I read a lot of books each year. If I bought each book I read it would put a serious dent in our budget. Luckily, if you know where to look there are a lot of options, both online and offline, to get free (or heavily discounted) quality mysteries and thrillers.
Here are my 5 favorite places to hunt down free mystery and thriller books.
A friend who is an avid reader recently told me she was disillusioned with the triller genre. As an action/thriller writer this made me a bit sad but with further reflection, I’m not sure she meant exactly what she said. I don’t think she was disillusioned so much as disappointed.
I think she actually liked psychological suspense or literary suspense and was approaching thrillers with the same expectations. That’s one way to walk away disappointed in a book.
Each genre has certain conventions, expectations, and necessary scenes to make for a satisfying reading.
Final tally, or close to it, I might squeeze in another book or two, for books read in 2018: 82. I read a lot of commercial thrillers this year, even for me, as I wanted to really try to dig in and look at the mechanics of the genre for my own writing.
This was also the year I took a break from podcasts and tried more audiobooks, mostly while I walked Dash. I ended up listening to 21 books on audio, which accounts for the jump in total books read. I’m usually around 60 or so, about a book a week on average.
So what books left an impression? What are the books I can still remember months later? These are my favorite reads of 2018.
As I’m getting back into my own writing, I’ve been reading or listening to a lot of thrillers and mysteries and trying to analyze the books by what I’m learning from The Story Grid. Why is it written this way? Why is it structured this way? Where is the turning point?
I know it’s a good book when I’m flipping pages and forgetting to ask those questions. That’s the type of book I’d like to write some day.
Calling these classics might be pushing the definition a bit, but they were all written more than 15 years ago and I think they all hold up really well and would likely find bestsellers lists again if they were released today.
If you find yourself in a used bookstore in a beach town this summer, you could do a lot worse than picking up one of these five classic thrillers to read while soaking up some sun.
