My podcast about Crime and Suspense fiction.
This week Welcome to 2026 on Crime Wave: I have a real treat to start the new year! Ross Montgomery, the multi-award-winning children’s author has written an amazing locked room adult mystery, MURDER AT WORLD’S END. Imagine this: It’s 1910. Halley’s comet streaks toward the earth, causing fears of an Read more
This week on Crime Wave: It’s our 100th episode and award-winning novelist Lou Berney returns with CROOKS, the story of the Mercurio crime family—Buddy, a low-level mob wise guy, his wife Lillian, a charming pickpocket, and their five children. CROOKS opens in 1960s Las Vegas and then spans decades and Read more
This week on Crime Wave: In Michael Sears’ LOVE THE STRANGER, Queens attorney Ted Molloy finds himself caught between profit-driven foreclosures and the grassroots fight to stop a massive development that threatens to uproot immigrant communities trying to build a better life. But when his activist girlfriend Kenzie Zielinski becomes Read more
This week on Crime Wave: THE CHINA GAMBIT by Jeffrey James Higgins hurtles readers into a razor-sharp geopolitical thriller where loyalty is perilous and truth is a weapon. When FBI Agent Nathan Burke uncovers evidence of a covert Chinese operation poised to upend global power, he’s thrust into a deadly Read more
This week on Crime Wave: In Emily Ross’ fascinating new novel, SWALLOWTAIL, Detective Samantha Star is forced to confront her long-buried past when, twenty years after her own abduction, a brutal murder rocks her hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts. The killing—eerily marked with a blue butterfly—echoes the work of a serial Read more
This week on Crime Wave: THE SOCIETY OF UNKNOWABLE OBJECTS by Gareth Brown plunges us into a globe-trotting fantasy thriller where seemingly mundane items hide extraordinary power. When a clandestine group dedicated to guarding “unknowable objects” dispatches its newest member, Magda Sparks, to Hong Kong, she stumbles into a world Read more
This week on Crime Wave: MYOPIC DUPLICITY, edited by Jeff Circle, gathers a sharp and unsettling range of short fiction that probes the quiet tension between what we want and what we’re willing to do to get it. These stories don’t offer easy answers—they linger in the gray zones, where Read more
This week on Crime Wave: Joel Dicker’s WILD ANIMAL begins with a dramatic heist in Geneva and gradually peels back layer after layer of deception to reveal a web of obsession, betrayal, and long buried secrets. Joel is a master of exploring the tension between reality and perception, and his Read more
This week on Crime Wave: In Tom Milani’s debut novel, Places That Are Gone, Bennett Wilder’s life feels small and predictable—until a chance encounter with Liz Messina, a hitchhiker with a troubled past, jolts him from his routine. Liz is on the run, with dangerous debts and a child to Read more
This week on Crime Wave: In Midnight Burning, Paul Levine brings together an unlikely team—Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, and LAPD’s first Black female officer, Georgia Ann Robinson—to take on a deadly Nazi plot in 1937 Los Angeles. As fascist sympathizers scheme to assassinate Hollywood icons and spark insurrection, the trio Read more