George Clooney and Grant Heslov's production company Smoke House is teaming up with Argo screenwriter Chris Terrio on a crime thriller that takes place in the world of New York's crime syndicates. Paul Greengrass (Bourne movies, United 93) is in talks to direct the untitled project, while Clooney is attached to star.
Cross Creek Pictures optioned feature film rights to Lori Roy's Edgar Award-winning mystery novel Bent Road. The project, to be adapted by Mark Mallouk, centers on a man who left home in Kansas as a boy after the mysterious death of an older sister, then returns with his family 20 years later when another little girl goes missing. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)
Chris Meloni (Law & Order: SVU) has been added to the cast of White Bird in a Blizzard, from writer-director Gregg Araki. The film follows a young woman (Shailene Woodley) whose life is thrown into absolute chaos when her mother vanishes.
Screenwriter Todd Phillips (of the Hangover movies) is in talks to adapt Linwood Barclay's novel Trust Your Eyes, a hriller about a schizophrenic savant who witnesses a murder, but is not trusted by the authorities as a credible source.
TV
Orange is the New Black, the Netflix original drama based on based on a book by Piper Kerman, has added Taryn Manning (Hawaii 5-0, Sons of Anarchy) to the cast. The show follows Taylor Schilling as Piper, a Brooklyn woman who finds herself behind bars in a federal penitentiary as a result of her former college relationship with a drug runner, played by Laura Prepon. Manning will play another of the inmates, Tiffany Doggett, a born-again Christian with major anger problems who doesn't get along well with the other inmates.
Author Dennis Lehane is being added to the fourth season of HBO's Boardwalk Empire as a writer and creative consultant, joining fellow author George Pelecanos, who will executive produce the show. The duo have worked together before on HBO's The Wire.
ABC Family is developing a television series adaptation of Barry Lyga's young adult novel I Hunt Killers. The book follows the likeable teenage daughter of an imprisoned notorious serial killer, who herself becomes a suspect after a string of copy-cat murders.(Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)
Details are coming out about the characters (not yet the actors) for the spin-off of the spinoff, i.e., a new series to be launched on NCIS: Los Angeles.
AMC ordered a pilot for a scripted drama based on Alexander Rose's book, Washington's Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring.
AMC canceled the series The Killing, despite a passionate outcry from its devoted fans, and months later news came that Netflix was trying to work out a deal to revive the show for a third season. Now it appears that AMC may be changing its mind and *could* bring the show back to the network. Still, it's mostly rumors at this point.
MTV is developing the scifi-mystery drama Blackwood, based on a YA book of the same title by Gwenda Bond. DC Comic book and television writer Peter Calloway (Brothers & Sisters) will write the adaptation of the novel, which has a tie-in between mysterious contemporary disappearances on Roanoke Island and similar disappearances in the 16th-century "Lost Colony."
FX has scheduled the premiere date of season four of Justified, to begin on January 8th. (Hat tip to Crimespree.)
Sienna Guillory is joining the cast for the third series of BBC's procedural Luther, playing Luther's love interest.
Fox has cancelled its freshman drama, The Mob Doctor, scheduling its last episode for late December.
BBC America has a new trailer for its historical crime drama Ripper Street. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)
Think you're a rapid fan of the former, long-running Law & Order series? Well, one watcher helped put together a list and graphs of how all 456 episodes of Law & Order ended.
PODCASTS/VIDEO
NPR talks with Mathew Prichard, the grandson of Agatha Christie about his new book, The Grand Tour: Around the World with the Queen of Mystery. In it, Prichard edited and published the letters the famous author wrote while on on a trip around the world in 1922
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