The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best crime anthologies released in 2023. * Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (eds), Never Whistle at Night (Vintage) “Spine-tingling and suggestive storytelling. . . . Entertaining and thought-provoking, especially in its … | Continue reading
It’s that time of the year again, and, no, I’m not talking about the holidays. I’m talking about year-end-list time. Just like the holidays, year-end lists can be anxiety inducing, especially for authors. So, as a reprieve from everybody and their Uncle Bob’s “Favorite Books of … | Continue reading
I’ll say it again: I actually can’t believe I found another ten crime movies that take place at Christmas. I really, really thought I had scraped the bottom of the barrel last year, rustling up things like “Psycho because there are Christmas decorations in Phoenix while Marion Cr … | Continue reading
At its heart, Blood Betrayal is a novel about fathers and how they shape our sense of belonging. Two separate police shootings take place in the novel: that of Duante Young, a Black graffiti artist, and the killing of Mateo Ruiz, a gifted Latino musician who is shot during a drug … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the year’s best true crime books. * Jillian Lauren, Behold the Monster (Sourcebooks) This startling new book uncovers the crimes of serial killer Samuel Little. Through her many conversations with Little and meticulous research, La … | Continue reading
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 no … | Continue reading
On Oak Island, everybody gets up early. By dawn, with the fog turning into a drizzle, the crew is hard at work. I’ve taken refuge inside the rusted hulk of an old tank car, where I can take notes without the ink smearing. Up the hill, men cluster around a drilling rig that is pou … | Continue reading
It was a very good year for movies. It seems like everyone made a movie, this year. We got new movies from veteran auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Michael Mann, Sofia Coppola, Paul Schrader, Todd Haynes, Kelly Reichardt, Christopher Nolan, Alexander Payne, Ava DuVernay … | Continue reading
Growing-up in upper Manhattan, on 151st Street between Broadway and Riverside, I always thought of my neighborhood as Harlem or Sugar Hill. Mom, who’d lived in the area since the mid-1950s, referred to it as Hamilton Grange, named after the post office located on 146th between Br … | Continue reading
Looking for a gift for the mystery lover who adores a smart heroine whose adventures will viscerally transport the reader somewhere else? Someone who loves the Miss Marple mysteries as much for their doilies as detection, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski books as much for their to … | Continue reading
Vivian Parry, the main character of Alexis Soloski’s Here in the Dark, is a perceptive theater critic for a New York magazine. She’s tough on hammy actors, but even harder on herself. Despondent since her mother’s sudden death, Vivian is a self-proclaimed “abyss where a woman sho … | Continue reading
Monk has returned! That’s right! An original Monk movie, entitled Mr. Monk’s Last Case, has just been released. And to mark this momentous release, our editor Olivia Rutigliano sat down with star Tony Shalhoub and series creator Andy Breckman, who also wrote the new film. Mr. Mon … | Continue reading
Those familiar with Game of Thrones will recognize the hallmarks of “grimdark” storytelling. In a grimdark world, morals are flexible. Dark aesthetics and gritty details dominate. Today’s hero could be tomorrow’s villain, if external circumstances change. Given the headlines of t … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors make their picks for the best noir fiction of 2023. (As is our annual tradition, we decline to define ‘noir’ even for the purposes of this exercise, because who knows, it’s just sort of a feeling, don’t you think?) * Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace (Zando, G … | Continue reading
So there you are, sitting in a cozy café in Odense, the hometown of the great fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen, enjoying a flaky Danish pastry and a strong coffee. As you gaze out the window at the old, charming city streets, an unsettling thought pops into your head: Wha … | Continue reading
Well, it’s a horrible year in world history, but it’s a great year in international fiction! Specifically, international thrillers and noir. France and the Scandinavians are, as usual, well-represented on this list, and there’s also a great showing from South American writers and … | Continue reading
Movies are loud. They are often written and written about in clamorous verbiage: they leer and loom, assault, pummel, and thunder. They are religion and sex strapped together into a rig of worshipful attention, all spectacle satiation and ritual subjugation. Before every contest, … | Continue reading
The couple walked on the beach at Santa Monica that September afternoon in 1903, then stopped at a shop to buy postcards. Once they were back in their suite on the third floor of the oceanside Arcadia Hotel, Tina Griffith began to pack – they were heading home to Los Angeles in t … | Continue reading
Nearly a decade ago, I fell in love with the twelve, out-of-print, Hardman crime novels by the late Ralph Dennis… an obsession that led me to acquire the copyright to his work, published and unpublished, and to co-found Brash Books, a publishing company to get his novels back int … | Continue reading
After two decades of making our living as mystery authors, we thought, hey, we must have done something right. If you think so, too (or you’re simply curious), read on. Just to be clear. This is not a list of mechanical techniques. Much has been written on genre tropes and tricks … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the year’s best espionage fiction. * Javier Marías, Tomás Nevinson Translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Knopf) A half-English, half-Spanish spy gets pulled into his old tricks after a years-long retirement by his mysterious mentor in … | Continue reading
Many thanks to Jyoti Guptara and Thomas Locke for kindly offering a conversation about their new thriller, Roulette. Jyoti Guptara: Thomas, remember when you visited me at the UN in Geneva? You arrived with this brilliant story seed: “What appears to be a simple case of overdos … | Continue reading
My latest novel, The Fiction Writer, is a modern-day gothic mystery that explore the boundaries of creative freedom. It asks questions about writing and ownership and who owns the right to tell any story. My main character, Olivia, is a writer, whose most recent novel, a retellin … | Continue reading
“Mr. Rawlins?” Niska Redman, our office manager, was standing at the door. “Yeah?” “That woman, Miss Stoller, the one Mrs. Blue wanted you to talk to. She’s here.” Niska was tallish for a woman at that time, maybe five nine, and brown like the lighter version of Sees caramel cand … | Continue reading
It’s been fourteen years since we last saw Adrian Monk. Monk, the anxious, observant detective protagonist of the USA Network series of the same name, which ran eight seasons from 2002 to 2009, was a prime-time treasure, one of the greatest detectives in the annals of TV. Played … | Continue reading
I am sad to report that we lost author Tim Dorsey at the end of November. He died at his home in Islamorada in the Florida Keys at age 62 – far too young, if you ask me. Tim, a bear-sized guy who frequently wore colorful tropical shirts, was the rare writer who was as […] | Continue reading
Wow, this was a hard list to compile–I don’t know that I’ve ever seen as many great new psychological thrillers come out in a single year. I had to physically restrain myself from adding at least ten more titles, or getting bogged down in crafting a notable list, because I wanted … | Continue reading
“There was no call for him to be as unkind as he was,” says famed author Patricia Cornwell, who single handedly created the forensic science crime fiction genre. Robert Merritt, the theater and arts critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1989, trashed his fellow Richmonder’s f … | Continue reading
The young adult mystery continues to thrive, along with plenty of YA horror thrillers, and this year was distinguished by quality storytelling, careful constructions, and social justice elements placed front and center. Whether you want to defeat the monsters or be the monster, s … | Continue reading
I’ve always been passionate about American history, especially the Revolution and founding of the United States. When I think of what immigrants endured just to travel to our shores, it gives me chills and waves of gratitude at the same time. When I was about 13, the John Jakes B … | Continue reading
Every story has to start somewhere. And be somewhere. Take Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel, Mystic River. Its setting is so pivotal to the plot that you can find it right there in the title. As it happens, Mystic River is a real river in Massachusetts, coursing seven miles through the … | Continue reading
“It seems fairly evident that the selection of such simple terms must to a certain extent depend upon the chief interests of a people; and where it is necessary to distinguish a certain phenomenon in many aspects, which in the life of the people play each an entirely independent … | Continue reading
Conflict lies at the heart of all mystery and suspense, and what could be more conflicting than taking a trip to paradise only to get caught up in the dark and deadly underbelly you didn’t know was there? Imagine your favorite or most desired vacation mecca, somewhere beautiful, … | Continue reading
Back when I was a newspaper reporter, I was hanging around our local prosecutor’s office when an investigator for the prosecutor was fondly recalling his days as a police officer and how cops would interrogate someone by holding their head underwater in the toilet in a police hol … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the year’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Paz Pardo, The Shamshine Blind (Atria) Paz Pardo’s The Shamshine Blind is a heady mix of high-concept speculative fiction, alternative history, and hardboiled detective … | Continue reading
Hello everyone. It’s been a hell of a year. I’m exhausted, you’re exhausted. I bet you just want to curl up on your couch and watch TV under a blanket until you gently fall asleep. Well, the good news is, CrimeReads can at least help with that. There were a lot of new crime shows … | Continue reading
I never met my paternal grandmother. She died before I was born, but from a few family photos, I formed a picture of a smartly turned-out woman with warm brown eyes, a wavy, blunt-cut bob and a weakness for silk scarves. Deeply respected in her small north-eastern England mining … | Continue reading
Have you read Dan Simmons’s The Terror – and are you looking for more reads which combine gruesome survival horror with a creepy supernatural element? Have you been binge-watching Yellowjackets, and looking for something to tide you over until the next season? Well, this just so … | Continue reading
If you’re anything like me, you’ll find the winter evenings perfect for immersing yourself in a little dark academia. Whether you enjoy the prestigious school settings, the thrown-together friendships that shouldn’t work but do, or simply the higher education of it all, there is … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors make their picks for the year’s best fiction. * Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women (Simon & Schuster) Jessica Knoll’s brilliant, blistering third novel is a tart new addition to the growing oeuvre of novels critiquing our fetishization of serial killers and … | Continue reading
In the late 70s my family emigrated to Toronto and stayed for two years. In those days, downtown was notorious for its Sin Strip. Four blocks concentrated on Yonge between Gerrard and Dundas. They were loaded with strip joints, adult bookstores, rub ‘n’ tugs and movie theatres wh … | Continue reading
The Penguin contract with the army for the Forces Book Club was a coup Allen Lane plotted with long-time crony Bill Williams, now comfortably installed at the Army Bureau of Current Affairs: it brought with it a precious allocation of paper from the government reserve. The news o … | Continue reading
People love to share vacation photos on social media. Some try to act nonchalant about their expensive getaways. Others aim to impress. The more remote the location, the better. Wait, you’ve never been to New Caledonia? You should go. It’s beautiful this time of year. That’s a … | Continue reading
There has long been a discussion of whether or not a reliable narrator in fiction is something that truly exists. Since humans are prone to biases and judgment, a purely reliable narrator just isn’t possible. Rather, degrees of reliability in literature might be a more realistic … | Continue reading
In 2023, two new novels, and one older title, were published in a niche of the detective/thriller genre concerning, to coin a term of art, “sinister films:” films—often lost, frequently silent, and usually scary—that have proven deleterious to their cast and crew during and after p … | Continue reading
“Thou shalt not kill,” commands the King James Bible— without, as opponents of capital punishment like to point out, riders or qualifiers. Curiously, this translation of an injunction in the ancient Hebrew Torah did not lead the list of Yahweh’s rules; it arrives after other warn … | Continue reading
The sudden arrival of a horseman on a Friday afternoon electrified New Haven. Israel Bissell leapt from his saddle and shouted for the village selectmen. His eyes bulged with news. Citizens came rushing to the green at the center of the prosperous Connecticut seaport. Bissell, hi … | Continue reading
Cats and cozies go together like Romeo and Juliet. Mac and cheese. Ernie and Bert. The term cozies was coined in the 1990’s for mysteries that take place in a small town setting where everyone knows everybody and the murders, which occur offsite, are solved by an amateur sleuth. … | Continue reading