

Dead Weight, by Frank Kane (Dell, 1953). This was Kane’s fifth novel to feature New York City private eye Johnny Liddell.
Cover illustration by William George.
BBC One, Victoria outfit Mammoth Screen and Agatha Christie Limited are teaming up on The Pale Horse, a TV drama adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel first published in 1961. Sarah Phelps (The Witness for the Prosecution) has scripted the two-part drama which has Amazon Prime Video on board as U.S. co-production partner. In the novel, a mysterious list of names is found in the shoe of a dead woman, and one of those named, Mark Easterbrook, begins an investigation into how and why his name came to be there. He is drawn to The Pale Horse, the home of a trio of rumored witches in the small village of Much Deeping. Word has it that the witches can do away with wealthy relatives using dark arts, but as the bodies mount up, Easterbrook is certain there has to be a rational explanation.I am cautiously optimistic that this will go well. I quite enjoyed screenwriter Phelps’ mini-series adaptations of Christie’s The Witness for the Prosecution and Ordeal by Innocence, but had to practically force myself to sit through all three parts of The A.B.C. Murders, her peculiar take on that 1936 Hercule Poirot mystery.
The month of June has not been kind to Linda Fairstein, the former head of the sex-crimes division of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Since Ava DuVernay’s limited Netflix series “When They See Us” debuted on May 31, the prosecutor-turned-bestselling crime writer has been under fire for her role in shaping the prosecution of the group of wrongfully convicted teens who became known as the Central Park Five. (I know Fairstein slightly through the world of crime writing.) Dutton, her longtime book publisher, and ICM Partners, her longtime agency, both dropped her, and social media campaigns spurred her to resign from the boards of the victims’ resource group Safe Horizon and Vassar College.Again, you’ll find Weinman’s whole piece here.
Fairstein’s fall is the result of a long-overdue public reckoning with New York’s response to the 1989 rape and attempted murder of Trisha Meili, the crime for which the Five were wrongly imprisoned. In measuring the cost of that case, it isn’t simply that Fairstein played a role in pursuing the wrong suspects. It’s that, as I wrote earlier this month, other women were assaulted, raped, and in one instance, murdered by Matias Reyes, the man solely responsible for the attack on Meili. The New York Police Department and the prosecutor’s office failed these women, some of whom were attacked after Meili, because they believed, incorrectly, that Meili was just one victim of a crime wave taking place in Central Park that night.
Our reckoning also needs to go beyond the Central Park jogger case. Fairstein joined an unjust system in the 1970s and, at first, she helped revolutionize certain aspects of that system. But, as our ideas about the criminal-justice system evolved, hers did not. Neither the excoriating op-ed Fairstein wrote in her own defense, nor Felicity Huffman’s villainous portrayal of her in “When They See Us” captures the full arc of what happened to Fairstein—and why it matters for the rest of us.
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