If you’ve spent any time at all on the singles scene, you’d be forgiven for thinking it would be easier to solve a murder mystery than actually finding ‘the one’. And as unlikely as it seems, romance novels share many of the same tropes as a good Golden Age Whodunit. Rather than … | Continue reading
There’s nothing quite like going on a vacation with a good book. And when the story is set at a resort or on a yacht, well, it’s a bonus. And it was while I was on vacation with my family, reading a great mystery set at a resort, the idea for my first travel story […] | Continue reading
Death of Mr. Dodsley, first published in 1937, is a “biblio-mystery” from a Scot who combined ministry in the Episcopalian church with a varied and successful literary career. John Ferguson was in his heyday described as “one of the most delightful stylists in the genre,” yet he … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors make their picks for the best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Nicola Solvinic, The Hunter’s Daughter (Berkley Books) In Solvinic’s debut, a decorated cop kills a man in the line of duty and is confronted with an onslaught of suppressed memo … | Continue reading
I remember seeing a clip from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet as a teenager: Kyle MacLachlan reaching down into a grassy field and discovering a severed ear crawling with ants. It was such a disturbing and surreal image that it stayed with me for years to come. Later in life, I discove … | Continue reading
With Bridgerton Season 3 hitting our screens and as we prepare to drop everything to binge-watch Lady Whistledown’s love story, it’s worth noting what the show has done to our period dramas and just how far we’ve come —no pun intended. Before Shonda Rhimes’s first season thrilled … | Continue reading
Amateur sleuths have been a staple of the mystery genre since the first detective crawled out of the ocean. But to be honest, I think there’s something vaguely condescending about the phrase—it sounds too much like dilettante or wannabe. To complicate things further, the definiti … | Continue reading
Pictures tell stories. We learn this from our earliest days. Our parents read to us—lulling us towards sleep in that sing-song cadence we know so well—and we are enraptured not only by the words, but with the images that compliment them. Sure, we may outgrow our love of picture b … | Continue reading
When considering the career of Elaine May, who turned ninety-two on April 21, 2024 and remains one of the brightest lights of twentieth-century popular culture, several superlatives come to mind. Pioneer of improvisational comedy. Award-winning actress. Peerless writer. Only the … | Continue reading
Dear Mom: I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all the bad things I did in high school when you thought I was studying. A scorching trope in thrillers is someone doing something in the past that catches up to them as an adult. Why is this so popular? Because most of us were easily able to [… … | Continue reading
Be warned that if you ever invite me for a dinner party, I’ll be taking notes about your family gossip. Not for any malicious reasons, and I won’t drop any names, but because I’ve always been enthralled with the stories behind the stories—the snippets of behavior so out of the or … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Greg Iles, Southern Man (William Morrow) “This is a genuinely terrifying book because of its plausibility—Iles perfectly captures the tinderbox that America is in the post-Trump era. . . .This is a pe … | Continue reading
Yes!!!!!! The sequel to Knives Out’s sequel Glass Onion has a title and a rough release window. The film will be called Wake Up Dead Man and it will make its premiere sometime in 2025. While the plot of the film is currently unknown, we do know that it finds Daniel Craig’s gentle … | Continue reading
The Planet of the Apes series, which has just released its tenth installment with Wes Ball’s new film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, is for my money one of the most consistent franchises in cinema history. Every entry has at minimum something worthwhile about it (even the mal … | Continue reading
You could call it Chekhov’s swimming pool: catch sight of a pristine , turquoise pool in the first act of a noir or crime film, and you’re likely to find a corpse floating in it by the third. Noir has long had a special relationship to water. As Chinatown makes abundantly clear, … | Continue reading
I now own two editions of Frankenstein whose cover illustrations prominently feature icebergs. The first one I acquired, a Broadview Edition, I bought for an undergraduate class. Its cover design is a full-page, blue-tinted, grainy photograph of a gigantic, pyramidal spike of ice … | Continue reading
I am a writer driven by rape. My first foray into fiction featured a girl charged with murder for killing her rapist in self-defense. It was about silence and the many ways society revictimizes people. It was about surviving. My debut mystery series stars a vigilante baker who ki … | Continue reading
Summer is here! Or, at least, pool season is officially starting (it’s been summer already for many of us working remotely). There are, of course, a gazillion good books coming out over the summer, and to attempt to highlight them all is a quixotic and never-ending quest. Thanks … | Continue reading
Hit Man, the new film from director Richard Linklater, isn’t really about a hit man. It’s about the myth of the hit man, or at least “the hitman-for-hire.” Yes, occasionally, mafias and shady corporations and dictatorships do seem to have assassins to sic on their enemies. But th … | Continue reading
Sometimes authors mine their own hallowed grounds, looking to the past in search of today’s treasures. In that spirit, #1 New York Times bestselling wordsmith Harlan Coben presents the long-awaited return of one of his most beloved characters in Think Twice (May 14, 2024; Grand C … | Continue reading
“The author should die once he has finished writing,” wrote Umberto Eco. “So as not to trouble the path of the text.” I’m a fan of this open approach to art and write in a way that seeks to expand rather than narrow what a book can mean to the reader. Once it’s finished, it’s […] | Continue reading
Here at CrimeReads, we love a heist, genre of crime that’s definitely a lot cooler and easier to pull off in movies. But there are heists in real life. They’re way less glamorous, but hey, so is everything. For this list, we thought we’d spotlight some of the more random and stra … | Continue reading
Dark academia is a literary genre that has its origins in Donna Tartt’s seminal 1992 novel. The Secret History is set in the elite Hampden College in Vermont where a scholarship student attempts to create a new identity among a select group of wealthy and privileged Greek scholar … | Continue reading
One day in July 2021, while failing to read yet another book during Australia’s never-ending COVID-19 lockdown— nothing much was grabbing me—I got a text message from Fred. It was short and intriguing: ‘Jess, have you heard of Dick Ellis? Look him up.’ Dad, then 74, had read a li … | Continue reading
Recently, the true crime genre has experienced a significant surge in popularity, captivating audiences with its nail-biting narratives of suspense and mystery. From bestselling books to binge-worthy documentaries and podcasts, true crime has become a true staple of pop culture, … | Continue reading
Early in my second novel, Return To Blood, one of the main characters discovers the skeletal remains of a murdered woman in the cold black sand dunes of a deserted New Zealand beach. Addison (the young woman who discovers the remains) learns that the bones she discovered belonged … | Continue reading
The sun was literally roasting Juan Martín de Albujar to death. It wouldn’t kill him, though. The hunger would do him in first. Or so he thought as his canoe drifted down a vast, uncharted river somewhere in the Amazon jungle. He hadn’t eaten for days, not since the gunpowder sto … | Continue reading
Armchair traveling is among my favorite pursuits. And little else surpasses the joy of diving into the most luxurious corners of the world via the pages of a delectable mystery. Give me all the books set in far-flung locales, especially ones exploring places I haven’t yet tread w … | Continue reading
I have long held the belief that you can tell a lot about a cowboy by the way he treats his hat; the way he wears it, and the way he treats it when he takes it off his head. The same can be said about a musician and his instrument, the songwriter and his […] | Continue reading
My father grew up in a small lumber mill town in Idaho called Potlatch, where the panhandle meets the pan. In 1953, Potlatch High School won the state championship in Track & Field. How’s that for a school with a graduating class of seven? How’s that for a school whose Track and … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Michael Bennett, Return to Blood (Atlantic Monthly Press) “Bennett highlights Hana’s struggle to reconcile the pull of her Māori roots against her inner cop, a struggle that serves as a compelling bac … | Continue reading
The first time I went to Adelaide the first thing everybody told me about the city was its specifically non-criminal antecedents. Adelaide, I was repeatedly told, is the major Australian city not originally established as a penal colony by the British. Today Adelaide is a jewel o … | Continue reading
“Aunt Betsy, what do we do with these boxes? They’re filled with paper,” my nephew shouted across the large playroom. In preparation for the estate sale, we were cleaning out my mother’s office, something that hadn’t been done in 32 years. We’d sorted through medical files, perso … | Continue reading
It’s that time of year again. There’s a new Guy Ritchie film in theaters. Last year, I went to the movies and experienced the soul-warming balm of the nearly-incoherent heist movie Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and this year, I wanted to experience that again. So, I took mys … | Continue reading
“I gave her my ugliness.” This is what I said to my editor when we first spoke about El, the protagonist of my debut novel Man’s Best Friend. El’s issues—her selfishness, her unavailability—were very much my issues in my early twenties. I was the friend who dodged phone calls, th … | Continue reading
July 5, 1915 Police headquarters, Centre Street, Manhattan The bombs came in all kinds of packages. Often they arrived in tin cans, emptied of the olive oil or soap or preserves the cans had originally been manufactured to contain, now wedged tight with sticks of dynamite. Someti … | Continue reading
The incredibly successful suspense author Harlan Coben once told me—with a chuckle—that he thought conducting research for a book was just another form of procrastination. Guilty as charged on some occasions, but in most instances the research I’ve done for all nineteen of my mys … | Continue reading
At Night Court one Christmas, John Larroquette gave me a sofa pillow embroidered with: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Larroquette, who makes the work of acting comedy and drama look effortless, gave it to me knowing it also crystalized the struggle of a writer. The real battle … | Continue reading
Chicago has produced more than a few successful African-American writers, in both the literary and sales sense, including Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Willard Motley and Sam Greenlee. Inspired greatly by Richard Wright, whose classic texts Native Son and … | Continue reading
El Nino-induced flooding of biblical proportions has inundated my home this year, which can mean only one possible thing: TIME TO READ SOME GOTHIC FICTION! It’s giving damp. It’s giving mold. It’s giving drip-drip-drip on the window pane. And the weather event causing me personal … | Continue reading
I was never a fan of science fiction. I have a vivid imagination but with the exception of the original Star Trek, there’s something about stories set on different planets, or filled with aliens or with robot point-of-views that disconnects me from the story in a way in which I c … | Continue reading
The Lavender Hill Mob, which was made in 1951, is a film of endless charm and joy. It is a caper, which is (in my opinion) the best genre. And it was made by Ealing Studios, an English production company that was formally established in 1929, though on a site that had been home t … | Continue reading
Film and television have given us a number of unforgettable serial killers to haunt our nightmares. Sometimes, their origins and crimes are inspired by the stories of real criminals in our world. Other times, offenses and offenders are conjured up entirely from nightmare ether, t … | Continue reading
There’s nothing I love more than sitting down with a queer mystery or thriller—obviously, as a writer of the genres myself! The twists, the turns, the “oh my god!” moments, there’s nothing like it. Add the riches of queer history, the complexity of queer identity, and the double- … | Continue reading
Jack Sterry sat astride the crossroads of history; at the right time and right place, he tried to shape the course of events by his actions. Sterry was part of an extraordinary group of men. Often referred to as Jessie Scouts, they were named after the wife of Major General John … | Continue reading
If the world is flat like the Internet says, then this is the edge. The mountains on either side of the Cajon Pass are crumbled and cracked ruins slumping under a starless sky. It looks like where the earth runs out, the place before no place. Not that Luke really believes the ea … | Continue reading
In the summer of 1995, I was living in a country at war. Where I kept my billet, in the westernmost province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the worst atrocities had been committed two years before my arrival. Nevertheless, it was amid the blast craters and bullet holes of Mostar, a d … | Continue reading
At seventeen thousand feet and halfway from India to China, pilot Joseph Dechene had lost both his aircraft’s engines to ice. His lumbering cargo plane was now a glider. With white, ice-laden clouds pressed tight against the glass of its windows, the cockpit was like the inside o … | Continue reading