0:03
Sneak peek: Searching for Maya Millete
Maya Millete, a 34‑year‑old mother of three, vanished from her San Diego home in January. Her husband, Larry, told police he’d been worried about her leaving the family, but investigators have now uncovered a far stranger motive. According to the latest findings, Larry allegedly reached out to a group of self‑styled spellcasters, paying them to place a hex on Maya that would keep her from walking away.
Detectives say the hex‑casting was part of a broader pattern of control. Text messages between Larry and the spellcasters reveal he asked for a “binding spell” and offered cash for the service. When Maya stopped showing up, the investigators linked the disappearance to that request, treating the hex as a possible prelude to foul play rather than a genuine supernatural act.
The case has now moved into a criminal investigation. Police have searched Larry’s home, seized electronic devices, and are analyzing the communications for any evidence of a crime. Meanwhile, Maya’s friends and family continue to organize search efforts and public appeals, hoping to bring her home.
If you’re following the story, the next update will air on “48 Hours” Saturday night, where the team will dive deeper into the evidence and the legal steps being taken against Larry. Stay tuned, and keep Maya in your thoughts.
0:36
Miranda Smith’s 6 Favorite Novels to Pair with Alfred Hitchcock Films
My traditional publishing debut Smile for the Cameras is a love letter to slasher movies born from my infatuation with all things cinema. For my sophomore release, Scary Movie Night, I wanted to explore a similar movie-inspired world through a different lens. Enter Hitchcock and his canon of films simmering with suspense.
Scary Movie Night is a locked-room thriller about a movie-themed birthday party gone wrong. It stars Tippi, a movie review blogger who is celebrating her thirty-fifth birthday and mourning her broken engagement. Before heading to Europe to embark on her next scene, she reluctantly agrees to reunite with old friends at her grandmother’s beautiful estate. The gathering turns sinister when she starts receiving birthday cards from her controlling ex and deteriorates further when one of the dinner guests dies under mysterious circumstances.
It’s a twisty, cinematic summer read that pulls inspiration from some of my favorite iconic scary movies. If you’re constructing your own summer reading list and love Hitchcockian themes, then check out these book recommendations inspired by the auteur’s most famous works.
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If you love Psycho, read Marion by Leah Rowan.
Hitchcock made horror history with Psycho, killing off the movie’s biggest star, Janet Leigh, in the first forty-five minutes. Have you ever wondered how the film would have unfolded if that iconic shower scene hadn’t ended with Marion Crane’s blood circling the drain?
Enter Leah Rowan’s summer blockbuster Marion. The two stories unfold in familiar fashion: Marion steals money from her employer in hopes of helping her sister and flees to a roadside motel run by a peculiar caretaker. However, in this feminist reimagining, the famous shower scene is only the beginning of the blood-soaked events that occur–and a fed-up Marion is the one wielding the knife.
If you love Rear Window, read Molka by Monika Kim.
Rear Window encompasses some great thriller elements: a frustrated, apartment-bound protagonist, a dazzling cast of side characters, and the subtle suggestion of violence. It’s a story that’s been reworked on the page and screen countless times, each iteration leaving us with questions about how much we really know our neighbors.
A modern take on the Peeping Tom to murder pipeline is Monika Kim’s Molka. This paranoia-inducing novel infiltrates the world of hidden spy cameras in Seoul and the havoc they can wreak on a person’s life. Dahye, our capable and biting protagonist, refuses to take this invasion of privacy lying down, and what unfolds is a truly unforgettable tale about voyeurism and revenge.
If you love Rope, read The Secret Dinner by Raphael Montes.
Hitchcock’s Rope focuses on two disturbed friends attempting to get away with murder all while hosting a dinner party at the scene of the crime. This one-room production filled with great performances and witty dialogue just might take the crown as my favorite Hitchcock film.
If you’re a fan of the dinner party gone wrong trope, you have to check out Raphael Montes’ upcoming novel The Secret Dinner (already an international bestseller!). At first glance, the two storylines may seem worlds apart, but I found myself admiring the overlap between stories: a group of friends with complicated histories, the heart-pounding pressure of trying to conceal a crime, a chic city setting, and multiple unhinged dinner parties.
If you love Strangers on a Train, read The Collective by Alison Gaylin.
Strangers on a Train, based on the Patricia Highsmith novel, has a brilliant premise: two strangers swap murders in the hope their involvement will remain undetectable (even if one participant is more committed than the other).
Alison Gaylin’s The Collective explores a similar philosophy. Camille’s grief over her daughter’s death turns into a fixation on the man she deems responsible. She finds herself involved with a secretive group of women that take turns enacting each other’s revenge fantasies. Nothing can go wrong if the guys getting attacked are bad people, right? Right!?
If you love them all, read The Hitchcock Hotel by Stephanie Wrobel.
Can’t decide on a favorite Hitchcock film? It’s a hard task, I know! Stephanie Wrobel’s The Hitchcock Hotel utilizes the best elements of the director’s catalog to create a completely original mystery. Alfred is the owner of a boutique hotel that pays tribute to the master of suspense (and his namesake). He invites his former college roommates to the hotel for the weekend, and a murderous revenge plot unfolds.
This book is littered with Hitchcockian breadcrumbs and sneaky twists.
If you don’t have a favorite Hitchcock film, but love the vibes, read The Spin by Faith Gardner.
Faith Gardner’s latest The Spin, a novel about a woman’s involuntary commitment to a psychiatric institute, captures the glamour and nuance of the sixties brilliantly.
2:34
The Secret Queer True Crime History Behind the Victorian Era’s Other Sherlock Holmes
In June 1898, Ernest William “Willie” Hornung began publishing the short stories that would comprise the collection The Amateur Cracksman. Hornung was at that point a relatively minor literary figure, though a well-connected one, in part by his membership of the cricket club, the Allahakbarries, founded by J.M.Barrie and whose other members included Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat) and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose beautiful sister Connie Hornung married in September 1893.
So when one notices that the dedication of The Amateur Cracksman read in full as follows:
To A.C.D.
This form of flattery
One has perhaps to sit up and pay attention.
ACD was, of course, Hornung’s brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle, already internationally famous as the creator of Holmes and Watson, and the reason for the sideways compliment quickly becomes apparent when you read the short stories within.
Each of them contains not a case, but a caper. Not a mystery to be solved, but a crime to be executed. Our hero is a tall, aristocratic, physically and mentally exceptional, singular British individual, A.J. Raffles, amateur cracksman. The greatest gentleman thief of this or any other age and the narrator of our stories is his hapless, much put-upon, intellectually and socially inferior best friend, War veteran Harry “Bunny” Manders.
Sound familiar? Flattery, indeed.
Hornung had shamelessly stolen and inverted Conan Doyle’s framework, put Holmes and Watson through a dark mirror, and outputted Raffles and Bunny – and it worked! The book became a bestseller. The characters became notorious, and Hornung himself was elevated from minor literary figure to celebrity author.
Indeed, over the next half century, Raffles and Bunny became two of the most famous, most adapted, and most talked-about literary creations of the age, standing comfortably beside Dracula, Sherlock, Dorian Gray, Peter Pan and a little bear called Pooh.
Hornung produced multiple volumes of short stories, a full-length novel, two long-running plays and then came the radio and movie adaptations, both during and after Hornung’s lifetime, culminating most memorably in David Niven’s 1939 portrayal of Raffles (pictured above), in a performance that unquestionably inspired Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.
That today hardly anyone remembers Raffles and Bunny, and that the stories are either out of print or only available in cheap public domain editions is sad, but perhaps not in itself surprising. Most literature does not survive the test of time. Even stuff massively popular in its day fades into quick oblivion decades later.
If you doubt this, try and name one thing that A.A. Milne or J.M.Barrie wrote other than the children’s books for which they are remembered. Yet in their prime they were both titans of the stage and literary worlds, churning out highbrow adult entertainment and if you told either man that today they would only be remembered for a little bear and a boy who never grew up, they would be surprised and perhaps at least in Milne’s case horrified. As, of course, was Conan Doyle, as his detective hero eclipsed all his other achievements.
Most things don’t last. None of us get to choose if we will be remembered at all or if we are what we might be remembered for. Thinking otherwise is hubris.
So in a way, perhaps the more interesting question is, why did Raffles and Bunny last as long as they did and become as famous and notorious and loved and controversial?
It cannot simply be because they were coasting off the coattails of Sherlock and Watson. There has been plenty of fanfic over the years, but little of it sticks around. Yet Bunny and Raffles did. Part of the answer is Hornung’s unquestionable talent as a wordsmith. He writes in clear, understated yet elegant Edwardian prose. His plots are of the most elaborate and beautiful clockwork, each caper humming and spinning through complex twists and turns but always sticking the landing.
I don’t think that’s the whole of it, though. There’s something else going on.
In story after story, Bunny, our well-intentioned but hapless narrator, is bamboozled by his beautiful friend into being first an accomplice and eventually a full-on burglar himself. Despite being the one telling the story, Bunny – like Watson before him – is always several steps behind his own narrative. Whilst he always tries to resist the moral corruption that Raffles so enticingly offers, Bunny nevertheless inevitably succumbs. In one tale, he robs his own parents. In another, he betrays his beloved fiancée, thus ending their union, and his chance for wedded bliss, forever.
When this happens, Raffles comments:
“So you are out of Paradise after all! I was not sure, or I should have come round before.
4:30
“Bloody Lady Agatha”: The Dark Childhood Imagination that Shaped Agatha Christie’s Fiction
Agatha was a surprise addition to the Miller family, an “afterthought,” as she would describe herself. Born on September 15, 1890, she was a child of the Victorian fin de siecle (or “end of the century.”) Her siblings, Margaret (“Madge”), born in 1879, and Louis (“Monty”), born in 1880, were eleven and ten, respectively.
Photographed with large hazel eyes and massive golden hair, Agatha was a happy child. Her autobiography, written between 1950 and 1965, recounts how much she relished the pleasures of home: piano lessons; swims in the cove; and afternoon teas of cakes and cream.
Yet beneath the sunshine, a dark imagination lurked. At age five, she began having nightmares of someone she called the “Gunman,” a uniformed Frenchman who carried a musket. Later in her youth, the Gunman would appear in her dreams to be a friend or family member, then suddenly turn into a stranger:
The dream would be quite ordinary….Then suddenly a horrid feeling of uneasiness would come….Sometimes…I would look across at a friend, or a member of the family, and I would suddenly realize that it was not Dorothy…or whoever it might be. The pale blue eyes in the familiar face met mine—under the familiar appearance. It was really the Gunman.
Her imagination developed quickly, enriched by her mother, Clara, and older sister, Madge. Clara invented bedtime stories for Agatha, almost never telling the same story twice.
When home from school, Madge would take her little sister to the theater and regale Agatha with humorous accounts of her friends and activities. Madge also loved performing in and inventing plays, and Agatha would act out roles with her.
At age ten, Agatha wrote her first poem, “The Cowslip.” Around the same time, she invented a story about the noble Lady Madge and bloody Lady Agatha, a Gothic melodrama that involved the inheritance of a castle. It was very short, Agatha would explain, because “both writing and spelling were a pain to me.”
When Clara primly suggested she shouldn’t use the word “bloody,” Agatha protested, “[b]ut she was bloody. She killed a lot of people.” And so emerged Agatha’s first portrait of a serial killer.
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Excerpted from Agatha Christie: The Mother of the Cozy Mystery, by Nancy West. Copyright 2026. Published by Adams Media. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
5:29
20 Speculative Thrillers to Get You Through the Rest of 2026
There is an avalanche of speculative fiction coming out this summer that is absolutely perfect for crime readers, so much so that there is no possible way to round it all up, but I’ve done my best to assemble some highlights!
While many of the books below count as both horror and speculative, I’m working on another soon-to-publish listicle with tons of horror releases coming out in the rest of the year. So, if you read the following list and wonder where all the vampires are, that is where the vampires will be. And ditto for worms, tradwives, demons, and other terrifying creatures that belong more in the horror category.
This list is more of an aliens, unicorns, and time travelers list. Also angels. There are a lot of angel books out this year. Probably because Daniel Kraus’s Angel Down left us all wanting more visits from the heavenly host. Or perhaps last year’s literature was so preoccupied with sexy antichrists that sexy and/or scary angels are really the only logical next step. Humans do tend to get turned on by whatever we’re afraid of, and we’re all freaking out about the end of the world these days. Bring on the horny apocalypse!
Other trends include a preponderance of alien first contact stories and technofascist dystopias, both of which lend themselves quite easily to the thriller genre. Magic appears less in this list than it will in the horror list, as everyone in books using magic these days seem to be doing so in rather nasty ways. Heists also appear a bit less than they should, simply because I didn’t have enough time to read them. But if you’re looking for epic speculative heist novels, I’ll make sure to add some—just add a comment.
Katherine Arden, The Unicorn Hunter
(Del Rey, June 2)
In 15th century Brittany, a noblewoman facing an unwanted union with a far-away lord puts in motion a clever plan to hold off the wedding: her husband-to-be must join her in a unicorn hunt in the dense, dark forest near to her castle. Soon, they find themselves transported into a magical realm beset by an ancient curse that only the lady and her wooing courtiers can break. The Unicorn Hunter takes its inspiration from the real Anne of Brittany, whose marriage to the King of France was just another method of preserving what little sovereignty her province could hold onto under the steady creep of French imperial influence, and who brought two beds to her wedding as a symbol of her independence. I think I would have quite liked Anne of Brittany—Katharine Arden certainly feels a sprightly kinship with the impish aristocrat.
Andrew Dana Hudson, Absence
(Soho, June 2)
Andrew Dana Hudson’s speculative thriller takes as premise a similar set-up to The Leftovers: people all over the world are suddenly disappearing (“popping”), and those investigating the strange occurrences (dismissively known as “depop cops”) are without a clue as to what’s responsible for the slow-moving and seemingly arbitrary disaster. When one of the disappeared reemerges, two detectives are dispatched to verify the return, and find themselves circling inexorably closer to the bizarre truths underpinning their warped reality. Absence captures the very essence of speculative fiction; when I think of the genre, I think of this book.
Naomi Kritzer, Obstetrix
(Tordotcom, June 9)
Obstetrix is one of several upcoming thrillers to examine compulsory reproduction in the post-Roe era. In Obstetrix, the last ob-gyn to perform an abortion in South Dakota is kidnapped after her acquittal and forced to play midwife to a cult. If you like this book, check out Carrying, by Samantha Josephs, in which a trans woman so stealth her family doesn’t even know finds herself impossibly pregnant, and Fallow, by Sarah Anderson, in which a company hires an in-house surrogate to eliminate a need for executive maternity leave.
Daniel Kraus, The Sixth Nik
(Saga, June 23)
Hot off the heels of his well-received Angel Down, and with several film adaptations under his belt or in the works, Daniel Kraus is having a moment, with two novels publishing this year: the self-explanatory film criticism book Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World, and the space horror novel The Sixth Nik, which completely and utterly destroyed me. In The Sixth Nik, a young girl is tasked with an epic quest to a dark truth, for a work reminiscent of Ender’s Game and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, neither of which had been read by Kraus before writing this novel (as the publisher’s introductory note has assured me).
7:19
There’s a new Series Adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards
Featured image credit: FX via The Hollywood Reporter
Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 autofictive horror novel The Shards, which is, in the words of CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief Dwyer Murphy is “genuinely excellent,” is getting a series adaptation. Veteran modern-mainstream-pulp producer Ryan Murphy is helming the project for FX, which stars Kaia Gerber and Igby Rigney, as well as Evan Rachel Wood, Wes Bentley, and Jordan Roth.
Via The Hollywood Reporter, here is FX’s logline for the show: “Set against the vivid backdrop of 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of privileged high school seniors at an elite prep school as they navigate identity, sex, jealousy, obsession and the dangers lurking beneath the surface of American adolescence.”
Ellis’s novel is an alternate memoir of his own senior year of high school. In the novel, the young aspiring novelist narrator Bret becomes obsessed with an enigmatic new transfer student, Robert Mallory, just as much as he becomes obsessed with “The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them — and Bret in particular — with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence.” Robert’s appearance, and the Trawler’s intensity, seem to correlate… so Bret becomes increasingly suspicious that Robert might be the mysterious killer, or at least, is not all that he seems.
Rigney, a veteran of the Flana-verse, plays Bret, while Homer Gere (son of Richard Gere and Carey Lowell) plays Robert.
Here’s the new trailer:
The Shards will air its first two episodes on Wednesday, Aug. 5 at 9 p.m. ET on Hulu and FX.
