Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to read queer voices, and what better way than with a page-turning thriller, an ingenious mystery, an engrossing psychological suspense, or a charming quozy? Queer Crime Writers* has curated a winter-to-spring roundup, showcasing the genre’s vibr … | Continue reading
Stories about mothers and daughters are everywhere, but the endless nuances of this intense relationship are fertile ground for thriller writers. Many of my novels address different dynamics of this relationship, but in my new thriller When She Was Gone I look at the tricky role … | Continue reading
I have high standards for vacation reads. I’ve never been one of those people who saw a trip to the beach as an excuse to read something that only required half my attention. Even if I’m reading on a plane or by the pool, I need a smart, well-written page-turner, and a couple of … | Continue reading
Season 2 of Poker Face is coming to Peacock on May 8th! And we have more good news: we now have a clip from one of the episodes… and not just an episode, but the episode in which Cynthia Erivo plays sextuplets (or quintuplets… I’m not yet clear). The episode is titled “The Game i … | Continue reading
Sharon Derrick drove an hour north on Interstate 45 through the Houston suburban sprawl and the piney woods of Sam Houston National Forest to a prison in a rural county north of Huntsville. On the way, she found herself tuning her audio system to a 1970s channel on Sirius XM. In … | Continue reading
Twenty-one years ago, National Hockey League forward Todd Bertuzzi got into an on-ice altercation with an opponent named Steve Moore. The encounter grew exceptionally violent. Moore suffered injuries that ended his NHL career. Bertuzzi went through civil and criminal litigation h … | Continue reading
Power lies at the heart of all fantasy, written or imagined. To craft a novel of the genre is to visualize an expression of power and assign it to factions that will then weave and warp over the course of the story. Yet, our ability to conjure is naturally shackled by the limits … | Continue reading
Someone was inside his home. This has nothing to do with strange coincidences. Facts present themselves as evidence, which are then catalogued and filed away for the case file labeled: Henry Richmond Pendel. He has lived in this Greenwich Village apartment for seven of the 12 yea … | Continue reading
In Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age, four friends — and lethal assassins — need to outsmart the team now hunting them. Now, they’re back, out of retirement, in Kills Well with Others. This time, they’re tasked with rooting out a mole threatening to expose their identiti … | Continue reading
Every summer my family goes camping at Sandbanks Provincial Park on the sandy shores of Lake Ontario. There is nothing we look forward to more than those hot summer days spent swimming, playing beach volleyball, hiking wooded trails, and playing charades by the campfire. We disco … | Continue reading
Novelists don’t need all the facts. We’re illusionists, after all. A little misdirection, a little sleight of hand, and suddenly the trick becomes real. Reporters don’t have that luxury. They deal in facts—or at least, that’s what they want you to think. I should know. I fall for … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption (Del Rey) “Wonderfully clever and compulsively readable . . . another winning blend of fantasy and classic detection.” –Publishers Weekly Julia Bartz, The … | Continue reading
I’ve long been fascinated by darkly feminist novels, books that keep me riveted by—and sometimes rooting for—complicated characters who embrace moral grayness and revenge, or who simply do what must be done in impossible situation. Whether you see these characters as anti-heroine … | Continue reading
I began writing about books for the New York Times in late 2023 and officially began my tenure as the horror fiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review in January on 2024. I love that gig with all my heart, but it often makes me miss something else I love with all my he … | Continue reading
Welcome to “Wait, What?,” a recurring column in which we examine confusing or incoherent details in crime movies. I was watching the bank heist scene of The Dark Knight in preparation for writing this ranking of bank heists and I was struck by something. See, the Joker has a memb … | Continue reading
As the great Jim Thompson said, “There is only one plot – things are not as they seem.” And it still holds as true today as it did for Jim, and even well before him. So who’s Jim Thompson? I hear some of you ask. (Hopefully not too many of you, because if that’s the […] | Continue reading
We asked Kevin Wade, the author of the new novel, Johnny Careless, and longtime screenwriter (Working Girl, Meet Joe Black) and showrunner (Blue Bloods), to tell us about some crime novels and movies that have been important to him along his writing journey. _____________________ … | Continue reading
In her latest novel, national bestselling author Ashley Winstead dives into the very online world of amateur sleuths. This Book Will Bury Me depicts a motley group’s investigation of gruesome slayings at a university, loosely inspired by the real “Moscow Murders” of 2022 at the U … | Continue reading
We all know her. Let’s call her Claire. She appears in many books: a woman in her late 20s or early 30s; sometimes a parent, sometimes not. She’s usually cishet and white, embroiled in a mystery or scandal. And she has a drinking problem. Sometimes her drinking is used as a plot … | Continue reading
First of all, friends, before I dive into this essay, I think we all deserve a big hug. In the past decade (?), century (?), millennium (?), we’ve watched democracy drunk drive itself into a wall, we’ve sand-walked, Dune-style, our way through a pandemic, and we’ve witnessed bill … | Continue reading
Robbing a bank is bad. It’s bad. Don’t do it. But I won’t deny that the movies make it look kind of cool. Well, not the robbery part, but the part where the robbers storm into the bank in coordinated disguises. You can’t deny it either! It is a truth universally acknowledged that … | Continue reading
These are dire times. Human rights, and especially the rights of trans folks, are under attack. And thankfully, some of the crime fiction community has come together to fight back. For the next week, leading up to the March 31st Day of Trans Visibility, over 100 crime writers are … | Continue reading
Chris Offutt has long been a “writer’s writer” acclaimed for his short story collections, memoir and novels. And though he spent his earlier career raising children and working occasionally in Hollywood, in recent years he’s been busier and more prolific than ever. Offutt’s new n … | Continue reading
Tess Gerritsen may not have been trained in the art of spy craft, but she knows a thing or two about flying under the radar. As a woman of a certain age, no matter how accomplished (30+ books published in forty countries with sales in excess of forty million copies), Gerritsen ha … | Continue reading
My new book, The Invisible Spy, is all about Ernest Cuneo, an ex-NFL football player who became America’s first spy of World War II, and how he worked secretly with Churchill’s spies at Rockefeller Center in the days before Pearl Harbor. This story tells how a mysterious Manhatta … | Continue reading
It is my earnest belief that two things will generally make a novel, if not necessarily better, at least more entertaining and/or interesting: 1. Queerness 2. A bog or a bog body (tell me that Sense and Sensibility and Bog Bodies wouldn’t totally slap, I dare you). Because I love … | Continue reading
Kill Your TV read the sticker my mother had affixed to the bumper of our Volvo station wagon. It was the early 1990s in the Bay Area, before Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates awkwardly danced on stage to celebrate the launch of Windows 95, before anyone had ever heard of something cal … | Continue reading
Honestly, who cares about books at a time like this? Not that you need me to enumerate the ways in which the human enterprise has gone completely off the rails of late, but for the purpose of establishing a who-gives-a-crap-about-books baseline, I offer an incomplete roundup of w … | Continue reading
I grew up on the North Side of Pittsburgh in the 1950s in a typical lower-middle-class family—mother, father, sister, brother—and by the time I was forty-six they were all dead. My mother was the last to go, adrift in a gentle fog of senility that seemed to spare her the heartach … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * C. B. Everett, The Other People (Atria) A labyrinthine fever dream with hidden depths and an irresistible sense of fun. –Chris Brookmyre Katy Hays, Saltwater (Ballantine) “A ride as exhilarating as th … | Continue reading
Ever since The Dream podcast premiered close to ten years ago, I’ve had a special interest in multi-level marketing businesses. You might’ve heard them called direct sales, or even, on occasion, pyramid schemes. I’m sure all of us, at some point or another, have had a friend beco … | Continue reading
Papua New Guinea, or simply PNG, sandwiched between Indonesia and Australia. A confection of over 800 languages and dialects. The capital, Port Moresby (Pom City) is generally regarded as a tough town, a hardship posting for diplomats and foreign correspondents, a potentially dan … | Continue reading
Here at CrimeReads, we ask the important questions. It’s how we’re trained. This weekend, I rewatched The Living Daylights and was struck (yet again) by the singularity of Timothy Dalton’s James Bond. This prompted a conversation between myself and my partner, comparing the diffe … | Continue reading
When I started writing The Liars Society—a twisty mystery set in the world of the New England prep school, featuring a secret society, a mysterious island, and family secrets—I set out to create a high-concept story that would excite readers of any age. My primary goal was not to … | Continue reading
I’m so old that I think of the art and science of modern-era movies according to whether they came before or after “Jaws” (1975) and “Star Wars” (1977). Partly that’s because those films made so much money that they changed the way films were marketed and released, but also becau … | Continue reading
Family secrets are the skeletons in the closet of crime and thriller fiction. They’re the whispered confessions, the buried truths, and the lies that fester over generations, only to explode into chaos when the past comes knocking. From Agatha Christie’s intricate family dramas t … | Continue reading
It’s rare to find a crime novel where nobody dies. It’s part of the genre. It’s the rock we most commonly throw in the pond, just to watch the intrigue, confusion, and drama in the ripples. It’s handled in all sorts of ways too. There’s no right or wrong here. There are riveting … | Continue reading
wi”It’s very satisfying to the human ego to discover the truth; ask Adam Dalgliesh. It’s even more satisfying to human vanity to imagine you can avenge the innocent, restore the past, vindicate the right. But you can’t. The dead stay dead.” “Life has always been unsatisfactory fo … | Continue reading
In 1857, British scholars held a contest to decipher the inscriptions on a 3,000-year-old clay artwork. Today, this would be considered a rarefied pursuit, but in Victorian London, the event enjoyed a keen audience. Mid-19th century Britons were besotted with the distant past, th … | Continue reading
It’s the puzzle of mystery novels that attracts me the most. The details that make me analyze and think critically and try to make sense of the world. But why not add a whiff of romance? Personal relationships give detective stories that extra spice to make us even more engaged o … | Continue reading
Sherlock Holmes, like many Englishmen, was wildly suspicious of the French. In the 19th Century, it was a great source of cultural anxiety in England whether to imitate or disavow French policing styles. As Sita A. Schütt notes, “It is not for nothing that Moriarty was otherwise … | Continue reading
Elon Green’s first book, Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, won the Mystery Writers’ of American Best Fact Crime Award. The book brings together a deeply researched police investigation into the serial killings of gay men in Manhattan in the earl … | Continue reading
Let me be very obvious at the start and say: a murder victim can’t tell you who the killer is. Locked-room mysteries are puzzling because the only person you’re sure was in the room is the one person you can’t ask for testimony. That’s also what makes locked-room plots such chall … | Continue reading
We’ve always been fascinated by the blurry boundary between what we call sanity and what we call madness. We think about it in our books and we think about it in our lives. All of us need sadness in our lives. It’s part of what makes us human. In Keats’ great poem on melancholy, … | Continue reading
Bunny Simpson picked a shirt off the floor and stuffed it into his bag. His boss at the cigarette store had just warned him that a pair of Denver police detectives had been looking for him. They had his DMV photo printed out and everything. “Plainclothes,” she said like the lack … | Continue reading
I first came to know you when I read your book, Sisters & Lovers, nearly 30 years ago(!!!) and I have been a fan ever since. When I heard you were now delving into romantic suspense, I thought it was a perfect co-mingling of genres for you. And now that I have read this terrific … | Continue reading
Mystery fans love ingenious misdirection in their plots, and novels can be even more mysterious when the setting itself adds layers of intrigue. Creepy old buildings have a long history in mystery fiction, and the novels I’m diving into today use architecture as a key part of the … | Continue reading
I arrived at an open gate, which invited me down a long driveway. It concluded in a dramatic semi-circle, crowned by a Tudor-style mansion. A lake gleamed behind it. There was a pergola for guests’ cars. I wondered if I should park there—was I a guest?—or at the edge of the circl … | Continue reading