The house remains dark, quiet, completely still, and my grip on the steering wheel tightens. This is how all those Netflix true crime docs start, I think, before the reality of the situation starts to sink in: I’ve driven into | Continue reading
Presented by Queer Crime Writers, an organization advocating for LGBTQIA+ authors. Where would you like to go this autumn? Sydney during the Depression? New York City at the turn of the century? How about the plains of Canada, or deep | Continue reading
Here are five debut crime novels, thrillers, and mysteries, all worthy of your attention. Enjoy these first forays into the published world; the start, we hope, of many. As always, blurbs are by me unless otherwise stated. * Matthew Aldrich, | Continue reading
This month, I’m recommending three very different films—Nosferatu, which I first watched ages ago and am planning to see again on the big screen for Halloween; Le Samouraï, the inspiration for the Filipino filmmaker, Isabel Sandoval’s new film, Moonglow (2026); | Continue reading
Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen King wrote both novels and short stories, Zora Neale Hurston as well, as did John Steinbeck. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is a classic, but so is his short story A Christmas Memory. Great writing | Continue reading
Twenty years after the job of “detective” was established in Britain, via the Criminal Investigation Division of the New Metropolitan Police in 1842, detectives began appearing on the stage. In Britain, the first official detective character on theatrical record is | Continue reading
Nightclubbing, we’re nightclubbing Oh, isn’t it wild? –“Nightclubbing” by David Bowie and Iggy Pop In the summer of 1981 I moved back to New York City after spending three years in Baltimore. Mom moved me and baby bro there from | Continue reading
Folk Horror is really having a moment right now, because, honestly, what’s scarier than small towns full of small people? Whether it’s a metaphor for the stifling conformity of village life or an examination in the guilt inherent in abandoning | Continue reading
October brings some of the coolest, cruelest, sharpest, nastiest fiction of the year, and the world of translated literature is no exception. The following titles are as brutal as they are beautiful, as terrifying as they are thrilling, as masterful | Continue reading
Eriq La Salle has many titles: Actor. Director. Producer. Novelist. But perhaps the one word that encapsulates them all is…storyteller. “As an actor and a director, you are handed a script. You are handed a world,” he says. “The difference | Continue reading
The following is a conversation between translator Lizzie Davis and author Desirée de Fez, as the two discuss bringing de Fez’s particular brand of body horror to English-reading audiences, and appreciate the cathartic nature of grotesquerie. Lizzie Davis: To start | Continue reading
Nothing grabs a reader’s attention faster than an embarrassing personal anecdote, so here’s mine: In the spring of 2018, I quit my day job. I’d made a deal to adapt my first novel, The Impossible Fortress, into a feature film | Continue reading
We’ve all used the term male gaze to talk about a piece of media with a male at the helm, usually pointing out ways it fell short in representing anyone who wasn’t a dude. And while I’m always happy to | Continue reading
I’d like to offer you one piece of advice. It’s just a small thing. It won’t apply to many of you – but it is important. It changed everything for me. It’s this: if you’re considering letting someone into your | Continue reading
Under normal circumstances (say at a watering hole sipping something gin-forward, or in a bookshop café petting the reigning cat), I would not commence a casual chat with, “Poe, Shakespeare, and Doyle are all inextricably linked and I’ve the facts | Continue reading
The night when I learned that I wasn’t a tough guy, I was in my early twenties, at a Motörhead show. This was in New York City, 2006. All my headbanger buddies were with me that night—except for Luke, missing in | Continue reading
Stigmatized properties are among the hardest to sell on the open market and do not often come up for full appraisal or inspection. However, given the tremendous increase in the cost of housing across the country, more and more homes | Continue reading
I’ve never been a violent person, except perhaps in my nearly violent love of literature. In fact, I’m a practicing Buddhist, so I’ve taken vows to try to do as much kindness and as little harm as possible, a day | Continue reading
I read all types of thrillers, but the ones that tend to lure me in the most usually have a gothic layer. It’s no surprise, then, that my adult debut, Please Enjoy Your Stay, is a gothic thriller that fuses | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Elizabeth Hand, Unspeakable Things (Little Brown) “A young woman learns the limits of passion in this tantalizing historical suspense novel. . . . The novel blooms | Continue reading
I have an Edgar Allan Poe-themed backpack that I bought at a bookstore and whenever I am wearing it, folks stop me to talk about Poe. Young, old, adult or teen, they share with me their favorite Poe story or | Continue reading
As someone who mostly reads novels by female authors (a group Nathaniel Hawthorne once dismissed as “that damned mob of scribbling women”), and now as a card-carrying member of that cabal myself, I’ve always been fascinated by the ways in | Continue reading
If books have all the makings of a treasure (and of course they do!), the prospect of a new story from Tom Ryan is as good as X marks the spot…. This is an indisputable truth that readers young and | Continue reading
5 new works of true crime history and reportage out this month, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. * Matt Kessler, The Wiregrass: A Tale of Murder and Retribution in the Deep South (Grand Central) “[A] searing look at the intersection | Continue reading
Is there any other kind? Depending on how you like your protagonist and your humans, there are faults enough for every reader. To enjoy the Golden Age of mysteries and the princely protagonists therein (which shaped me and which I | Continue reading
You’ll often find me in my pajamas, a mug of lukewarm coffee in one hand and a book about Dom Perignon and Dior in the other. But the reason I’m speeding through the pages is because I know that before | Continue reading
Horror is huge right now. We’re seeing it in the furious surge of female rage in books, and we’re seeing it on the screen, too, such as Curry Barker’s Obsession. But what if this rabid hunger for horror in fiction | Continue reading
Dexter: Resurrection is coming back this month, but what does that mean!? Which Dexter is THIS Dexter? Wait, HOW many Dexters are there? Well, buckle up, friends, because I’m going to take you through the different spinoffs. The original series aired on Showtime, which no | Continue reading
In the summer 1937, a fisherman spotted a giant sea monster off the coast of Nantucket. So far as we know, he was entirely sober. Returning to shore, Bill Manville did what any enterprising fellow would do in an economic | Continue reading
Back in the 1900s, we had albums and cassette tapes and, eventually, CDs, but you still couldn’t burn songs onto those in the beginning (at least I couldn’t). Regardless, those shiny discs like strange dreamcatchers came later. In my beginning, | Continue reading
So, you’re a writer? First of all, c’mere. Hugs. Being a writer is hard for so many reasons, but chief among them is that it’s hard to invent truth. It’s hard to make something up that feels real, especially when | Continue reading
Thomas Babington “Babe” Levy has it rough. He’s poor, single, and lives in a slum. He’s mocked by the street gang on his block. He grinds through long morning runs around the Central Park reservoir, lacking enough stamina to finish | Continue reading
I’m not really interested in wrestling with what defines a classic. It’s the kind of question that fills up think pieces and podcasts with bouts of teeth gnashing and hand-wringing and endless rumination on the Western canon. But let’s agree | Continue reading
Here are 10 of the best novels to come out in paperback this month, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. * Tom Ryan, We Had a Hunch (Atlantic Crime) “Ryan’s novel is as immersive as it is satisfying. A fabulously | Continue reading
Look, let’s get right down to it: horror movies scare me. They always have, since my initial viewing of Poltergeist in 1982 at the tender young age of seven or eight. Due to the fog of time, the reason I | Continue reading
The delight of an epistolary novel is the feeling of reading something you shouldn’t. Letters, yes. But take a broad definition and include emails, court filings, news clippings, archives, and it gets even more delicious. Imagine riffling through the papers | Continue reading
The title is a bit misleading as the “British” have been with us for quite some time. I doubt anyone would have anticipated the tsunami of Jane Austen’s popularity when her first film adaptations hit our shores and screens in | Continue reading
By nature, any artistic pursuit has passion poured into it, whether it’s performing on a stage under spotlights or writing locked behind a door under the cover of night. And that much passion has a dark side: competition, intense devotion, | Continue reading
Love letters were far from my mind when I began researching The Case of the Autographed Corpse, my book about the wrongful murder conviction of Apache medicine man Silas John Edwards and his partnership with bestselling mystery writer Erle Stanley | Continue reading
Featured image credit: Ephemeral New York I was perusing my usual webpages this morning when I came across a fascinating article from Esther Crain’s wonderful blog Ephemeral New York. Today’s post was about a forgotten New York City crime wave… the | Continue reading
Nearly five million people live in what was a city of the British East Africa Protectorate before Kenyan independence. Nowadays the city is emerging as the technology and AI hub of East Africa, often dubbed the “Silicon Savannah”. And Kenya’s | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Peter Swanson, Do You See What I See? (William Morrow) ““The case seems clear cut, but readers familiar with the plotting prestidigitation of Swanson (Kill Your | Continue reading
Secrets are her trade and truth is her destiny. Whether writing fictional crime stories or solving real ones, bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan—who has thirty-seven Emmys and fourteen Edward R. Murrow Awards in addition to her numerous accolades in publishing—recognizes | Continue reading
I love when a mystery knows it’s a mystery. I mean, I love when any story knows it’s a story, but I especially love it when that story is a mystery. For me, the more meta, the more playful with | Continue reading
As a reader and a writer, I crave stories with a very strong sense of place. I love when a setting is so vivid and distinctive that it shapes the story as much as the characters do. One of the | Continue reading
October is spooky season! But that doesn’t mean crime fans won’t have plenty to savor in the month ahead. In particular, October is positively stacked with heavy-hitters in the noir and gothic categories. Honestly, there’s like, barely any horror in | Continue reading
They say truth is stranger than fiction. Whoever they are, I concur. May Day, a Cold War-themed bromance starring Ryan Reynolds (spy pilot Troy “Assassin” Kelly) and Kenneth Branagh (KGB agent “Nick”) is filled with hijinks, treachery, betrayal, empathy, distrust of | Continue reading
The Wiregrass sits at the southernmost tip of the Bible Belt, beginning just south of Augusta, Georgia, and running west to Troy, Alabama, and south into the Florida Panhandle, with peanut crops and pine tree groves stretching as far as | Continue reading