors who themselves have experience in translation, and reward readers with their turns of phrase and tricks of prose lifted from the cadences of … | Continue reading
What makes an academic institution the perfect setting for fictional crime? Perhaps it’s because there is so much at stake when a child or young adult is exposed to a crime. A campus, whether primary, secondary or tertiary, offers the potential for a juicy closed-room thriller – … | Continue reading
Last Seen in Havana, a suspenseful addition to Teresa Dovalpage’s Havana Mystery series, was released by Soho Press in February 2024. The novel, which takes place in Havana poignantly captures the perspectives and experiences of Sarah Lee Nelson, a young woman from San Diego who … | Continue reading
Cozy mysteries are having a moment. The sub-genre is expanding and has resulted in a surge of popularity. Modern cozies maintain the core elements including a light-hearted tone, an amateur sleuth, and no graphic sex or violence. Yet they’ve become more inclusive and expanded the … | Continue reading
During the early years of the pandemic, I escaped into horror movies and books. There is something soothing about sitting at home alone in the dark, hiding from the outside world. There is a cool control to be found watching fictional evil on my computer screen, or falling asleep … | Continue reading
It was early 2021 and I couldn’t stop thinking about the eighties. For you maybe it was the seventies, or early 2000s, or whatever time it was that whisked you back to your youth, what we collectively call the good ole days, even if we can never all agree on when those days were. … | Continue reading
When I first became aware of Kellye Garrett’s work, I couldn’t wait to run out and grab a copy of her breakthrough novel Like a Sister. Who wouldn’t want to read a novel with a beginning like this: “I found out my sister was back in New York from Instagram. I found out she’d died … | Continue reading
SJ Rozan is the bestselling author of twenty novels and over eighty short stories, and editor of three anthologies. Her multiple awards include the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, Macavity; Japanese Maltese Falcon; and the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award. … | Continue reading
My first novel, For Worse, in bookstores April 2, 2024, is a domestic thriller about a vision impaired woman who’s trapped in a dangerous marriage with a husband who uses her blindness to sabotage her. Desperate for freedom, she finds an unexpected solution in a ladies chat room … | Continue reading
For more than three decades, Don Winslow has written bestselling novels about everything from the War on Drugs (with his sweeping Border trilogy) to police corruption (“The Force”) to mafia hitmen (“The Winter of Frankie Machine”). Yet even as he produced these books at an astoun … | Continue reading
Write what you know—it’s a piece of advice you hear a lot. I’m not sure how useful it is. My first novel opened with a mysterious man buying a shovel so he could help a friend dig a grave in the woods. My latest begins with an eleven-year-old girl sneaking out her bedroom window … | Continue reading
The Underhistory began with a box of old postcards. Written in the 1920s and 1930s, they were from an artist travelling Europe, notes back home to his wife and sons. They had a lovely tone to them. Even when he met royalty, his postcard said, ‘look after Mummy and we’ll get you a … | Continue reading
Rows of orange people sit handcuffed in a beige room. One of them is my mother. I squint at the TV that the bailiff has rolled in on a cart. The people aren’t orange, their jumpsuits are. My shoulder presses against my sister’s on the hardwood bench we share, our legs shaking in … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Don Winslow, City in Ruins (William Morrow) “With City in Ruins, Winslow wraps up a spectacular crime fiction trilogy: a sweeping story that morphs and expands over time.” –Washington Post Harry Dolan … | Continue reading
Some years ago, I was working on a draft of my first real mystery thriller. In the opening pages, I included a bit of description meant to establish the location of the story (my hometown, Gainesville) and the time of year (late spring, the most miserable season in Central Florid … | Continue reading
Ever since Miss Marple looked up from her knitting needles and solved her first murder, fiction has loved an unconventional amateur detective. From classic children’s adventures with sleuths like Nancy Drew or the Hardy boys, to Richard Osman’s crime solving seniors in The Thursd … | Continue reading
In a maddening twist, nearly 1/4th of 2024 has already passed. I can barely remember to date things with the correct year, let alone comprehend that it’s basically April. But it is, and I have the ticket stubs to show for it. In the last three months, I’ve seen a lot of movies. H … | Continue reading
Crime novels in translation were few and far between for the first two months of 2024, but March brings with it a deluge of mysteries and thrillers from across the globe. Below, you’ll find five highlights from the month in globetrotting literature, including a brutal French noir … | Continue reading
Two of my great literary loves are historical mystery and romance–especially when they star strong, complex, and messy female main characters. The kind that reviewers call unlikable, or spoiled, or complicated, and who sidestep completely the trap of “not like other girls.” My fa … | Continue reading
My husband, our young son, and I fostered seventeen dogs during the pandemic. Our son cried every time a dog went to their forever home. A couple who adopted one of our fosters was so touched by his devotion that they offered to give him back the dog. When he said no, they sent h … | Continue reading
When Elzabeth Fenwick’s psychological crime thriller The Make-Believe Man was published in 1963, one of the novel’s many laudatory reviewers, a young North Carolina newspaper columnist named James Alexander Dunn, in the Chapel Hill News perceptively placed his finger on the signa … | Continue reading