In Reference to Murder

Media Murder for Monday

It's Monday again, which means it's time for the latest roundup of crime drama news:

AWARDS

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced the nominees for the 2019 Golden Globe Awards for both film and television. Some of the big-screen crime drama nods include a Best Picture nomination for BlacKkKlansman (based on the real story of an African American police officer who infiltrated the Klan) and also its star, John David Washington, and director, Spike Lee; and Best Actress honors to Nicole Kidman, for the crime drama Destroyer, and also Melissa McCarthy, who played a forger in Can You Ever Forgive Me?

On the TV side, The Americans, Bodyguard, Killing Eve, Homecoming, The Alienist, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Escape at Dannemora, Sharp Objects, and a Very English Scandal were all nominated for Best Drama or Limited Series. You can find the complete list via this ink.

The New York Film Critics also handed out their awards for film in 2018. Can You Ever Forgive Me? was a big winner with the online critics group with Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant winning Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor respectively.

THE BIG SCREEN

Fox 2000 has acquired the best-selling novel Where the Crawdads Sing, described as a mixture of a crime thriller and a coming-of-age tale, and has tapped Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine to produce a feature film adaptation. The story is set in a small southern town where a young woman named Kya raises herself in the marshes after she is abandoned by her family. After her former boyfriend is found dead, Kya becomes the prime suspect in his murder.

Fimmaker Cary Joji Fukunaga announced that Spectre actress Lea Seydoux and regular 007 castmembers Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw and Naomie Harris are returning for Bond 25. Seydoux played psychiatrist Dr. Madeleine Swann in Spectre who works at Austrian clinic and has an affair with Mr. Bond. She is arguably the first Bond girl to reprise a role in a picture (although Maud Adams played different characters in separate films). Fiennes will continue on as Bond’s crusty MI-6 boss, Whishaw as the famed tech gadget guru Q, and Harris as 007 sidekick Moneypenny. TMGM plans to release the film on Feb. 14, 2020.

Stefano Sollima (Sicario: Day of the Soldado) is in talks to direct Without Remorse, based on the Tom Clancy novel that serves as the origin story of John Clark, to be played by Michael B. Jordan. The film will be the first of two novels (the other being Rainbow Six) that Paramount is adapting based on the character from the Jack Ryan universe.

Antoine Fuqua is developing and may direct the historical-action epic, The Devil Soldier, based on Caleb Carr's bestselling novel which is described as "an American version of Lawrence of Arabia, set in 19th century China." Carr’s bestseller The Alienist was turned into a hit limited series for TNT.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Starz has acquired the eight-episode crime drama series Dublin Murders, adapted from Tana French’s first two novels in the Dublin Murder Squad crime series, In The Woods and The Likeness. Dublin Murders follows Rob Reilly (Killian Scott) – a smart-suited detective whose English accent marks him as an outsider – who is dispatched to investigate the murder of a young girl on the outskirts of Dublin with his partner, Cassie Maddox (Sarah Greene). Reilly is pulled back into another case of missing children and forced to confront his own darkness even as Cassie is sent undercover for another murder case and forced to come face to face with her own brutal reckoning.

ABC, which is rebooting its iconic series NYPD Blue, is also looking to bring back another 1990s New York cop drama, Dick Wolf’s New York Undercover. Created by Wolf and Kevin Arkadie, New York Undercover aired on Fox for four seasons, between 1994-98. It starred Malik Yoba and Michael DeLorenzo as two undercover detectives in New York City’s Fourth Precinct and was the first police drama on American television to feature two people of color in the starring roles.

Quantico star Pearl Thusi is set to star in Queen Sono, Netflix's first African original series. Thusi will play a highly trained spy in a South African agency in the series.

Apple is in advanced talks to buy rights to the gritty Israeli TV show Nevelot (English translation: "Bastards") and adapt it for the U.S., beating out bids from competitors including Showtime, FX and Amazon. The show's plot involves two military veterans who go on a youth-focused killing spree because they believe today's kids don't understand the sacrifices of their generation. Richard Gere is also in talks to star in the series.

Oscar winner Brie Larson is finalizing a deal to star in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the new film adapted from Iain Reid’s 2016 novel and directed by Charlie Kaufman for Netflix. The story centers on Jake, who is on a road trip to meet his parents on their secluded farm with his girlfriend (Larson), who is thinking of ending their relationship. When Jake makes an unexpected detour leaving her stranded, a twisted mix of palpable tension, psychological frailty and sheer terror ensues.

Netflix has renewed Narcos: Mexico for a second season, an announcement that comes just three weeks after the first season’s Nov. 16 premiere. The series charts the origins of the country’s drug war through the rise and fall of the Guadalajara Cartel under Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo (played by Diego Luna). Season 1 follows Gallardo as he unites Mexico’s disparate smuggling organizations into the country’s first global drug empire, while DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena’s (Michael Peña) efforts to expose the operation lead him to a horrific outcome with decades-long geopolitical consequences.

Desmond Chiam (The Shannara Chronicles) has been tapped as one of the male leads opposite Poppy Montgomery in Reef Break, ABC’s 13-episode summer crime drama. Reef Break is described as "a sexy, action-packed drama" starring Montgomery as Cat Chambers, a thief-turned-fixer for the governor of a stunning and seductive Pacific Island paradise. Desmond will play Jake Wyatt, a detective on the island who knows his way around a life-or-death scenario. After a one-night stand as strangers, Wyatt and Cat (Montgomery) suddenly are working on a case together — a scenario he’s not quite prepared to handle.

NCIS: New Orleans will welcome LeVar Burton, best known as Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation, for a guest starring role playing Rufus Nero, a Naval intelligence agent who works with Pride's team after a deadly virus is stolen. Cooperation between Rufus and the agents is imperative, given that this is a rare virus that could do a lot of damage if not recovered as quickly as possible.

Netflix has released the trailer for their upcoming docuseries The Innocent Man. Based on the 2006 non-fiction book by John Grisham, the six-part documentary series focuses on two murders in Ada, Oklahoma in the 1980s and the dubious means to which the convictions were obtained.

There's also a new trailer for the forthcoming Netflix action-drama Triple Frontier, about a group of former Special Forces operatives played by Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, and Pedro Pascal.

The riddle of Raymond “Red” Reddington (James Spader) is the central question for NBC’s The Blacklist as it returns for Season 6 and the just-released trailer suggests that the master manipulator of the underworld may be behind bars for a while.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The Guardian Books podcast sat down with Sara Paretsky, author behind the iconic Detective VI Warshawski, to discuss her latest book in the long-running crime series, Shell Game.

The latest episode of Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast is a Christmas-set feature, the first chapter of the mystery novel Ruined Stones written by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer, which is read by actor Paddy Myers.

Two Crime Writers and a Microphone hosts Steve Cavanagh and Luca Veste delved into the "hot" topic of sex in crime fiction. They're joined by top crime writers Steph Broadribb, Mark Edwards, and Susi Holliday. They discuss the do's and don't's of sex scenes in crime fiction, share some of the best and worst examples, and the results of the incredibly scientific poll carried out among crime fiction readers.

Debbi Mack interviewed crime writer Paul Heatley on the latest episode of the Crime Cafe.

Read or Dead hosts Katie McClean and Rincey Abraham had a quick round up of some adaptation news and some holiday recommendations from readers.

Det. Adam Richardson discussed twins' DNA, Massive Parallel Sequencing, the First 48 hours of an investigation, and discovering your characters, in the latest Writer's Detective Bureau podcast.

GAMES

The immersive entertainment company Nomadic and virtual reality games publisher VRWERX are teaming to develop an adrenaline-laced virtual reality experience based on Paramount’s hit film franchise Mission: Impossible. The location-based game, which is scheduled to open next spring in Orlando, will bring players inside a mission and give them the vicarious thrills of pursuit—running, jumping and interacting with objects in a physical space that’s enhanced through virtual reality.

Media Murder for Monday

It's Monday again, which means it's time for the latest roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN

Eric Bana (star of the Bravo series Dirty John) will star in an adaptation of Jane Harper's bestselling novel The Dry. Robert Connolly will direct the Australian production from a script he wrote with Harry Cripps. The Dry won the Ned Kelly Award for best first crime fiction in 2017 and was voted best crime and thriller at the 2018 British Book Awards. The story centers on a policeman who returns to the country town he grew up in to investigate a murder-suicide.

Saban Films has obtained the U.S. distribution rights to Nomis, the David Raymond directorial debut that stars Henry Cavill and Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley. The psychological thriller, which has its world premiere as the closing night film at the LA Film Festival, also stars Alexandra Daddario, Stanley Tucci, Minka Kelly, and Nathan Fillion. The plot follows Marshall (Cavill), a weathered Lieutenant, and his police force as they investigate a string of female abductions and murders linked to an online predator. When new leads emerge and the case unravels, Marshall teams with local vigilante (Kingsley) in pursuit of vengeance.

Robert Patrick is in talks to join Liam Neeson and Kate Walsh in the action thriller, Honest Thief. In the film, written by Steve Allrich and Ozark co-creator Mark Williams, career bank robber Tom Carter (Neeson) meets the love of his life in Annie (Kate Walsh), who works at the front desk of a storage facility where he hid $7 million in stolen loot. They fall head over heels, and he resolves to wipe the slate clean by turning himself in but when the case is turned over to a crooked FBI agent, everything becomes far more dangerous and difficult. Patrick will play the FBI agent who sets up the story.

Lionsgate announced that the third installment of Gerard Butler’s "Fallen" series, Angel Has Fallen, will be released on August 23, 2019. The film sees Butler return as Secret Service agent Mike Banning, who finds himself framed for an assassination attempt on U.S. President Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman). Pursued by his own agency and the FBI, he must find the real threat to the president’s life, uncovering a plot to hijack Air Force One.

A retrospective of filmmaker Jacques Tourneur is heading to New York City December 14 - January 3. His notable works in the horror and mystery genre include the espionage thriller Berlin Express, starring Robert Ryan and Merle Oberon; Night of the Demon, a slow-burning chiller about witchcraft in contemporary England; the brooding, menace-edged Circle of Danger, starring Ray Milland; and the psychological mystery Experiment Perilous, starring Hedy Lamarr as the disturbed wife of a wealthy man who may—or may not—be going mad.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

NBC has put in development Prism, a Rashomon-inspired drama. Written by Daniel Barnz, who also directs, Prism is a provocative exploration of a murder trial in which every episode is told through the perspective of a different person involved. Driven by an ensemble of complicated and original characters, the show will explore bias in the criminal justice system and let the audience ask if truth matters less than who can tell the most compelling story.

The BBC is developing a drama based on David Burke’s book The Spy Who Came In From The Co-Op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage. It follows one of the most important Soviet spies of the 20th century, Melita Norwood, a member of one of a communist spy networks in Britain who helped shorten the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb project by up to five years.

Netflix continues to roll out international scripted projects and has ordered a prequel series based on Henning Mankell's best-selling Kurt Wallander novels from Yellow Bird UK. The six-part series will feature a British and Swedish cast and will go into production in 2019. The project will tell the story of the young Detective Kurt Wallander's first case.

Netflix has also commissioned the 12-part series Criminal, from Killing Eve writer George Kay. The show is set across four countries, France, Spain, Germany and the UK, with three episodes per country. Criminal takes place exclusively within the confines of a police interview suite, and is described as "a stripped down, cat-and-mouse drama that will focus on the intense mental conflict between the police officer and the suspect in question."

Acorn TV has acquired the true crime drama Manhunt from ITV, which stars Martin Clunes (of Doc Martin fame) as Detective Colin Sutton, the police officer who tenaciously pursued British serial killer Levi Bellfield.

YouTube has given a pilot order to drama Dark Cargo, written by Adam and Max Reid (Sneaky Pete). Dark Cargo is described as a "high-octane, cliffhanger-driven, neo-noir thriller set in the big rig cab of Joe Dobbs as he traverses the darkest nights of his life. What begins as a random encounter with a disturbed stranger turns into a race against time, the police, and even more malevolent forces. All the while, Joe just wants to get back to his family."

Donald Sutherland has joined Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant in HBO’s upcoming drama series The Undoing. Based on the book You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz, the six-episode series stars Kidman as Grace Sachs, a successful therapist with a devoted husband (Grant) and young son who attends an elite private school in New York City. Overnight a chasm opens in her life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only a chain of terrible revelations. Sutherland will play Franklin Renner, Grace’s father, a retired financier and loving grandfather, who is tasked with protecting his family when the turbulent revelations come to light.

George Eads will be leaving the CBS drama MacGyver, where he's co-starred since the pilot. According to Deadline, although his character, Jack Dalton, is being written out, he is not being killed off, with the door left open for Eads to possibly return as a guest star. The official reason for his departure is that he wanted to spend more time with his daughter in Los Angeles, especially after production on the show moved to Atlanta.

Alona Tal (SEAL Team) is the first actor cast in ABC’s pilot NYPD Blue, a new iteration of the iconic cop drama. Tal will play Detective Nicole Lazarus in the sequel, which revolves around Theo, the son of Dennis Franz’s Detective Andy Sipowicz character from the original series, who tries to earn his detective shield and work in the 15th squad while investigating his father’s murder. 


A trailer was released for the TNT limited series, I Am the Night, starring Chris Pine as a reporter who seeks redemption for a failing career with a new look into the murder of Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the "Black Dahlia.

A trailer was also released for the indie thriller, Perfume. The six-episode season is based on the same Patrick Süskind novel that led to the 2006 film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

BBC One has dropped the first trailer for Season 5 of Luther, starring Idris Elba. As the season synopsis begins, "When the moonless shadows of London give birth to a new nightmare, DCI John Luther is once more called to immerse himself in the deepest depths of human depravity."

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The Spectator Books Podcast welcomed Lee Child to chat about Reacher, revenge, and writing without a plan.

Tell The Damn Story interviewed mystery author, professor, and book critic, Art Taylor, whose short crime fiction has won Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and Derringer Awards.

The latest Mysteryrat’s Maze Podcast features the mystery short story, "What a Little Cinnamon Can Do," written by L.D. Barnes and read by actor Julia Reimer. The story involves baking, with a little spice for the holiday season.

Criminal Mischief Episode #09 focused on "The Mysterious Human Brain," with Dr. D.P. Lyle noting that understanding a bit about how it works can help you craft your fictional crime stories.

Writer Types had a chat with Ian Rankin from Bouchercon including a listen to his band, Best Picture, and their first single Isabelle. Other guests included true crime writer Nancy Rommelmann, and Tom Pitts, Marietta Miles and JJ Hensley, who offered up Crime Writing 101 tips.

Meet the Thriller Author welcomed police officer Gavin Reese, who is the author of the Alex Landon thrillers and the Saint Thomas thriller series.

Speaking of Mysteries was joined by Val McDermid to talk about DCI Karen Pirie of Police Scotland, back in Val McDermid’s new crime fiction novel, Broken Ground.

Media Murder for Monday

I hope everyone in the U.S. enjoyed a happy, healthy, holiday weekend. But it's Monday again, which means it's time for the latest roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN

Tom Shepherd, who scripted Robert Downey Jr.’s forthcoming The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle, has been signed to write Paramount's Matt Helm project, based on Donald Hamilton’s long-running book series of spy thrillers. Bradley Cooper is set to star as the title character, with George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci all serving as executive producers. Four of the books were made into films in the 1960s starring Dean Martin, but they were more spoofs of the source material. Hamilton’s Helm was a U.S. special agent/assassin during World War II who left the life to raise a family in Santa Fe but is forced to return to his former life.

The Sopranos prequel film, The Many Saints of Newark, has found its lead in Alessandro Nivola, who is in final talks to play Dicky Moltisanti, Tony's (James Gandolfini) mentor and Christopher's (Michael Imperioli) father. The Many Saints of Newark takes place in the 1960s, more than 30 years before the HBO series, when Italians and African-Americans were essentially at war in New Jersey. Moltisanti is described as a "charismatic but violent man" who falls in love with his own father's extremely young bride. He's the mentor to a teenage Tony Soprano, who is under Moltisanti's tutelage after Tony's father goes to prison. Other Sopranos fan-favorite characters are also expected to appear in the film.

The latest and final Department Q film The Purity Of Vengeance has become the highest-grossing Danish film at the local box office. The latest installment, based on the fourth book in Jussi Adler-Olsen’s book series about crime unit Department Q, charts how a series of mysterious disappearances in 1987 are all eerily connected to the same person.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

NCIS star and executive producer Mark Harmon is behind a new crime drama project at CBS, based on author John Sandford's best-selling Prey novels. The show would focus on Minneapolis homicide detective Lucas Davenport and his best friend and profiler, psychology professor and nun Elle Krueger. The two were brought together by a shared tragedy and now work together to hunt the most dangerous criminals in Minnesota.

Netflix has ordered the new docuseries The Innocent Man, based on John Grisham’s best-selling book, with a December 14 premiere. Innocent Man is a story that gained national attention thanks to Grisham’s nonfiction work, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town. The Netflix six-part documentary series blends new footage with archival video and photos and focuses on two murders that shook the small town of Ada, Oklahoma, in the 1980s and the controversial chain of events that followed.

The Crown star Kate Phillips will take the lead role in Miss Scarlet and The Duke, a British crime drama that marks A+E Networks International’s first moves into international scripted co-productions.The series was created by the writer of Grantchester and The Mallorca Files, Rachael New, and follows the first ever-female detective in 19th century London.

AT&T Audience Network has ordered a third season of the drama Mr. Mercedes, based on the Stephen King novels, with 10 hour-long episodes. Brendan Gleeson will return to star as retired Detective Bill Hodges, who becomes obsessed with the psychopath Brady Hartsfield, a/k/a Mr. Mercedes (played by Harry Treadaway). Also returning is Holly Gibney (Justine Lupe), who became Detective Hodges' partner in a private investigative agency during the second season.

Chaske Spencer is joining the Season 4 cast of NBC’s Blindspot in a recurring role. Although details are mainly being kept under wraps, it is known that he'll be playing Dominic Masters, someone who works for Madeline Burke (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). In Season 4, Jane Doe/Remi (Jaime Alexander) continues to fight the effects of the ZIP poisoning she received in Season 3, which has destroyed her recent memory. This, as the FBI team hunts a dangerous enemy operative, and a deadly new foe emerges.

ABC’s summer procedural drama series Take Two was cancelled after it wrapped its 13-episode first-season run. The straight-to-series drama starred Rachel Bilson as Sam, the former star of a hit cop series who’s fresh out of rehab following a bender of epic proportions. Desperate to restart her career, she talks her way into shadowing rough-and-tumble private investigator Eddie (Eddie Cibrian) as research for a potential comeback role.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Authors on the Air host Pam Stack welcomed law enforcement officer and author of authentic hard-boiled crime fiction, Gavin Reese.

The latest episode of the Crime Cafe featured the Philip Marlowe radio episode “The Persian Slippers.”

Read or Dead hosts Katie McClean and Rincey Abraham talked about Tom Cruise being too short for Jack Reacher, how boring the Goodreads Choice Awards are, and do a spoiler-filled discussion of the new Tana French book, The Witch Elm.

The latest Crime Files podcast was recorded live at the Rooftop Book Club event and featured authors Rachel Abbott, Elly Griffiths and Sabine Durrant, and was chaired by editor, Claire Frost.

The new Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast featured the mystery short story, "What A Little Cinnamon Can Do," written by mystery author L. D. Barnes and read by Fresno actor Julia Reimer.

BBC Radio's Open Book podcast chatted with Lee Child, author of the phenomenally successful Jack Reacher series, who told host Mariella Frostrup why his famous creation continues to fascinate him.

THEATER

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time returns to the UK's National Theatre for a strictly limited season beginning November 29th. The play centers on the the young autistic Christopher, whose detective work, forbidden by his father, takes him on a frightening journey that upturns his world.

Media Murder for Monday

Monday means it's time for the latest roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN

Margot Robbie’s Luckychap and Dan Lin’s Rideback are developing Tess Sharpe’s novel Barbed Wire Heart for Warner Bros., with Westworld scribe Carly Wray adapting. Barbed Wire Heart follows Harley McKenna, the daughter of a meth-dealing killer who’s been groomed for the family business since she was 16. She squares off against the rival family who took her mother’s life and she must find a way to stand up to them and her fierce father without jeopardizing the lives of the abuse survivors in the women’s shelter she runs.

Paramount Pictures is in talks with with Chris Pratt to star in a relaunch of its action franchise The Saint. Based on the character in the novels by Leslie Charteris, The Saint was originally adapted into a 1940s serial and then a TV series in the 1960s starring Roger Moore. Simon Templar, known as "The Saint" is a wealthy adventurer and fixer who takes on the criminal underworld.

Aisha Tyler (24, Criminal Mind) has been set to direct Vigilante, a female-themed thriller scripted by Irwin Winkler and Jose Ruisanchez. The project is described as a socially charged #MeToo era thriller that follows the journey of a young woman who, after suffering a brutal attack, channels her anger and grief into protecting others.

Peter Sarsgaard, Maya Hawke, and Betty Gabriel have joined Liev Schreiber, Marisa Tomei, and Alex Wolff in the indie dramatic thriller Human Capital, an adaption of Stephen Amidon’s novel which is being helmed by Mark Meyers. The film centers on the lives of two families, one middle-class and one privileged, as their lives intertwine across the social divide when two of their children suddenly begin a relationship that leads to a tragic accident.

The British Independent Film Awards has set a handful of early winners including a couple of crime dramas. Psychological noir thriller You Were Never Really Here (Amazon) took Best Music for Jonny Greenwood and Best Sound for Paul Davies. Layton’s heist picture American Animals (The Orchard) won Best Editing by Nick Fenton, Julian Hart, and Chris Gill.

An official trailer was released for The Informer, starring Joel Kinnaman as an ex-con who goes undercover and intentionally gets himself incarcerated again in order to infiltrate the mob at a maximum security prison.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

NBC has given a script commitment to Red Stick, a crime drama from bestselling author Patricia Cornwell and Sony Pictures TV. Written by Samantha Humphrey (S.W.A.T.), Red Stick is based on an idea by Cornwell and follows Dr. Annie Dodge who is summoned from New York to her hometown of Baton Rouge, LA, after the sudden death of her father, the city’s beloved coroner. Now, as she’s mourning the loss of her childhood hero, Annie finds herself reluctantly stepping into her father’s role to solve an ongoing murder while navigating the complicated waters of Bayou politics, Southern hospitality and a simmering past romance.

The peacock network also given a script commitment to The Bone Collector, based on the bestselling book series by Jeffery Deaver and the 1999 movie of the same name which starred Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. Written by VJ Boyd and Mark Bianculli, The Bone Collector follows Lincoln Rhyme, a retired genius forensic criminologist left paralyzed after an accident on the job. When a harrowing case brings him back to the force, Rhyme partners up with an ambitious young detective, Amelia Sachs, to take down some of the most dangerous criminals in the U.S.

Fox has given a script commitment to Puller, an hour-long drama based on David Baldacci’s bestselling John Puller book series. Written by Bones executive producer Carla Kettner, Puller is described as an action-forward procedural thriller about John Puller, an investigator with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. Puller, a decorated former Army Ranger, faces the most difficult case of his life when his brother, a convicted traitor, escapes from a maximum security prison. Together with Veronica Knox, an army intel specialist, Puller searches for his fugitive brother. In the book series, John and Veronica solve the most difficult of crimes while John secretly battles to restore his family honor.

Fox is also developing a female-centric Texas Rangers drama. Written by Matt Cook, the untitled project centers on Lauren Crawford Flynn, one of only two females in the legendary and notoriously tough Texas Rangers, who balances the demands of her intense, high stakes job in a male dominated world with the challenges of being a single mom to a young teenage daughter.

Joel Silver and his Silver Pictures Television have sold two crime drama projects to CBS, False Memories and Crooked Brooklyn. False Memories is inspired by Emmy Bryce’s article “False Memories and False Confessions: The Psychology of Imagined Crimes,” in Wired UK and centers on a forensic psychologist who uses her expertise in the malleability of human memory to investigate crime scenes. Crooked Brooklyn is inspired by Michael Vecchione and Jerry Schmetterer’s 2015 bestselling book Crooked Brooklyn: Taking Down Corrupt Judges, Dirty Politicians, Killers and Body Snatchers, and centers on a drive to ferret out corruption that leads to the DAs of the Brooklyn Rackets Division given badges and guns to investigate crime on the streets and prosecuting those crimes in the courtroom.

ABC has put in development the drama The Marriage Lie, inspired by Kimberly Belle’s bestselling book of the same name and adapted by writer Michael Cooney. The project centers on Iris and Will whose seven-year marriage seems idyllic. But on the morning Will flies out for a business trip to Florida, Iris’s happy world comes to an abrupt halt when she learns his name is on a passenger list not for Florida but on another headed to New York that has crashed. As Iris sets off on a desperate quest to uncover what her husband was keeping from her, the answers she finds shock her to her very core.

Netflix is working on a new adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's thriller novel, Rebecca. It tells the story of a young woman (Lily James) who, on arriving at her husband's (Armie Hammer) imposing family estate on a bleak English coast, finds herself battling the shadow of his dead first wife, the mysterious Rebecca, whose legacy continues to haunt the house. In 1940, Alfred Hitchcock directed the iconic film version that starred Lawrence Oliver and Joan Fontaine.

Amazon Studios has closed an exclusive production deal with Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Television for eight thriller genre features which will all be connected thematically. The deal marks Amazon Studios’ first ever global-direct to service deal for feature length programs.The movies will be made by a diverse group of filmmakers and is being developed out of Amazon’s movie department.

With a fifth season currently in production and set to launch next year, Amazon announced the Titus Welliver-led series of Connelly’s beloved and hardboiled LAPD detective, Bosch, will be back for a Season 6. In addition to Welliver as the jazz loving Harry Bosch, the series also stars Jamie Hector as LAPD Detective Jerry Edgar, Amy Aquino as Lt. Grace Billets, Madison Lintz as Maddie Bosch, and Lance Reddick as Deputy Chief Irvin Irving.

Netflix has opted not to renew The Good Cop, its hourlong dramedy starring Tony Danza and Josh Groban. The Good Cop starred Danza as Tony Sr., a disgraced former NYPD officer who never followed the rules. He lives with his son, Tony Jr., (Groban), an earnest, obsessively honest NYPD detective who makes a point of always following the rules. This “odd couple” become unofficial partners as Tony Sr. offers his overly cautious son blunt, streetwise advice.

CBS All Access, CBS’ SVOD and live streaming service, has given a straight-to-series order to the true-crime drama, Interrogation. Co-created by Swedish writer-producer Anders Weidemann (30 Degrees In February) and John Mankiewicz (House of Cards, Bosch), Interrogation is an original concept based on a true story that spanned more than 30 years, in which a young man was charged and convicted of brutally murdering his mother. Each episode is structured around an interrogation taken directly from the real police case files, with the goal of turning the viewer into a detective.

Hugh Grant has joined the cast of the HBO’s The Undoing, set to star opposite Nicole Kidman. Grant will play Jonathan Sachs, an acclaimed pediatric oncologist, devoted husband to Grace Sachs (Kidman) and doting father, whose past undergoes scrutiny when he suddenly disappears, leading to a chain of terrible revelations for his wife. Based on the book You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz, the six-episode series follows Grace in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster.

Stranger Things star David Harbour has joined the cast of the Chris Hemsworth action vehicle Dhaka for Netflix. The screenplay, written by Joe Russo, centers on the underworld of weapons dealers and traffickers, where a young boy becomes the pawn in a war between notorious drug lords. Trapped by kidnappers inside one of the world’s most impenetrable cities, his rescue beckons the unparalleled skill of a mercenary named Tyler Rake. But Rake is a broken man with nothing to lose, harboring a death wish that makes an already deadly mission near impossible.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, co-author of Mycroft and Sherlock, stopped by CBS's The Talk.

Crime novelist, poet, and jazz enthusiast John Harvey was one of the latest guests on BBC Radio's Private Passions podcast, hosted by Michael Berkeley.

Beyond the Cover welcomed Jon Land, author of the new Jessica Fletcher novel, Manuscript for Murder: a Murder, She Wrote novel.

The latest episode of Writer Types featured thriller writer Lee Child, creator of the Jack Reacher series, as well as Sara Gran with her new Claire DeWitt novel, The Infinite Blacktop. Also Peter Leonard talked about keeping alive his father Elmore's creation, Raylan Givens alive in Raylan Goes To Detroit.

In the Speaking of Mysteries podcast, Wiggins is back in The Red Ribbon, H.B. Lyle’s second installment of the continuing story of Sherlock Holmes’ Irregular-in-Chief’s career in Britain’s MI-5.

Host D.P. Lyle talked about "Mood and Tone in Crime Fiction" in the latest installment of CRIMINAL MISCHIEF: The Art & Science of Crime Fiction.

Media Murder for Monday

Monday greetings to all and welcome to your latest crime drama roundup:

THE BIG SCREEN

A Breaking Bad movie from original series creator Vince Gilligan is set to begin production in New Mexico later this month. Further details about the film are being kept under wraps, although it's said to follow the escape of a kidnapped man and his quest for freedom. What's unclear is whether any of the show’s original characters are expected to return or if the project is planned for a theatrical release or will air on television.

The live-action film version of the 1960s pop icon/animated TV series Jonny Quest appears closer to becoming a reality after Lego Batman Movie director Chris McKay has been hired to direct the project for Warner Brothers. The story centers on the adventurous boy hero Jonny Quest who travels around the world with his scientist father, his adopted brother Hadji, and their former secret agent bodyguard, Race Bannon, to solve world-threatening mysteries. An individual with knowledge with of the project told TheWrap that a major movie star is being eyed to play Race Bannon.

J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot has optioned an untitled feature pitch from The Crown writer Ed Hemming following a competitive auction. Plot details are being kept under wraps, although it's understood to be a high school-set thriller in the present day with a socially relevant twist. 

Allison Janney has landed the lead role in the thriller Lou, another project being set up at J.J. Abrams’s Bad Robot Productions. Anna Foerster (Underworld: Blood Wars, Outlander) will direct the dramatic thriller that follows a tough elderly woman living on a remote island who is recruited by a neighbor to help her find her kidnapped daughter. Janney will play a rule-breaking woman with a tough shell and abilities as a tracker.

Saban Films has acquired North American rights to American Dreamer, Derrick Borte’s thriller starring Jim Gaffigan as a down-on-his-luck rideshare driver who gets in way over his head with drug dealers and a kidnapping. Saban plans a theatrical release for the pic, which had its world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Less than a month after announcing the upcoming seventh season of Orange Is the New Black would be its final run, producers Lionsgate Television are already mulling a potential sequel to the series created by Jenji Kohan and starring Taylor Schilling, Laura Prepon, Uzo Aduba and Danielle Brooks. Orange Is the New Black, which is inspired by Piper Kerman's memoir of the same name, bowed to critical acclaim in 2013.

Emmy-winning director Susanne Bier (The Night Manager) has signed on to direct all six episodes of The Undoing, the network’s high-profile limited series written by David E. Kelley and starring Nicole Kidman. Adapted from Jean Hanff Korelitz’s book You Should Have Known, The Undoing centers on Grace Sachs (Kidman), who is living a seemingly perfect life - a successful therapist with a new book, a devoted husband, and a young son in an elite private school. But a violent death followed by her husband going missing threatens to tear her perfect world apart.

Emmy-winning The Americans star Matthew Rhys is in talks to take on the role of the iconic titular lawyer in HBO's planned Perry Mason reboot. Rhys played Russian spy Philip Jennings for six seasons on FX's The Americans, and this year the role scored him his first career Emmy after three prior nominations.

Jeremy Irvine (War Horse) and Brian J. Smith (Sense8) have been cast as two of the leads of USA Network’s straight-to-series drama Treadstone, an offshoot of Universal’s Bourne franchise, from creator Tim Kring and Universal Cable Productions. Written by Kring, Treadstone explores the origin story and present-day actions of a CIA black ops program known as Operation Treadstone — a covert program that uses behavior-modification protocol to turn recruits into nearly superhuman assassins.

Robin Givens is set to appear on the ABC legal drama The Fix in the recurring role of Julianne Johnson, the loyal ex-wife of Sevvy (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). The Fix follows Maya Travis (Robin Tunney), an L.A. district attorney who suffers a devastating defeat when prosecuting Sevvy, an A-list actor for double murder. With her high-profile career derailed, she flees for a quieter life in Washington. But when Sevvy falls under suspicion for another murder eight years later, Maya is lured back to the DA’s office for another chance at justice.

Max Greenfield is the latest original Veronica Mars cast member set to reprise their role in the upcoming Hulu revival. Also joining the cast of the eight-episode limited series, scheduled to premiere in 2019, is Patton Oswalt. Greenfield’s Leo D’Amato was the new Sheriff’s Deputy when he recurred on the first three seasons of Veronica Mars. In the followup movie, Leo was a detective at the San Diego Police Department who helped Veronica (Kristen Bell) in the Susan Knight murder investigation.

Less than a month after its premiere on ABC, The Rookie is getting a full-season order. The cop drama premiered in mid-October to ratings that surpassed its time period from previous shows in that slot.

TNT's hitman series Good Behavior has been canceled after two seasons. The series was based on books by Blake Crouch and starred Michelle Dockery as Letty, a con artist released from jail on good behavior, who accidentally becomes entangled with an assassin named Javier played by Diego Botto.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Showtime is launching a companion podcast for its upcoming limited series from Ben Stiller, Escape at Dannemora, that will delve into the real-life events that inspired the drama. The limited series, which is directed and executive produced by Stiller, is based on the 2015 prison break from Clinton Correctional Facility. The podcast, which is produced by Wondery’s Real Crime Profile, will dive deeper into the real-life events and feature interviews with cast-members, real people involved in the case and the creators.

In the latest Crime Friction episode, hosts Jay Stringer and Chantelle Aimee Ausman were joined by Lou Berney to talk about hats, the sixties, and his new book, November Road.

The MysteryRats Maze podcast featured the first chapter of the mystery novel The Plunge by Nancy G. West, read by local actor Ariel Bennett.

Host Debbi Mack welcomed crime writer Dana King, author of the Nick Forte & Penns River Series, for an interview on the Crime Cafe.

Regular Read or Dead host Rincey Abraham was joined by guest host Liberty Hardy to "basically just rave about the amazingness that is Agatha Christie."

The latest Spybrary podcast featured a chat with author Merle Nygate about her first espionage novel, The Righteous Spy.

THEATER

A new Sherlock Holmes adaptation is heading to The New Theatre Royal, Portsmouth, from November 15-17. Nick Lane adapted Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four for the stage, and says of the production, "Some of it is set during the Indian rebellion of 1857 – the book does go back 35 years in time from when it was written to talk about what transpired and why the crime at the centre of the novel happened, so there’s quite a bit of exposition. You have to try and find ways to make it fun for the audience to watch and visually interesting."

Media Murder for Monday

Welcome to the first post-time-change edition of Media Murder, with the latest roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN

Mel Gibson is teaming up with Charlie Hunnam and Eiza Gonzalez for Waldo, the action-packed thriller from Brit filmmaker Tim Kirkby, best known for directing episodes of Veep. The film is based on the novel Last Looks by Howard Gould and follows the brilliant but disgraced former LAPD detective Charlie Waldo (Hunnam), currently living the life of a minimalist in the woods. His quiet life comes to a startling halt when he is roped back into working as a private eye to investigate the murder of an eccentric TV star’s wife.

Dev Patel has been set to make his feature directing debut with action revenge pic Monkey Man. The Oscar nominee will also star in the film, which follows the Kid (Patel) who emerges from prison to take on a world enmeshed in corporate greed and eroding spiritual values. Thunder Road producer Basil Iwanyk calls it a “vibrant, thrilling and above all entertaining story.”

A24 announced it has picked up North American rights to the war thriller, The Kill Team, starring Nat Wolff and Alexander Skarsgard. The project follows a young soldier in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan who witnesses other recruits killing innocent civilians and considers reporting them to higher-ups as the heavily-armed, increasingly violent platoon becomes suspicious that someone in their ranks has turned on them.

Noomi Rapace (the Millennium series) has been set to star in the thriller The Secrets We Keep, which has Joel Kinnaman (Suicide Squad) also in talks to join. Yuval Adler will direct from a script by Ryan Covington. Rapace will play Maja, a woman rebuilding her life along with her husband Dobie in New York after WWII. When they encounter an eerily familiar man their life starts to unravel. They wonder, could this be the officer who was one of their chief tormentors at the concentration camp Birkenau all those years ago?

Chloë Grace Moretz and Jack O’Connell will play Bonnie and Clyde in Kike Maillo’s Love Is a Gun, based on the book Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde by bestselling author Jeff Guinn. Oscar nominee Shelton Turner (Up in the Air) wrote the screenplay, while Johnny Newman (Narcos) added revisions. Parker and Barrow gained renown during the Great Depression as they committed multiple bank and store robberies from 1931 to 1935. They are believed to have killed at least nine police officers before they were slain in Louisiana.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

The Watch, based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, has landed an eight-part series order at BBC America. The network describes the show as a “punk rock thriller” inspired by the City Watch subset of Discworld novels. The character-driven series centers on Terry Pratchett’s misfit cops as they fight "to save a ramshackle city of normalized wrongness, from both the past and future in a perilous quest."

NBC has put in development Einstein, based on the popular German series, from writer Michael Reisz (Shadowhunters), Carol Mendelsohn, Tariq Jalil’s Intrigue Entertainment and Universal TV. Written by Reisz, Einstein follows a whip-smart, smooth-talking and illegitimate descendant of Albert Einstein who is recruited by the police for his skills at solving particularly complex cases.

The Disney-owned cable channel Freeform announced it's working on an adaptation of Stephen King's novel Joyland. The project tells the story of Devin, a college student who takes a summer job at an amusement park in a North Carolina tourist town where he confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child and the way both will change his life forever.

NBC has put in development an LAPD police drama from writer Kevin O’Hare, The Brave creator Dean Georgaris, Keshet Studios and Universal TV. Written and executive produced by O’Hare, the untitled project is based on police pilot programs in major U.S. cities. The drama follows an unlikely group of LAPD officers and detectives incentivized to live and become active members in the community they patrol, all in hopes of changing perceptions and reducing violence.

BBC Studios is developing a high-end drama based on the real-life story behind the murderous Lady Macbeth, which is set before the Shakespeare play and tells the epic and violent tale of Lady Macbeth from the female perspective, when she was Gruoch Ingen Boite, married to Gille Coemgáin, the King of Mormaer.

McMafia producer Cuba Pictures is developing a TV adaptation of Lesley Kara's debut novel, The Rumour, a story loosely based on the real-life case of British child killer Mary Kill. The book, which is set to be published in December, starts when single mother Joanna hears a rumor at the school gates that a notorious child killer is living under a new identity in their sleepy little town of Flinstead-on-Sea. How dangerous can one rumor become? And how far will Joanna go to protect her loved ones from harm when she realizes what she’s unleashed?

Ryan Hansen is officially on board for Hulu’s Veronica Mars revival reprising his role of Rick Casablancas. He joins star Kristen Bell and series creator Rob Thomas, along with a slew of other show alums, for the streamer’s eight-episode run.

William Shatner is returning at the host of Rescue 911, a reboot of the CBS series that ran from 1989 to 1996. The show featured real footage and reenactments of 911 call emergencies, and the new version would have some updates, including a new weekly, two-hour format offering a live look at first responders taking real emergency calls every week.

Investigation Discovery has ordered a six-part crime series about cold case murders in small towns from British producer Britespark Films. Welcome To Murdertown follows the baffling murder mysteries where it’s not just one person who’s hiding something – it’s everybody. From small towns and tight-lipped communities to tight-knit families, investigators must penetrate a wall of silence to crack the case.

HBO released a trailer for the upcoming third season of True Detective, which stars Mahershala Ali as an Arkansas police detective who can’t stop thinking about the two children who went missing 30 years prior. Costarring with Ali is Stephen Dorff as Hays’ partner on the case.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Crimereads profiled the event in 1958 when the BBC asked Ian Fleming to “interview” his eminent friend, Raymond Chandler, on Chandler’s 70th birthday. The interview is broken down into four audio segments with some of the transcripts.

Speaking of Mysteries welcomed Henry Porter to chat about Firefly, his new novel which is a classic thriller—with a twist.

Lynda La Plante has shaped crime fiction writing over the course of the last 35 years, and she spoke with the Ray Darcy Show about her enduring career.

In the latest edition of Crime Cafe, host Debbi Mack spoke with David Malcolm about his novel, The German Messenger, a historical espionage story.

Crime Novelist and The Deuce Creator George Pelecanos stopped by Wisconsin Public Radio to discuss his latest novel, The Man Who Came Uptown, and the author's history of using blue-collar stories in his work.

D.P. Lyle's latest episode of his podcast, CRIMINAL MISCHIEF: The Art & Science of Crime Fiction, focused on "Famous and Odd DNA Cases."

Lea Wait was the featured guest on Destination Mystery. Wait is the author of historical books for young people and the cozy Antique Print Mystery Series for adults.

Media Murder for Monday

Monday means it's time for a new week and a new roundup of the latest crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN

Martin Scorsese has been attached to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio to star in the feature adaptation of the New York Times bestselling David Grann book, Killers of the Flower Moon, with Eric Roth writing the script. The project is based on a true story and set in 1920s Oklahoma when the Osage Nation were the richest people per capita in the world, after oil was discovered under their land. And then they were murdered, one by one. As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case and unraveled a chilling conspiracy and one of the most monstrous crimes in American history.

Chris Pratt is in talks to star in director Taylor Sheridan’s next project, tentatively titled Fast. The plot is mostly under wraps, but it centers on a black ops team that goes after drug dealers who are being protected by the feds.

Jamie Lee Curtis is joining the cast with Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, and Lakeith Stanfield in director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out. The project is still somewhat mysterious but has been described as a modern-day murder mystery in the classic whodunit style.

David Tennant and Emily Watson are set to star in Quicksand, a thriller that will mark the feature directorial debut of Humans and Troy: Fall of a City TV director Mark Brozel. The story centers on British couple Dan (Tennant) and Sarah (Watson) who are living out their dream in the Mediterranean. But their paradise comes to an abrupt end when their visiting son is murdered by a local youth. Dan, grief stricken, is offered a chance at revenge by a dangerous stranger who won’t take no for an answer, but the price of revenge is one more murder.

Academy Award winner Geena Davis and Joan Chen have joined Jessica Chastain’s drama Eve, with Tate Taylor directing. Colin Farrell, Common, John Malkovich, and Diana Silvers are also set to star in the project. Although plot details are murky, Chastain is portraying the title character, who works for a black ops organization led by Farrell’s character. Common will portray her ex-fiance.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Blackbox Multimedia is developing The Last Cop and also Murder in Time, the latter of which is based on a series of time-traveling crime thrillers by U.S. writer Julie McElwain. McElwain’s three "Murder in Time” books, published by Pegasus, revolve around tough FBI agent Kendra Donovan who goes rogue in London in an effort to assassinate the man who killed her team, only to end up in England in the 1800s. The Last Cop is described as a crime procedural set in an alternative present/near future in which there is no crime due to implanted crime inhibitor chips that detect violent impulses in the brain. Against this backdrop, a reluctant former police detective is taken out of retirement to solve a murder, the first in 17 years.

Broadchurch star Elen Rhys and Pagan Peak's Julian Looman will star in the BBC drama The Mallorca Files. The ten-part series is created by Dan Sefton and is set among the expat community on the sunny Spanish island that features a British and German detective clashing over their very different approaches to policing the island.

Henry Lloyd-Hughes and Shannon Tarbet have been cast in Season 2 of BBC America’s breakout drama series Killing Eve, joining previously announced new cast members Nina Sosanya, Edward Bluemel and Julian Barratt and series stars Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer and Fiona Shaw. Killing Eve centers on two women; Eve (Oh) is a bored, whip-smart, pay-grade security services operative whose desk-bound job doesn’t fulfill her fantasies of being a spy, and Villanelle (Comer), an elegant, talented killer who clings to the luxuries her violent job affords her. These two fiercely intelligent women, equally obsessed with each other, go head to head in an epic game of cat and mouse.

True-crime hub Investigation Discovery (ID) has renewed Breaking Homicide for Season 2, and production is already underway. Breaking Homicide follows veteran police detective and private investigator Derrick Levasseur in his pursuit of cold cases around the nation.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Author Novoneel Chakraborty's thriller novel Black Suits You is to be developed into a web series by Ekta Kapoor's OTT platform. The story of Black Suits You follows Kiyan Roy, a reclusive author of a bestselling erotica trilogy, who is stalked by obsessed fan. Soon, he falls for her charms and gets sucked deeper and deeper into a dark and twisted love affair until his life and career slowly begin to unravel.

Crime Cafe host Debbi Mack welcomed author David Malcolm to discuss his novel, The German Messenger, a historical espionage story.

Suspense Radio Inside Edition chatted with authors Tasha Alexander (Uneasy Lies The Crown), JJ Hensley (Record Scratch), and Daniella Bernett (A Checkered Past).

Beyond the Cover's latest special guests were Jeff Abbott (The Three Beths) and Julie Hyzy (Vitural Sabotage).

Writer Types' Halloween episode featured horror writers Paul Tremblay (The Cabin At The End of the World) and Amy Lukavics (Nightingale). Plus, some scary book recommendations from the Malmons.

Read or Dead hosts Katie McClean and Rincey Abraham talked about a very cool program Stephen King runs and some of the upcoming releases that they are very excited about.

THEATER

La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts is staging a production of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, as adapted by Ken Ludwig, through November 11. Directed by Sheldon Epps, the cast features Tony Amendola as Christie's iconic detective, Hercule Poirot. 

Media Murder for Monday

It's Monday again, which means it's time for the latest roundup of crime drama news on screens both big and small:

THE BIG SCREEN

Michael B. Jordan will star in and produce Lionsgate’s film adaptation of assassin story The Silver Bear. A director has not yet been attached to the project, announced last week. The film is based on the book series by Derek Haas (the screenwriter for Wanted and 3:10 to Yuma) and centers on an assassin named Columbus — called the Silver Bear by some — who tracks a powerful politician with presidential aspirations.

IFC Films has picked up the U.S. distribution rights to Out Of Blue. The crime drama, written and directed by Carol Morley, had its premiere at this year’s Toronto Film Festival and will be released in theaters sometime next year. Patricia Clarkson (The Green Mile), Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom), James Caan (Misery), Toby Jones (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), and Mamie Gummer (End Of Tour) star. Based on the novel by Martin Amis, the story follows a New Orleans homicide detective Mike Hoolihan (Clarkson) as she investigates the shooting of leading astrophysicist and black hole expert Jennifer Rockwell (Gummer). As she gets deeper into the case, her quest for the truth completely shakes her view of the universe, and ultimately herself.

Liam Hemsworth and Vince Vaughn are heading to Arkansas, Clark Duke’s feature directorial debut that Duke wrote and will also star in. Arkansas follows a pair of low level drug runners in the Dixie Mafia, Kyle (Hemsworth) and Swin (Duke), who live by the orders of an Arkansas-based drug kingpin Frog (Vaughn), whom they’ve never met. But when a deal goes horribly wrong, deadly consequences are soon to rattle the duo’s routine lives.

Eve, the upcoming crime drama starring Jessica Chastain, has added Joan Chen and Academy Award-winner Geena Davis to its cast. The plot for the film is being kept under wraps, but the production companies on the project, Voltage Pictures and Freckle Films, describe it as" a character-driven action-drama."

Don Johnson and Blade Runner 2049 actress Ana de Armas are set to join Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Lakeith Stanfield, and Michael Shannon in writer-director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out. Shooting is due to begin next month on the modern-day murder mystery which will see Craig star as a detective, although the plot and character details are largely being kept under wraps.

After co-starring in last year’s successful Murder on the Orient Express, Tom Bateman is set to return as Bouc in the 20th Century Fox feature adaptation of Death on the Nile, which will now be released October 2, 2020, instead of December 20, 2019. The latest Agatha Christie film also will see the return of Kenneth Branagh as director and in the role of Hercule Poirot, and Gal Gadot and Armie Hammer also attached to star.

Adam Brody, Mark O’Brien, and Henry Czerny have come aboard Fox Searchlight’s Ready or Not thriller, which is being directed by Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, with Samara Weaving and Andie MacDowell previously announced to star in the film. The plot centers on a young bride (Weaving) as she joins her new husband’s (O’Brien) rich, eccentric family (Brody, Czerny, and MacDowell) in a time-honored tradition that turns into a lethal game with everyone fighting for their survival.

A trailer was released for Destroyer, starring an unrecognizable Nicole Kidman as LAPD detective Erin Bell who was placed undercover as a young cop with a gang in the California desert with tragic results. When the leader of that gang re-emerges many years later, she must work her way back through the remaining members and into her own history with them to reckon with the demons that destroyed her past.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

CBS has put in development the cop drama Ranger, inspired by James Patterson’s recently released best-selling novel, Texas Ranger. The project hails from American Sniper writer Jason Hall, and centers on a Texas Ranger and his cantankerous father move to South Florida where the Ranger becomes a homicide detective and searches for his brother’s killer.

ABC has landed Wolfe, a crime drama from former Bones producer Kathy Reichs and executive producer/co-showrunner Michael Peterson, who also serves as writer on the project. Wolfe centers on veterinarian Dr. Charles Wolfe, who has a unique perspective on homicide, believing murder is a primal, animalistic act, and killers are animals. After getting elected coroner of Boulder, CO, Wolfe partners with his mirror opposite, FBI profiler Kristin Faulk, who is confident Wolfe is dead wrong and that it is nurture, not nature, that leads a person to murder.

Fox has given a script commitment plus penalty to an hour-long female-focused FBI drama from former Queen Sugar showrunner Monica Macer, Thruline and 20th Century Fox TV. Written by Macer, the Untitled FBI Women Project (aka The Tribe) is inspired by journalist and author Doug Stanton’s interviews of women in law enforcement. It is a character-driven drama set inside the New York City field office of the FBI featuring the stories of three female agents as they struggle to balance their professional and personal lives. 

NBC has given a put pilot commitment to Emergence, a mystery drama from Kevin (Probably) Saves The World creators/executive producers Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters, director Paul McGuigan and ABC Studios. Written by Fazekas and Butters, Emergence centers around a sheriff who takes in a young child that she finds near the site of a mysterious accident who has no memory of what has happened. The investigation draws her into a conspiracy larger than she ever imagined, and the child’s identity is at the center of it all.

Shades of Blues star/executive producer Jennifer Lopez has teamed with co-star Vincent Laresca for a new cop drama, which has been put in development by NBC. The project, Blood Ties, hails from former The Mentalist executive producer Tom Szentgyorgyi, who also serves as screenwriter. Blood Ties is a procedural crime show in the vein of NYPD Blue, in which convicted homicide detective Steve Horvath is exonerated and given his job back but finds he now has unconventional insight about the criminals he faces. Teaming up with an unexpected rookie who has a secret agenda of his own, Horvath must learn to adapt to life outside of prison while trying to figure out who framed him and why.

Shades of Blue creator Adi Hasak is teaming with Red Arrow Studios International and Universal Television to develop a U.S. version of popular German series The Last Cop (Der Letzte Bulle). The Last Cop tells the story of Mick Briggs, an alpha male detective, who wakes up from a 25-year coma and struggles to find his identity as a man, husband and father in a world he neither recognizes nor understands.

British producer Synchronicity Films is lining up the next project from The Cry author Helen FitzGerald, which the author is still writing and will be released in 2020. The BBC One drama is said to be a domestic disaster noir story set in a small town. The Broadchurch-style tale explores small-town secrets in an action-packed thriller format that features a devastating bush fire and its impact on a community. 

Another classic series is coming back to television without rebooting its entire universe—in fact, it's killing off a major character. NYPD Blue is getting a revival but the premise revolves around the death of original series protagonist Andy Sipowicz (played by Dennis Franz). The new show would be based on Theo Sipowicz, who followed in his father's footsteps and pursued law enforcement. His goal is to earn his shield as a detective and investigate crime out of his dad's old 15th precinct, including using his NYPD resources to investigate his dad's murder.

Doubt creators Joan Rater and Tony Phelan have sold two dramas to NBC including Trust, based on the French-language format Banking District, which is described as part thriller, part family drama. It follows psychology professor Michaela Murphy as she unexpectedly takes over her family’s banking business when her brother suspiciously falls into a coma. In order to save her brother’s life, the bank and her family’s legacy, Michaela must contend with her estranged family and in doing so begins to uncover a host of long-buried secrets.

Fox is developing the police drama Deputy from David Ayer and former LAPD detective Will Beall. The project is being made with the full cooperation of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, and centers on Deputy Bill Hollister, a career lawman who’s very comfortable kicking down doors and utterly lost in a staff meeting. But when the LA County Sheriff drops dead, Bill becomes acting sheriff of Los Angeles County, in charge of 10,000 sworn deputies policing a modern Wild West.

Martin Freeman will star in the six-part drama, A Confession, for UK’s ITV. Written by Jeff Pope, the series tells the story of how Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher, played by Freeman, deliberately breached police procedure and protocol to catch a killer, a decision that ultimately cost him his career and reputation. 

The Scorpion and X-Files star Robert Patrick is boarding Steven Soderbergh’s Netflix drama, The Laundromat, taking on the role of Captain Perry. He joins an ensemble cast of Gary Oldman, Meryl Streep, Antonio Banderas, David Schwimmer, and Will Forte in the story that centers around one of the largest money laundering schemes ever, "The Panama Papers," documents that linked money laundering to politicians and powerful higher-ups such as U.S. President Donald Trump.

Oscar-nominated actress Catalina Sandino Moreno is set for a leading role opposite Sophia Bush in CBS’ drama pilot Surveillance. The project is described as a complex and timely spy thriller centered around the head of communications for the NSA (Bush), a charming operative who finds her loyalties torn between protecting the government’s secrets and her own. Sandino Moreno will play Natalie, who oversees all active operations at the NSA, the first woman to do so – and she’s excellent at her job. She is fiercely loyal to Maddy (Bush), her close colleague and longtime friend, and the two are like sisters.

Enrico Colantoni is set to join Kristen Bell in Hulu’s eight-episode Veronica Mars revival. He will reprise his series regular role from the original of Keith Mars, Veronica’s (Bell) father and head of Mars Investigations. The hour-long limited series, slated to premiere in 2019, hails from Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, who will pen the first episode. In the revival, spring breakers are getting murdered in Neptune, thereby decimating the seaside town’s lifeblood tourist industry. 

After finding huge success in the United Kingdom, Bodyguard will make its way stateside on October 24 when it debuts on Netflix. Bodyguard tells the story of David Budd (Richard Madden), a heroic, but volatile war veteran now working as a Specialist Protection Officer for the Royalty and Specialist Branch (RasP) of London’s Metropolitan Police Service. When he is assigned to protect the ambitious and powerful Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes), Budd finds himself torn between his duty and his beliefs. Responsible for her safety, could he become her biggest threat?

CBS has handed back-orders to three more freshman series, including Magnum P.I, the reboot starring Jay Hernandez. Although the show got off to a modest ratings start, it improved its programming block by fifty percent-plus over last season’s low-rated comedies.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The latest episode of Two Crime Writers and a Microphone is titled "Would a Crime Writer Lie to You!," and recorded in front of a live audience at the Bloody Scotland crime festival. The featured authors include Val McDermid, Chris Brookmyre, Abir Mukherjee, Denise Mina, Sarah Pinborough, Will Dean, Mark Billingham, Stuart Neville, and Howard Linskey.

Suspense Radio Inside Edition welcomed Marnie Riches (The Girl Who Wouldn't Die) and Reavis Wortham (Gold Dust) to the show.

James Scott Bell, a winner of the International Thriller Writers Award for his novel, Romeo’s Way, and the #1 bestselling author of books on the craft of writing, was the latest featured guest on Meet the Thriller Writer podcast.

D.P. Lyle's podcast, Criminal Mischief: The Art & Science of Crime Fiction, focused on "Writing Modern Crime Fiction."

Kings River Life Magazine Mysteryrat’s Maze Podcast featured the mystery short story, "The Mercy Killer," written by mystery author Merrilee Robson and read by Kingsburg actor Thomas Nance.

Self-Publishing Journeys spoke with UK indie thriller writer Nathan Burrows about his trilogy of dark comedy thrillers based in Norfolk.

Media Murder for Monday

Welcome to a new Monday and a new roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN

Lawrence Kasdan (of Star Wars fame) is turning his attention next to the JFK assassination, acquiring the film rights to November Road, the new novel from Edgar Award-winning author Lou Berney. The story follows Frank Guidry, who is connected to the president's murder, and when other loose ends begin dying all around him, Frank knows he’s next. Hunted by a ruthless hitman hired by his ex-boss, Frank heads across the desert where he meets Charlotte Roy, who is running away from her small-town life and abusive alcoholic husband with two young daughters and an epileptic dog in tow. Guidry sees this instant family scenario as the perfect cover, and Charlotte sees him as her best chance at a new life—if they can escape before his past catches up to them.

Liam Neeson and Kate Walsh are set to star in Honest Thief, a film to be directed by Mark Williams, who co-created the hit Netflix series Ozark. Neeson plays a career bank robber who meets the love his life in Annie (Walsh), a clerk at a storage facility where he hid $7 million in stolen loot. They fall head over heels, and he resolves to wipe the slate clean by turning himself in. When the case is turned over to a crooked FBI agent, everything becomes far more dangerous and difficult.

Emmy winner Sarah Paulson (American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson) has been tapped as the lead in the Lionsgate thriller, Run, which will reunite the team behind the Sundance award-winning film, Searching, with its helmer Aneesh Chaganty attached to direct. The story follows a teenaged girl, raised in total isolation by her mother (Paulson), whose life begins to unravel as she discovers her mother’s sinister secret.

Freya Tingley (Hemlock Grove) and Paul Rae (True Grit) will star in the indie thriller Year Of The Detectives, which goes into production this month in LA. Tingley will play Nic O’Connell who inherits her grandfathers’ long-running private detective agency in the heart of Chinatown. She and her co-inheritor must put aside their differences to solve the final mystery of their grandparents’ deaths, with Rae playing the detective who reluctantly joins their effort as the bodies pile up. 

Golden Globe winner Rachel Brosnahan is set to co-star with Benedict Cumberbatch in the Cold War drama, Ironbark. Dominic Cooke is on board to direct the feature from a screenplay by The Hitman’s Bodyguard scribe Tom O’Connor. The project is based on the true story of Greville Wynne (Cumberbatch), a British businessman who helped the CIA penetrate the Soviet nuclear program during the Cold War. Wynne and his Russian source, Oleg Penkovsky, provided the crucial intelligence that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis. Brosnahan will play Emily Donovan, the brilliant, determined CIA agent who runs Wynne and Penkovsky’s espionage operation.

Matthew McConaughey is joining writer/director Guy Ritchie in a return to British crime dramas via Toff Guys. McConaughey will star alongside Kate Beckinsale and Crazy Rich Asians breakout star Henry Golding in the story that explores the collision between old money in Europe and the modern marijuana industrial complex with new gang entrants swarming.

The mystery drama Knives Out keeps filling out its all-star roster. Following the producers' announcement Daniel Craig and Chris Evans were set to co-star, comes news that Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water, The Little Drummer Girl) will also be joining the project, the plot of which is, well, mysterious thus far, but is described "as a modern-day murder mystery in the classic Agatha Christie whodunit style."

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Netflix has picked up The Laundromat, the Steven Soderbergh-directed drama about the Panama Papers scandal. David Schwimmer has just joined an all-star cast led by Oscar-winning Darkest Hour star Gary Oldman, The Post's Meryl Streep and Life Itself's Antonio Banderas. The film has a script by Scott Z. Burns, based on the Jake Bernstein book, Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite.

Writer-director Leslye Headland will adapt and direct the movie thriller Tell Me Everything for Netflix, which preemptively swooped on screen rights to the project earlier this year. It’s based on Cambria Brockman’s debut novel, which Ballantine acquired at auction for a June 2019 street date. Set at an elite college in small-town New England, it follows the shifting alliances and romantic entanglements of six tight-knit students — until one of them is murdered.

Fox has given a script commitment plus penalty to Saturday Night Special, a police drama from Black List writer Robert Specland. Saturday Night Special is a grounded police soap exploring a tight-knit group of Washington D.C. cops with focus on "the wildest, most dangerous shift of the week, giving us an in-depth look at the police force from the top down, Lieutenant to rookies, and how a job like this affects each of their lives, and their lives affect the job."

Rob Lowe is set to star in the six-part British crime drama Wild Bill for ITV, playing the high-flying US cop, Bill Hixon, who is appointed Chief Constable of the East Lincolnshire Police Force. The story follows follow Lowe’s Hixon as he lands in Lincolnshire with his 14 year-old daughter Kelsey, hoping to flee their recent painful past. Whip-smart, acerbic and unstoppable, Bill is very good at what he does but from the outset Bill isn’t about making friends—until he soon discovers the people of Boston are just as smart-mouthed, cynical and difficult to impress as he is.

Tobias Lindholm, one of the writers behind the Danish TV hit Borgen, is to turn the murder of the Swedish journalist Kim Wall into a six-part TV series – but the killer, the self-taught rocket engineer Peter Madsen, will not feature. The project will instead primarily focus on the police investigation of Wall's murder when she went missing in August 2017 after boarding Madsen’s homemade submarine for a profile she was writing about him. Her dismembered body was found floating in the Copenhagen harbor shortly afterward. Madsen maintains that Wall died in an accident on the submarine, and that he “buried her at sea,” but he was found guilty of her murder in April.

Paris-based company About Premium Content is on board to co-finance The Murders, a gritty eight-part Canadian police thriller series. Gotham's Jessica Lucas stars as Kate Jameson, a rookie homicide detective who searches for redemption in her investigative work after indirectly causing the death of a fellow officer. Jameson is partnered with detective Mike Huntley (Lochlyn Munroe) with whom she navigates the case of a mysterious serial killer who uses music for destructive ends.

A Star is Born's Rafi Gavron is set as a series regular opposite Forest Whitaker and Vincent D’Onofrio in Godfather of Harlem, Epix’s straight-to-series crime drama. Written and executive produced by Chris Brancato (Narcos) and Paul Eckstein, Godfather of Harlem is inspired by the true story of infamous crime boss Bumpy Johnson (Whitaker), who in the early 1960s returned from ten years in prison to find the neighborhood he once ruled in shambles. With the streets controlled by the Italian mob, Bumpy must take on the Genovese crime family to regain control and forms an alliance with radical preacher Malcolm X. Gavron plays Ernie Nunzi, a flashy young mobster with dreams of getting “made,” into the Genovese Family.

Katherine LaNasa (Imposters) has joined the cast of Are You Sleeping, the upcoming Apple thriller drama series starring Octavia Spencer and Lizzy Caplan, in a major recurring role. She'll play a new character that replaces the one previously played by Moon Bloodgood who was cast as a series regular on the show but exited after four of the eight Season 1 episodes were filmed. As part of the recasting, the role of Poppy’s right hand was re-conceived, and LaNasa will play Noa Havilland, Poppy’s (Spencer) producing partner. Are You Sleeping is based on the true-crime novel by Kathleen Barber and takes a look into America’s obsession with true-crime podcasts, challenging its viewers to consider the consequences when the pursuit of justice is placed on a public stage.

Ozark has been renewed for a third season of 10 episodes at Netflix. The crime drama stars Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Sofia Hublitz, Skylar Gaertner, Julia Garner, Jason Butler Harner, Peter Mullan, and Lisa Emery and focuses on the Byrde family, with patriarch Marty (Bateman) working as a financial adviser as well as a money launderer for a Mexican drug cartel.

The first trailer for AMC’s upcoming miniseries Little Drummer Girl was released, and it features Alexander Skarsgard, Michael Shannon and Florence Pugh in an international game of espionage. The 1970s-set thriller is based on John le Carré’s novel of the same name, and tells the story of young actress Charlie (Pugh), who gets caught up in Israeli intelligence officer Becker’s complex and high-stakes plot orchestrated by Spymaster Kurtz (Shannon).

Bravo released a trailer for Dirty John, its upcoming series based on the true-crime podcast of the same name. It follows the twisted story of Debra Newell Stewart, a divorceé in Los Angeles who meets the too-good-to-be-true John Meehan on a dating site. They hit it off and things move at warp speed, but something is amiss from the start.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

Suspense Magazine's Story Blender podcast welcomed Karin Slaughter to discuss her passion for sharing empowering and honest stories of women including her latest novel, Pieces of Her.

The legendary Lawrence Block stopped by the Writer Types podcast. Hosts Eric Beetner and S.W. Lauden also asked five questions with Stephen Jay Schwartz, and Karen Olson sat down for a chat. Plus this week's Unpanel featured award winners Meg Gardiner, Attica Locke, and Kristen Lepionka.

The latest Mysteryrat’s Maze Podcast Featuring the first Haunted Bookshop Mystery by Cleo Coyle, The Ghost and Mrs. McClure, with excerpts read by Max Debbas.

Read or Dead hosts Katie McClean and Rincey Abraham talked about some casting news, other exciting podcasts, lots of Tana French mentions, plus some book recommendations for Hispanic Heritage Month.

Speaking of Mysteries spoke with Lou Berney and his new novel November Road, where cataclysmic events, chance encounters, and unintended consequences collide.

THEATER

The Metropolitan Opera will premiere Nico Muhly's Marnie on October 19. The production is a re-imagining of Winston Graham’s thriller novel set in the 1950s about a beautiful, mysterious young woman who assumes multiple identities. Director Michael Mayer and his creative team have devised a fast-moving, cinematic world for the twisty story of denial and deceit, which also inspired a film by Alfred Hitchcock. Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard sings the enigmatic Marnie, and baritone Christopher Maltman is the man who pursues her—with disastrous results

Media Murder for Monday

Here's your weekly roundup of the latest crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN

20th Century Fox has optioned the best-selling series Spy School by Stuart Gibbs and attached the author attached to write the screenplay based on the first title in the series. Spy School follows middle schooler Ben Ripley, who dreams of becoming a CIA agent. Even though he is awkward and accident prone, he is brilliant and recruited for a magnet school with a focus on science that actually is a front for a junior CIA academy.

Golden Globe winner Maggie Gyllenhaal has teamed with Pie Films to acquire film rights to Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter, which will mark her Gyllenhaal's first outing as a director. The Lost Daughter follows a woman who experiences a seemingly meaningless event while on a beach vacation that causes her to be overwhelmed by memories of the difficult and unconventional choices she made as a mother and their consequences for herself and her family. What begins as an apparently serene tale of a woman’s pleasant rediscovery of herself soon becomes a ferocious psychological thriller about a confrontation with an unsettled past.

Captain America's Chris Evans will co-star with Daniel Craig in Rian Johnson’s murder mystery movie Knives Out. Johnson, who wrote the script and is producing with partner Ram Bergman, will make the movie before directing a new trilogy in the Star Wars universe. Plot details on the film are largely being kept under wraps, although it's said to be a modern day murder mystery in the classic whodunit style.

Armie Hammer has joined Gal Gadot in the cast of Death on the Nile, 20th Century Fox’s follow-up to last year’s successful Agatha Christie adaptation Murder on the Orient Express. Kenneth Branagh returns to direct and star as master detective Hercule Poirot, and Orient Express scribe Michael Green is back to adapt. The book’s plot centers on Poirot investigating a murder during a luxurious cruise on the Nile River that he just happens to be on. But just as he identifies a motley collection of would-be killers, several of the suspects also meet their demise, which only deepens the mystery.

Ray Donovan's Eddie Marsan has come aboard the Fast & Furious spin-off Hobbs and Shaw starring Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham. Chris Morgan will serve as producer and screenwriter for the project that stars Johnson as U.S. Diplomatic Security Agent Luke Hobbs who forms an unlikely alliance with Statham’s Deckard Shaw. The film is scheduled to premiere Aug. 2, 2019.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

CBS has put in development Body Cam Cop, a drama series from Madam Secretary executive producer/writer David Grae and former CBS Entertainment president-turned-producer Glenn Geller. The story follows a cop whose heroism inadvertently lands him celebrity status after an on-the-job incident goes viral. He and his new partner are selected to be part of a pilot program that livestreams body cam footage to the public, but they soon find their lives have become more complicated.

Fox has given a script commitment to an untitled FBI cyber security drama from The Resident executive producer/showrunner Todd Harthan, former Prison Break executive producer Vaun Wilmott and 20th Century Fox TV. The project centers on FBI Director Dole Green, who is framed for a brazen, well-orchestrated attack at the agency headquarters where a treasure trove of classified data and agents identities is stolen in one of the worst attacks on national security in US history. With his career in shambles, Dole must fight to protect his family and get his life back through any means necessary.

J.K Rowling's (a/k/a Robert Galbraith) detective Cormoran Strike is heading back to the BBC with four new episodes of the crime drama known as Strike in the UK and C.B. Strike on HBO's sister network Cinemax.Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger will return as Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott.

Nickelodeon announced its latest TV movie, titled Bixler High Private Eye, starring Jace Norman and Ariel Martin. The comedy tells the story of a young sleuth, Xander DeWitt, whose father suddenly goes missing. Xander’s mom then sends him to live with his grandfather — who used to be a private eye — but it’s in his father’s hometown where the mystery really picks up. Xander finds a surprising lead in the case and meets Kenzie Messina, played by Martin, who is a reporter for the school paper.

On the heels of Queen of the South's recent Season 3 finale, the crime drama has been renewed for a fourth season to premiere in 2019. Starring Alice Braga, Queen of the South is based on the bestselling book La Reina Del Sur by Arturo Pérez-Reverte and tells the powerful story of Teresa Mendoza (Braga), a woman who is forced to run from the Mexican cartel and seek refuge in America. In Season 3, Teresa strikes out on her own, determined to build a new empire for herself. But as enemies old and new close in, she realizes that being Queen will require more work and more sacrifice than she ever imagined.

Black Panther's Winston Duke is set to star opposite Mark Wahlberg in the Netflix crime drama Wonderland, adapted from the novel Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland, written by Ace Atkins. The book is part of the Spenser series, named after a fictional character in the series of detective novels initially written by American mystery writer Parker and later by Atkins. The story follows Spenser who, fresh out of prison, is sucked back into Boston’s underbelly as he uncovers the truth about a sensational murder and the twisted conspiracy behind it. Duke will play Hawk, Spenser’s close friend and an equally tough guy and enforcer with a shady past.

Lethal Weapon had barely gotten over the drama of one of the show's two main characters, Riggs (Clayne Crawford), being ousted from the show after the second season due to his reportedly volatile behavior was over, when the other main star of the show, Damon Wayans, added another shock. In an interview with Electronic Urban Report, Wayans announced that he is "going to be quitting the show in December, after we finish the initial 13 [episodes]."

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

This week's Kings River Life Magazine Mystery Rats Maze podcast features an excerpt from Cleo Coyle's novel The Ghost and Mrs. McClure: Book #1 of the Haunted Bookshop Mysteries, read by actor Max Debbas.

The Crime Files podcast (via By Hodder & Stoughton, Headline Publishing Group & Quercus Books) has two new episodes, one looking at "The legacy of Philip Kerr, author of the Bernie Gunther series," and another with a look back at the Harrogate 2018 crime fiction festival.

DP Lyle's Criminal Mischief: The Art & Science of Crime Fiction took a look this week at "Making Characters Compliant."

Suspense Magazine's Beyond the Cover welcomed Lisa Unger to discuss her new psychological thriller Under My Skin.

Two Crime Writers and a Microphone hosts Steve Cavanagh and Luca Veste discussed bookshops in paradise, being billionaires, defending big companies on social media, and more. The special guests were the duo Chris Brookmyre and Dr. Marisa Haetzman, who make up the author Ambrose Parry, talking about writing as a duo, becoming a writer, and historical medical facts.

THEATER

Rebus: Long Shadows, the play based on Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus series, opens tonight at the King's Theatre in Edinburgh with a run through Saturday, October 13. Adapted by Rona Murno and starring Charles Lawson as John Rebus, the story follows the Detective Inspector who is now retired. But the shadows of his former life still follow him through the streets of Edinburgh when the daughter of a murder victim appears outside his flat.