It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:
THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES
Apple Original Films is developing the thriller, Echo Valley, from a script by Mare of Easttown creator, Brad Ingelsby. Sydney Sweeney and Julianne Moore are attached to star, with Michael Pearce directing. Moore plays Kate Garrett, who is reeling from a personal tragedy and spends her days boarding and training horses at Echo Valley Farm, a secluded, picturesque property in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Late one night, her wayward daughter, Claire (played by Sweeney), arrives at her doorstep, frightened, trembling, and covered in someone else’s blood. As the logline states, "from that simple premise, Echo Valley becomes a heart-pounding thriller about just how far a mother will go to save her child."
Jason Clarke, Scott Eastwood, and Chaske Spencer have joined the cast of Wind River: The Next Chapter, the sequel to Taylor Sheridan’s 2017 crime drama. Kari Skogland will direct from a screenplay by writing partners Patrick Massett and John Zinman (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Friday Night Lights). Starring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen (who are not returning for the sequel), the 2017 film followed a seasoned hunter who helped an FBI agent investigate the killing of a young woman living on a Wyoming Native American reservation. The sequel also takes place on the Wind River reservation, where a series of ritualistic murders remain unsolved. Chip Hanson (Martin Sensmeier, reprising his Wind River role) is a newly minted tracker for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service recruited by the FBI to work on the case. He soon finds himself in the middle of a conflict between the law, a vigilante, and the reservation he calls home.
TELEVISION/STREAMING
David Kane, the lead writer on the BBC’s Shetland, is developing Denise Mina’s Morrow book series into a multi-season TV show. Set in Glasgow, the series consists of five books and follows DS Alex Morrow, a formidable detective who can’t face talking to her husband or bear to sleep in the family home following a recent trauma. In season one, titled Still Midnight, as Morrow investigates a crime with partner Det. Sgt. Grant Bannerman, questions arise about whether their ambitious Machiavellian boss has their backs. Morrow doesn’t have a broadcaster attached yet but Kane envisages it running for multiple seasons.
Scottish producer STV Studios has landed TV rights for Natali Simmonds’s debut, Good Girls Die Last, which will be published later this year. Good Girls Die Last is a darkly comic, feminist thriller, telling the story of Em "who, on the day of a record-breaking heatwave, is in a race against the clock to escape a gridlocked London while a serial killer stalks the streets. Em’s life has always been full of men having their own way and today, the scorched city is teeming with them but, as her troubled past returns to haunt her, she refuses to let them win."
In another blow to Hulu’s series adaptation of The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, Todd Field has exited the project on which he was to serve as director and executive producer. News of Field’s departure from the show comes just days after it was reported that series star, Keanu Reeves, had bowed out as well. The book tells the true story of Daniel H. Burnham, a demanding but visionary architect who races to make his mark on history with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and Dr. H. H. Holmes, America’s first modern serial killer and the man behind the notorious "Murder Castle" built in the Fair’s shadow. This is the latest chapter in the long development history of the book, which at various times has seen Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, and Martin Scorsese attached to the project.
HBO announced that season four of Bill Hader’s Barry will be its last. The series follows the misadventures of the titular character, a hired assassin who dreams of becoming an actor. The more he tries to move away from L.A.’s seedy underbelly the deeper it consumes him — and affects everyone around him. In Season 3, Barry is fully committed to untangling himself from the murder business to follow his passion to act full time. But that proves to be a job in and of itself because he knows too much. The cast also includes Henry Winkler, Stephen Root, Michael Irby, Anthony Carrigan, and Sarah Goldberg.
Hallmark Movies & Mysteries will continue its popular Aurora Teagarden Mysteries without longtime star Candace Cameron Bure, giving a green light to the prequel, Aurora Teagarden Mysteries: Something New that will premiere later this year. Skyler Samuels will take over the lead role as young Aurora, while Evan Roderick will play young Arthur and Marilu Henner will reprise her role as Aida Teagarden. Something New is set in Aurora Teagarden’s post-college days when she finds herself back home in Lawrenceton. While her mother, Aida (Henner), struggles to keep her new real estate business, Aurora supports herself by working as a teacher’s assistant in a crime fiction class, and waitresses at the local diner at night, where she shares her love of researching true crime with her friend Sally and police officer Arthur (Roderick). Bure began starring in the films in 2015; her last one, Aurora Teagarden Mysteries: Haunted by Murder, aired in February of last year.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO
It Was a Dark and Stormy Book Club featured the novel, The Hunter, in which reckless behavior costs former NYPD detective Leigh O’Donnell her job and her marriage. The book is by Jennifer Herrera, a former philosophy grad student turned literary agent and now author.
With Katie McLain Horner on vacation this week, Liberty Hardy joined Kendra Winchester on Read or Dead to discuss middle grade mysteries.
Cara Black stopped by Speaking of Mysteries to talk about Night Flight to Paris, the follow up novel to Three Hours in Paris, which introduced readers to Kate Rees, the Oregonian sharpshooter whose considerable skills are put to work by England during World War II.
The latest episode of Criminal Mischief : Forensic Science for Crime Writers featured Dr. DP Lyle discussing "evidence classification."
On the Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine podcast, Martin Limón's duo of military detectives George Sueño and Ernie Bascom were on the case again in "Kimchi Kitty," trying to solve the disappearance of a Korean country music star.
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