Bullet Points: Bursting at the Seams Edition

It’s been a good long while since I put together one of these news bits columns, so I have some serious catching-up to do!



• The finalists for 2026’s Hammett Prize have been announced by the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch. This commendation is presented annually to a work, published in the previous year, that judges say demonstrates “literary excellence in crime writing.” Here are the five latest candidates:

— El Dorado Drive, by Megan Abbott (Putnam)
— Party of Liars, by Kelsey Cox (Minotaur)
— The Big Empty, by Robert Crais (Putnam)
— The Savage Noble Death of Babs Dionne, by Ron Currie (Putnam)
— The Lizard, by Domenic Stansberry (Molotov Editions)

Expect to hear news of the winner later this summer. Lists of previous Hammett Prize nominees and recipients are available here.

• Believe it or not, among the 13 novels on this year’s longlist of Booker Prize nominees is one plucked straight from the crime/thriller category: All Them Dogs (Riverhead), by Irish fictionist Djamel White. The award’s Web site calls it “by turns savage, thrilling and unexpectedly tender, ... a gripping story of violence, lust, and greed that explores one man's struggles to find his place in an unsparing world.” Whether All Them Dogs will find a place on the Booker shortlist, slated to be revealed on September 22, is anybody’s guess.

• Following this year’s release of A River Red with Blood, the 23rd outing for cop-turned-P.I. Charlie Parker, John Connolly explains in his latest newsletter that his next novel—due out in May 2027—will be The Castle, “a standalone thriller with political overtones, set in a Connecticut suburb in 1973.” He goes on to say:

The Castle is a safe haven, a gated community in a U.S. nation troubled by the war in Vietnam, political assassinations, and the growing shadow of Watergate. For the disillusioned publisher Hamer, it is an escape from a world that has disappointed him.

But something is very wrong in the Castle. A teenage boy has gone missing. There are thefts, threats, shootings. Hamer has begun to fear the Castle may not be so safe after all, and he and his neighbors are the targets of a conspiracy with a single purpose: to destroy five families and punish them for the sins of their children. And one of those families could be his own.

Connolly calls this “a book about secrets: the secrets of the state, the secrets of families, and perhaps the secrets we hide even from ourselves. I’ve been working on it for three years now, and I think—I hope—that it’s about as good a thriller as I can write.”

• If you haven’t yet noticed, my Killer Covers blog is currently rolling out a succession of posts celebrating private eyes.

• I’m a huge fan of stories that illuminate small, seemingly insignificant aspects of crime-fiction storytelling. So Olivia Rutigliano’s new CrimeReads piece, “The 8 Best Fake Crime Novels in Film and TV, Ranked,” is right up my alley.

• The debut of Amazon Prime’s Reacher, Season 4, is teed up for Wednesday, August 12. This latest run of eight episodes will be based on Lee Child’s 2009 novel, Gone Tomorrow. It finds Reacher (played by Alan Ritchson) having “a chance encounter with a distraught stranger on a train [that] goes horribly wrong,” only to see our hero “drawn into a complex and deadly game that pits him against ruthless foes from the highest echelons of power.” A trailer for Reacher is below.



• The program is already looking ahead to its next season. “Amanda Ip, Jay Baruchel, Ciara Bravo and Kevin Durand will star opposite Alan Ritchson,” says The Hollywood Reporter, “as Reacher in the fifth season ... will be based on Lee Child’s novel Make Me. The series ... will catch up with Ritchson’s title character after his train stops in the mysterious town of Mother’s Rest where he teams with a private investigator in the search for a missing person.”

• Meanwhile, watch for the premiere of Prime’s Reacher spin-off series, Neagley, starring Danish actress Maria Sten as the most dangerous operative among Jack Reacher’s Special Investigators, on Wednesday, September 16. (It has its own trailer here.) And Kill Zone, the third entry in Dan Ames’ Frances Neagley novel series, is due out on August 17, with another, Blow Back, coming in November.

• In other television news, The Chelsea Detective, with Adrian Scarborough and Vanessa Emme, will return to Acorn TV for a fourth season on Monday, August 10. A trailer and brief synopses of the four new 90-minute episodes can be found here.

• Max Allan Collins reports that Death by Fruitcake, his 90-minute indie film that brings to life main characters from the Trash ’n’ Treasures mystery series he’s been penning for almost two decades with his wife, Barbara (under their joint pseudonym, Barbara Allan) recently debuted on the streaming TV service Tubi.

• Deadline brings word that “Cooper & Fry are heading to the U.S. after streamer BritBox snapped up the British crime drama. The show has performed well on Paramount-owned broadcast network 5 in the UK and now has a U.S. home. BritBox has snagged Season 1 of the show for U.S. and Canada, while Netflix has taken second window UK rights. Adapted from Stephen Booth’s bestselling detective novels, Cooper & Fry follows unlikely detective duo Ben Cooper and Diane Fry, played by Robert James-Collier (Downton Abbey) and Mandip Gill (Doctor Who). Set in and around England’s picturesque Peak District, the series follows Cooper, who is struggling to emerge from the shadow of his late father, while Fry is an outsider fleeing tragedies in her past. Together, they tackle grisly crimes in the remote countryside.” All eight episodes of Season 1 will drop on Monday, August 17; look for a one-minute trailer here. A second season has already been commissioned, with episodes adapted from Booth’s novels The Devil’s Edge, Fall Down Dead, One Last Breath, and The Murder Road. 

• Maigret, based on Georges Simenon’s many mysteries, will return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece rotation for a sophomore season beginning on Sunday, October 18. Benjamin Wainwright (Belgravia: The Next Chapter, Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim) reprises his lead role as French police detective Jules Maigret, with Stephanie Martini (The Gold, Last Kingdom) playing his wife, Louise. What can we expect from the half-dozen new episodes? PBS offers this plot brief:

An epic power struggle is happening in La Brigade Criminelle in Maigret Season 2. Maigret’s boss, Director of Police Xavier Guichard, has become suspicious of Maigret’s methods and decides to ‘take him down a peg.’ One of Maigret’s colleagues leaves, another is transferred by Guichard and replaced by George Bonfils, who is immediately unpopular with Les Maigrets. As Maigret investigates new crimes, the line between guilt and innocence is blurred. The unconventional detective will have to work out his own unique form of justice for victims and perpetrators alike.

These stories are adapted from Simenon’s The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, Maigret’s Revolver, and The Yellow Dog.

• Agatha Christie created the characters Thomas Beresford and his wife, Prudence (née Cowley), for her 1922 novel, The Secret Adversary. They carried on their detecting escapades through four more books, into the early 1970s. Their debut on television came in the 10-part, 1983-1984 series Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime, starring Francesca Annis and James Warwick. A terrific six-episode show, Partners in Crime, resurrected the pair in 2015, this time portrayed by David Walliams and Call the Midwife’s Jessica Raine in a drama set during the 1950s. Now, Britbox has scheduled a six-part reboot, Agatha Christie’s Tommy & Tuppence, to commence airing on Tuesday, September 15. The action in this new TV serial takes place in the present day, with the private detective protagonists reimagined as on-and-off romantic partners. Antonia Thomas (The Good Doctor, Still Up) will play “spirited actress” Tuppence, while Josh Dylan (The Buccaneers, Mamma Mia 2) portrays Tommy, “a meticulous and charming crime writer.” Mystery Fanfare furnishes a video preview.

• According to In Reference to Murder, “Morgan Spector is in talks to headline Netflix’s series adaptation of Dan Brown‘s latest novel, The Secret of Secrets, tackling the role of Professor Robert Landgon played by Tom Hanks in the film versions. Rebecca Hall (The Town) is also in talks for the female lead opposite Morgan. Spector already stars in HBO’s The Gilded Age as railroad tycoon George Russell, but sources say he would be able to do both series with proper scheduling should Gilded Age get renewed for a fifth season. In The Secret of Secrets, symbologist Robert Langdon (Spector) races against ancient forces and time to rescue his girlfriend, missing scientist Katherine Solomon (Hall), and her groundbreaking manuscript whose discoveries have the power to forever change humanity’s understanding of the mind. If the deals come to fruition, it will mark the first TV series acting collaboration for real-life couple Spector and Hall, who have starred together in a handful of plays and movies, including the Broadway revival of Machinal, Christine, and Permission.”

• And Icelandic author Lilja Sigurðardóttir has reached a deal with Germany’s ZDF Studios and Iceland producer Glassriver to translate her five “Áróra Investigation” novels for the small screen. Variety delivers this synopsis of Sigurðardóttir’s popular yarns: “Set across Iceland and London, the series follows Áróra, a tough fraud investigator with Icelandic roots who returns home to search for her missing sister. What begins as a family mission soon expands into a wider criminal investigation as she teams with Daniel, an Icelandic police detective and potential love interest, exposing corruption, betrayal and violence beneath Iceland’s rugged landscape.”

• It seems every time I think about how many free hours I might gain by signing off from Facebook, that social-networking site dispenses some fresh nugget of information I didn’t know I needed. Case in point: A post from somebody named Donald Bishop, who writes:

If you ever wondered who that beautiful young woman was who was running down the beach combing her hair and then turning to face the camera in the opening of [the original] Hawaii Five-O, now you know, her name is Elizabeth Logue. She is a native Hawaiian, apparently still alive. Her full name is Elizabeth Louise Malamalamaokalani White Logue. Apart from that iconic shot in the intro, she has only 2 other screen credits to her name. In 1961, she had a role in a low-budget Italian exploitation film shot in Tahiti called Nude Odyssey. Her only other part was in the Julie Andrews/Max Von Sydow film Hawaii, based on James Michener’s novel of the same name. She also did a short promotional film for the state of Hawaii to lure tourists to the island paradise.

Below is a compilation of opening sequences from Hawaii Five-O’s 12 seasons as part of CBS’s prime-time line-up (1968-1970).



• Speaking of Facebook, Frederick, Maryland-based publisher Level Best Books declared there weeks ago that it has formed Level Best Books UK, “a wholly owned subsidiary based in London that will serve as the publisher's official presence in the United Kingdom and represent the company's interests throughout Great Britain.” The venture “will be led by Shawn Reilly Simmons, publisher and CEO of Level Best Books, and internationally acclaimed mystery author Martin Edwards, who will serve together as co-directors.”

• This “collaborative mystery” from Britain’s Detection Club should be fun. Sadly, we must wait until 2028 for its appearance.

• I’m quite behind in drawing reader attention to Frank Gregorsky’s fine Detective Drama Gems. Issue 18 marks the start of that publication’s sixth year, and contains background on the 1961-1962 ABC-TV series The New Breed, as well as the Canadian cop drama Night Heat (1985-1989) and “Fade in to Murder,” a memorable 1976 episode of Columbo that pitted Peter Falk’s shabby but clever Los Angeles police lieutenant against former Star Trek captain William Shatner, who played the self-obsessed star of a TV detective show. Issue 19 celebrates the radio version of Dragnet, the 1966-1969 ABC program Felony Squad, and another episode of Night Heat. The next edition of Gems is expected in November.

• Published and unpublished works alike have achieved wins in this year’s contest for the Daphne du Maurier Awards for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense, sponsored by the Kiss of Death Chapter of Romance Writers of America. Click here to see the full results.

• A new crime-fiction periodical is to be launched soon! Beginning in October (so, in time for it to be heavily promoted at Bouchercon in Calgary), SMFS Mystery Magazine will appear three times a year featuring content from some familiar members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. In addition to short stories, the mag is expected to incorporate interviews by Kevin Tipple and M.E. Proctor, and reviews by June Lorraine Roberts and Mat Coward. I’m guessing we will hear more about buying subscriptions once we get closer to the publication date. The cover of Issue 1 is embedded on the left.

• Hot off the presses (or at least still warm) is the Summer 2026 “Mysteries Set in France” edition of Mystery Readers Journal. Grab a copy for yourself here. And note that this follows a similarly themed number of the magazine from the spring of 2012, which looks to be available now only in PDF format.

• The next issue of MRJ will address the topic of “Cross-Genre Mysteries.” Submissions of articles, reviews, and author essays are due by August 20. Guidelines can be accessed here.

• This is good news, indeed! Scottish novelist Peter May wrote recently on Facebook (yeah, damn Facebook again!): “I know that I indicated strongly that The Black Loch [2024] would be my last book. But I also said, never say never. So there’s going to be just one more.” His post also drops “some visual clues” to a location he suggests is “very similar” to an imaginary one featured in Island of the Dead, set to go on sale from Riverrun next January.

• Sometime Rap Sheet contributor Peter Handel hatched his own blog almost a year ago. It’s called Carnivorous: A Steady Diet of Crime Fiction and has of late brought forth a couple of interviews destined to reward your scrutiny. The first is with Amy Bloom and focuses around Blunt Instrument (Mysterious Press), which marks her entry into the mystery-fiction world. The second finds Handel talking with Greg Shepard, the director of vintage publisher Stark House Press. Bookmark Carnivorous, if you have not already done so.

• Finally, we must say good-bye to some people who greatly impacted this field of fiction. Gail Bowen, the Canadian author of more than 20 novels starring Joanne Kilbourn, a political science professor in Saskatchewan with a sideline in solving crimes, passed away on June 25 at age 83, “following a brief battle with cancer.” Japanese writer Keigo Higashino, who reportedly produced 106 books during his lifetime, but may be remembered best for his Detective Galileo mysteries (The Devotion of Suspect X, etc.), perished on July 23 as a result of colorectal cancer; he was 68 years old. And Joanna Pettet may have been a London-born actress, rather than a wordsmith, but her contributions to crime and mystery fiction were still important. She guested on such boob-tube series as The Fugitive, Mannix, The Delphi Bureau, Banacek, Harry O, and Murder, She Wrote, and played “the scantily clad Mata Bond,” daughter of David Niven’s James Bond, in the 1967 spy parody Casino Royale. Pettet was 83 when she died in Temecula, California, on July 7.

Bullet Points: No Shutdown Here Edition

• I mentioned last spring on this page that Raymond Benson, the author of several James Bond continuation novels published between 1997 and 2003, had penned a thrilling adventure for Ian Fleming Publications (IFP) titled The Hook and the Eye, set back in 1952 and centered on ex-CIA op Felix Leiter. A Bond cohort familiar from several of Fleming’s novels, Leiter has become, in Benson’s yarn, a Pinkerton detective tangling with spies in Manhattan and tasked with safely transporting an “impossibly beautiful and impossibly secretive” woman to Texas. Hook was originally intended for release in 10 digital installments, beginning in May, and was then supposed to debut in print in October—this month. So far, however, it seems to be available in book form only for direct purchase from IFP. I don’t see the same edition listed on Amazon in either the United States or the UK, though that online retailer is still satisfying orders for the Kindle version. I asked Benson for an update on this situation. Here’s his reply:

IFP became their own publisher recently and they wanted Hook to be exclusive from them (for the time being). So, yes, right now, while the e-book is on Amazon and other retailer outlets, the print book can only be ordered from IFP. They will likely expand this rollout in the future like the old roadshow movie attractions, slowly offering it on Amazon and such, an audiobook, maybe a U.S. publication, maybe a limited-edition hardcover. It’s all new to them and they’re trying things out, like the e-book serialization that ultimately didn’t work technically (so they released the full e-book at once).

As to the possibility of The Hook and the Eye becoming the initial entry in a whole new Leiter series, Benson answers only, “Not known yet.” That isn’t a “no,” so keep your fingers crossed.

(Above) The full paperback cover of Raymond Benson’s The Hook and the Eye, designed by Thomas Gilbert.

• By the way, Terrance Layhew recently spoke with Benson about The Hook and the Eye for his podcast, Suit Up!

• I missed this news, so thanks to In Reference to Murder for bringing it to my attention. Writes B.V. Lawson: “The winners of the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards (fondly known as the Lammys), established in 1989 to garner national visibility for LGBTQ books, were announced this past weekend. The winner of the Best LBGTQ+ Mystery was Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco (MCD). The other finalists include: Charlotte Illes is Not a Teacher by Katie Siegel (Kensington); One of Us Knows by Alyssa Cole (William Morrow); Rough Pages by Lev AC Rosen (Tor Publishing Group); and The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani, translated by Sam Bett (Soho Crime).”

• Chicago Review of Books last week announced its shortlist of contenders for the 2025 Chicago Review of Books Awards (what other name did you think they would have?), and among the five fiction rivals is one that might be especially interesting to this blog’s readers: Vanishing Daughters (Thomas & Mercer), by Cynthia Pelayo, a novel of psychological suspense focusing on a Chicago journalist haunted—in more ways than one—by mysteries surrounding her mother’s death and her own hunt for a fiendishly successful serial killer.

• On October 1, Crime Writers of Canada opened the submissions process for its 2026 CWC Awards of Excellence, “celebrating the best in Canadian crime, mystery, and suspense writing.” Eligible for consideration are works published in 2025 by Canadian citizens and permanent residents. There are 10 award categories:

— The Peter Robinson Award for Best Crime Novel ($1,000 prize)
— Best Crime First Novel ($1,000)
— Best Crime Novel Set in Canada ($500)
— The Whodunit Award for Best Traditional Mystery ($500)
— Best Crime Short Story ($200)
— The Best French Language Crime Book ($500)
— Best Juvenile/YA Crime Book ($250)
— The Brass Knuckles Award for Best Non-fiction Crime Book ($300)
— Best Unpublished Crime Novel Manuscript written by an
unpublished author ($500)

Submission deadlines are here. Shortlisted nominees will be publicized next April 24, with the winners to be announced on May 29.

• Meanwhile, writers hoping to contribute articles or reviews to the Winter 2025 edition of Mystery Readers Journal will want to get cracking: the deadline is November 1. This will be the second issue in a row devoted to Northern California mysteries, tying them both in nicely to next year’s Left Coast Crime convention, which is set to take place in San Francisco from February 26 to March 1, 2026.

• Max Allan Collins has been noodling for years with a novel that would embroil his famous series private eye, Nathan Heller, in a 1960s-era investigation involving both labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He’s even suggested that such a book might be the last one he writes about Heller. Now, though, Collins says he “might not write it at all,” or might instead pen two more Hellers. He explains the situation in his blog:

I was watching TV and saw Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and
wondered if he had, if not damaged, the Kennedy name, brought it into a kind of doubt. He strikes me as a crank, and a dangerous one; some smart people disagree, but enough people share that view—that as Secretary of Health and Human Services he is a threat to health and human services—that the Robert F. Kennedy name is not something I dare, at the moment, hang a Heller on. It may already have hurt Too Many Bullets [2023], my Heller RFK assassination novel.

I don’t do this lightly. I first asked [my wife] Barb if she agreed that this was a bad time to embark on an RFK novel (the theme was to be RFK/Hoffa, as my previous Kennedy-oriented novels have more than hinted at). She immediately agreed and said, “Write something else.” I called my editor, Charles Ardai, at Hard Case Crime and asked if he thought I should do a different, non-Kennedy novel instead of the one we’d been planning (and that I was contracted to deliver). He was thrilled I was setting that subject aside (for now anyway). I asked my longtime researcher, George Hagenaur, what he thought. He, too, said it was a bad time to do a Kennedy book.

So. I am instead going to write [an early 1970s] Watergate novel, which was already one of two Heller novels I was considering doing, for quite a while now. It seems like a good time to deal with a cover-up.

Indeed, revisiting the paranoia and drive for power that led to the 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex and Republican President Richard M. Nixon’s subsequent concealment of that crime, would draw obvious parallels to Donald Trump’s paranoia, corruption, and autocratic scheming. Personally, I prefer to see Collins’ Heller tackling older cases (the 1934 murder of bank robber John Dillinger, the 1937 disappearance of aviatrix Amelia Earhart, Los Angeles’ 1947 Black Dahlia murder, etc.), and Too Many Bullets did imply that an RFK/Hoffa story was next. Yet any new Heller novel is better than none.

• With The Last Death of the Year, her sixth Hercule Poirot novel, coming out on both sides of the Atlantic later this month, British author-poet Sophie Hannah talks to CrimeReads “about how she writes the Poirot novels, the taunting challenge at the beginning of this new novel, and what crime fiction and poetry have in common.”

• And the Web site Spybrary mentions that John le Carré’s fourth son, who pens fiction as “Nick Harkaway,” is encouraging other writers to “continue the adventures of his father’s famed spymaster George Smiley, opening the way for a potential new wave of espionage novels. Harkaway, who has already published one continuation novel, Karla’s Choice, and has another due next year, said the morally ambiguous world created by le Carré was ‘richer and wider than the original books ever had a chance to show.’ He urged writers to enter the Smiley universe ‘with due deference and due fearlessness.’”

• We’ve known for some while that a spin-off from Reacher, the Amazon Prime TV series based on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, was in the works and that its protagonist would be Frances Neagley (played by Maria Sten), once a member of Reacher’s army special-investigations unit and now a partner with a Chicago private security firm. But not until the author was interviewed by Shots had we heard a recent update on that program’s development. Child revealed that Season 4 of Reacher, based on his 2009 novel, Gone Tomorrow, “is almost done … and the Neagley spin-off is almost through post-production.” As to Neagley’s Season 1 plot, Wikipedia says it will find the character “seek[ing] the truth after an old friend dies in a suspicious accident.”

• Since we’re talking TV, note that Season 2 of Karen Pirie, the ITV show based on Val McDermid’s now eight books about a young Scottish police investigator, will have its U.S. premiere on BritBox come Thursday, October 2. This new season will comprise three 90-minute episodes and is adapted from the second of McDermid’s Pirie tales, A Darker Domain. Mystery Fanfare provides a trailer.

• Lauren Lyle, who plays Karen Pirie, also headlines The Ridge, a six-part drama coming to BBC Scotland and Sky Open on Tuesday, October 21. The Killing Times explains that The Ridge “sees Lyle in the lead role of Mia, who is fleeing addiction and leaving behind a professional life in tatters in Scotland. She accepts a wedding invitation from her estranged sister in New Zealand—only to find the would-be-bride dead upon arrival. Caught up in grief and pulled by a dark attraction to her late-sister’s fiancé Ewan, played by New Zealand star Jay Ryan, Mia soon finds that familiarity among a small community breeds secrets and tensions, endangering the brittle fabric of the town itself.”

• Man From U.N.C.L.E. fans, pay attention! Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has scheduled eight telefilms, all edited from that 1964-1968 TV series but frequently boasting extra footage, to show back to back on Monday, October 13. Click here to learn more.

• One hundred fifty years after Edgar Allan Poe was reburied in Baltimore, Ed Simon considers his legacy, his interest in premature burials, and his Americanism in this splendid essay for Literary Hub.

• Included among Columbia University linguist John McWhorter’s choices of “10 Old Television Series Every Kid Needs to Watch”—prepared partly with his “tween daughters” in mind—is CBS’s Mannix (1967-1975). “Weird choice, I know,” he remarks in The New York Times. “But my girls should know the conventions of the once ubiquitous hourlong private-eye genre, including the way it reduced female characters to just dolls. I found that weird even when I was a kid, and I want my girls to see what we have gotten at least partly beyond. Plus, the look and sound of Mannix were a delight. The fashions, sets and even jazzy three-quarter waltz time theme song are groovy. Especially after the first season, when [Joe] Mannix has left a detective agency and goes it alone, the episodes are pleasingly interchangeable; choose the one with your favorite guest star.”

• “Why Do Priests and Vicars Make Perfect Detectives?” asks a headline in the TV-oriented blog The Killing Times. Editor Paul Hirons submits that it’s because mystery-solving clergy—whether G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, Sidney Chambers in Grantchester, or Daniel Clement in Murder Before Evensong—“offer not just the satisfaction of seeing a puzzle solved, but a meditation on what it means to be good, or to fall short. The crimes may change, but the questions of conscience, guilt and grace remain timeless.”

• We have a cover already for Hurricane Room, Kim Sherwood’s third and final Double O novel. Its tagline is certainly suggestive: “James Bond Is Alive.” Hurricane Room is being readied for release in the States and UK next May.

• Whenever I order something online from Blackwell’s Books in England (as I do rather frequently), I am impressed by an incidental legal notation at the bottom of its Web pages that reads, “©1879-2025 Blackwell’s.” In an era when bookshops struggle to stay afloat, you have to love an operation that’s been around for 146 years!

• Finally, let us wish a tardy but justly appreciative farewell to Ann Granger, the Portsmouth, England-born author of more than three dozen books in four different mystery series (her first being 1991’s Say It With Poison). She was 86 years old at the time of her death on September 7. An obituary in The Daily Telegraph observes that “Ann Granger’s mysteries were popular with British readers, but she secured her largest readership abroad, feeding the voracious global appetite for the gentle English style of violent crime. Translated into 10 languages, her novels were especially popular in Germany—where she sold millions of copies, with some 30 of her books entering the top-five bestseller list—and the United States. “The village mystery plot should be ingenious, the style witty, the setting picturesque and the characters amusingly idiosyncratic,” the New York Times Book Review declared in 1995. “Ann Granger knows the drill so well she could write a manual.” According to the Web site Fantastic Fiction, she has one further entry—currently untitled—in her series starring Victorian police inspector Ben Ross that’s still in the publishing pipeline.

Turning the Dial

Amid all of my (mostly self-imposed) reading responsibilities, I have not been keeping up with what television offers. Only recently, for instance, did I finally tune in the seven-episode, 2024 AppleTV+ adaptation of Laura Lippman’s novel Lady in the Lake. And last night, I began watching Season 3 of Prime Video’s Reacher, which stars the terrific Alan Ritchson and is based on Lee Child’s seventh Jack Reacher novel, Persuader. I’m hoping this latest eight-episode run of Reacher will combine humor, character development, and action in a manner similar to the balance achieved in Season 1.

Meanwhile, debuts steam ahead (or should that be “stream” ahead) without a moment’s concern for my schedule:

• Agatha Christie’s 1944 crime novel Towards Zero has been translated into a star-spangled three-part small-screen drama set to commence showing on the UK’s BBC One on Sunday, March 2. BritBox will carry it in the States, but at a not-yet-specified date.

• A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, with the captivating Lucy Boynton playing an “infamous murderess, the last woman to be hanged in the UK” in the mid-1950s), is headed to British boob tubes on Wednesday, March 5. I just read, though, that this four-part historical drama is already available via BritBox on this side of the pond! (See what I mean about not staying current?)

• Amanda Seyfried stars in Long Bright River as a Philadelphia police officer “determined to track down her missing, drug-addicted sister, while simultaneously untangling the mystery of who’s murdering young prostitutes in the district she patrols.” All eight installments of this show, based on Liz Moore’s 2020 novel of the same name, will drop on streamer Peacock come Thursday, March 13.

• The 2024 thriller A Remarkable Place to Die, starring Chelsea Preston Crawford as a police detective who, to quote Telly Visions, “returns to her home town of Queensland in New Zealand, which she both loves and hates,” debuted on Acorn TV on February 17. Four 90-minute installments will stream on Mondays through March 10.

• Last but certainly not least, British broadcaster ITV has commissioned a fifth season of Ben Miller’s Professor T before that mystery’s fourth series has even aired (on PBS-TV here in the States).

Bullet Points: Alarming Week Edition

After the horrific results of this week’s U.S. national elections, I’ve done my best to avoid major news sources. However, as always, I have kept my eyes open for developments in the world of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. Here are a few items worth sharing.

(Above) Author Paretsky, from her Facebook page.

• Sara Paretsky has been chosen to receive the 2025 Killer Nashville John Seigenthaler Legends Award. As In Reference to Murder notes, that prize—named for an ex-editorial director of USA Today—is “bestowed upon an individual within the publishing industry who has championed First Amendment Rights to ensure that all opinions are given a voice, has exemplified mentorship and example to authors, supporting the new voices of tomorrow, and/or has written an influential canon of work that will continue to influence authors for many years to come.” The Killer Nashville Web site relates some of the reasons Paretsky deserves this commendation:

Sara Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world in 1982 by introducing V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only. Paretsky challenged a genre in which women historically were vamps or victims by creating a detective with the grit and smarts to take on the mean streets. V.I. struck a chord with readers and critics; Indemnity Only was followed by twenty more V.I. novels. Her voice and world remain vital to readers; the New York Times calls V.I. “a proper hero for these times,” adding, “To us, V.I. is perfect.”

While Paretsky’s fiction changed the narrative about women, her work also opened doors for other writers. In 1986, she created Sisters in Crime, a worldwide organization that advocates for women crime writers. This organization earned her Ms. Magazine's 1987 Woman of the Year award. More accolades followed: the British Crime Writers awarded her the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement; Blacklist won the Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers for best novel of 2004, and she has received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from several universities.

Called “"passionate” and “electrifying,” V.I. reflects her creator’s passion for social justice. After chairing the school's first Commission on the Status of Women as a Kansas University undergraduate, Paretsky worked as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side during the turbulent race riots of 1966. Since then, Paretsky’s volunteer work has included advocating for healthcare for the mentally ill homeless, mentoring teens in Chicago's most troubled schools, and working for reproductive rights. Through her Sara & Two C-Dogs foundation, she also helps build STEM and arts programs for young people.

The author will be presented with her award during a special dinner at next year’s Killer Nashville conference, to be held in Nashville, Tennessee, from August 21 to 24.

• The shortlists have been announced of this year’s An Post Irish Book Awards contenders. Categories range from Popular Fiction, Non-fiction, and Cookbook to Poetry, Short Story, Newcomer, and Teen and Young Adult. There are also half a dozen candidates for the 2024 Irish Independent Crime Fiction Book of the Year. They are:

— A Stranger in the Family, by Jane Casey (Hemlock Press)
— Witness 8, by Steve Cavanagh (Headline)
— Where They Lie, by Claire Coughlan (Simon & Schuster)
— Someone in the Attic, by Andrea Mara (Bantam)
— Somebody Knows, by Michelle McDonagh (Hachette Ireland)
— When We Were Silent, by Fiona McPhillips (Bantam)

Winners will be revealed during a ceremony in the Convention Centre Dublin on Wednesday, November 27.

• Elizabeth Foxwell points us toward this fascinating piece in Humanities Magazine, which recalls “how a copyright tussle between author Dashiell Hammett and Warner Bros. over his detective Sam Spade changed copyright law.”

• On this first day of Veterans Day Weekend, blogger-editor Janet Rudolph serves up a substantial list of mystery fiction related to this holiday. You will find works ranging from Rennie Airth’s River of Darkness and Susan Elia MacNeal’s Mr. Churchill's Secretary to Max Allan Collins’ The Million Dollar Wound, Elizabeth Speller’s The Return of Captain John Emmett, and Philip Kerr’s earliest Bernie Gunther yarns (March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem).

• Having himself penned a trio of James Bond continuation novels, it’s understandable that Anthony Horowitz might concoct a character in his own fiction who undertakes that same sort of assignment. And so he does in Marble Hall Murders, the forthcoming third entry in his Susan Ryeland/Atticus Pünd series (Magpie Murders, Moonflower Murders). This new work is due out in the UK in April 2025, and in the States come May. Here’s the plot summary from Amazon:

Editor Susan Ryeland has left her Greek island, her hotel, and her Greek boyfriend Andreas in search of a new life back in England.

Freelancing for Causton Books, she’s working on the manuscript of a novel, Pünd’s Last Case, by a young author named Eliot Crace, a continuation of the popular Alan Conway series. Susan is surprised to learn that Eliot is the grandson of legendary children’s author Marian Crace, who died some fifteen years ago—murdered, Elliot insists, by poison.

As Susan begins to read the manuscript’s opening chapters, the skeptical editor is relieved to find that Pünd’s Last Case is actually very good. Set in the South of France, it revolves around the mysterious death of Lady Margaret Chalfont, who, though mortally ill, is poisoned—perhaps by a member of her own family. But who did it? And why?

The deeper Susan reads, the more it becomes clear that the clues leading to the truth of Marian Crace’s death are hidden within this Atticus Pünd mystery.

While Eliot’s accusation becomes more plausible, his behavior grows increasingly erratic. Then he is suddenly killed in a hit-and-run accident, and Susan finds herself under police scrutiny as a suspect in his killing.

Three mysterious deaths. Multiple motives and possible murderers. If Susan doesn’t solve the mystery of Pund’s Last Case, she may well be the next victim.

I very much enjoyed the first two Ryeland outings, so should be early in line to pick up a copy of this book as well.

• Mystery Fanfare brings word that the latest Death in Paradise Christmas special is coming to UK screens on December 25, courtesy of BBC-TV. That feature-length installment will star Don Gilét, who replaces Ralf Little as the British lead detective on the show. Series 14 of Death in Paradise is expected to debut on the opposite side of the Atlantic early in 2025. There’s no word yet on when it might be available to American viewers.

• Meanwhile, Series 3 of the Death spin-off series Beyond Paradise, featuring Kris Marshall and Sally Bretton, has its own Christmas special planned (the broadcast date will be December 25), with new episodes expected in the spring of next year. And a third spin-off, the Australia-set Return to Paradise, is scheduled to air in the UK beginning on November 22. Six episodes will be on offer this first season.

• Not only has the Prime Video series Reacher received an early fourth-season renewal (Season 3—based on Persuader, Lee Child’s seventh Jack Reacher novel—won’t even debut until 2025), but a spin-off drama is also in the works. As Deadline reports, it will find Danish actress Maria Sten reprising her “fan-favorite” role as Frances Neagley, a corporate security professional in Chicago who served with Reacher in the U.S. Army's 110th Special Investigations Unit. The blog In Reference to Murder says that in this spin-off’s first season, Neagley “learns that a beloved friend from her past has been killed in a suspicious accident, [and] becomes hell bent on justice. Using everything she’s learned from Jack Reacher and her time as a member of the 110th Special Investigators, Neagley puts herself on a dangerous path to uncover a menacing evil.” Look for Alan Ritchson, who plays Reacher in the original series, to guest star in the offshoot.

• They don’t amount to much, but The Killing Times has posted a handful of “first look” images from Series 6 of Strike, which BBC One promises to premiere in the UK next month. These latest episodes are adapted from the 2022 novel The Ink Black Heart, by “Robert Gailbraith” (aka J.K. Rowling), and will star Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger. The Web site TVDrama.com provides this plot synopsis:

In the new season, the co-creator of the popular [YouTube cartoon series] The Ink Black Heart shows up frantic at Cormoran Strike [Burke] and Robin Ellacott’s office because she is being persecuted by a mysterious online figure. Ellacott [Grainger] informs her that the agency is too busy to take on the case, but regrets doing so when, weeks later, she discovers that the cartoon co-creator has been murdered in Highgate Cemetery, the location of The Ink Black Heart.

Ellacott and Strike are drawn into a quest to uncover the anonymous online figure who was tormenting the co-creator and are pulled into a complex web of online aliases, business interests and family conflicts.

Strike has previously aired in the States on HBO-TV, as C.B. Strike. But I have found no news yet of a U.S. debut for Series 6.

• One final boob tube-related item: The eight-episode Apple TV+ series Presumed Innocent is morphing into an anthology drama. Its acclaimed first season was of course based on Scott Turow’s 1987 novel of the same name, But, according to Deadline, the David E. Kelley-run production may take its sophomore-season inspiration from a legal thriller not even due for publication until 2026: Dissection of a Murder, by Jo Murray. It goes on to explain that Murray’s tale “follows Leila Reynolds who has just been handed her first murder case. She’s way out of her depth but the defendant only wants her—and to make matters worse, her husband is the prosecutor. Soon Leila is fighting to keep her own secrets buried too.”

• The British Crime Writers’ Association has brought on two new sponsors. The editorial consultancy Fiction Feedback, founded in 2008 by editor and former CWA secretary Dea Parkin, will support its Emerging Author Dagger prize. Writer/lecturer Morgen Witzel has volunteered to sponsor the Historical Dagger in memory of his wife, Dr Marilyn Livingstone, with whom—under the pseudonyms A.J. MacKenzie and R.L. Graham—he wrote 13 historical crime novels and thrillers. Livingstone passed away in September 2023.

• Scotland’s Glencairn Crystal Limited, which manufactures the famous Glencairn whisky glass and has for four years underwritten the McIlvanney and Bloody Scotland Debut crime-writing literary awards, is out with a new anthology, The Last Dram, that “features tales from 16 different authors, all of whom have previously entered the Glencairn Glass Crime Short Story competition over the last three years.” Among those writers, says The Bookseller, are “Allan Gaw (2022/23 runner-up, who has since gone on to win this year’s Bloody Scotland Debut Prize); Phillip Wilson (2023/24 winner); Elisabeth Ingram Wallace (2023/24 runner-up); Brid Cummings (2021/22 winner); Jennifer Harvey (2021/22 runner-up); Judith O’Reilly (2021/22 runner-up).” Funds raised through the sale of this anthology will go to Maggie’s, a network of cancer-care drop-in centers located across the United Kingdom.

• While re-reading The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler’s fifth Philip Marlowe novel, author Dana King finds himself surprised by the author’s “misogynistic tendencies.”

• As the DVD and Blu-ray editions of his latest indie film, Blue Christmas, are being readied for Christmastime sale, crime novelist Max Allan Collins reports that he and his fellow-author spouse, Barbara, recently celebrated the “world premiere” of a second new picture, Death by Fruitcake, with two showings in their home town of Muscatine, Iowa. Fruitcake brings to life the main characters in their almost two-decades-old Trash ’n’ Treasures mystery series, published under the nom de plume Barbara Allan. “The screenings weren’t flawless,” Collins writes. “These were our first showings anywhere other than on our computers, and Death by Fruitcake is primarily intended for television (streaming most likely) and physical media (Blu-ray and DVD). None of that marketing has begun, as the film is intended for a 2025 holiday release. So there were bumps, chiefly of the audio variety (softer image and audio on Friday, and still not ideal audio on Saturday). But they were eminently watchable and got a terrific reaction from both audiences, with lots of laughs and a good deal of fun at the red carpet event before and after …”

• I’m always a reluctant convention-goer, but I have promised to attend next year’s Bouchercon in New Orleans, during which my friend Ali Karim will serve as Fan Guest of Honor. And now I am giving serious thought to attending the Left Coast Crime get-together in late February 2026. It will be held in San Francisco, which is one of my favorite cities in the world, and feature as its Fan Guest of Honor Randal S. Brandt, a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and an infrequent contributor to The Rap Sheet. For more info or to register for the ’26 LCC, click here.

• Let me wish fond farewells to two lately deceased performers who appeared over the years on many TV programs, including crime dramas: Teri Garr and Alan Rachins.

• And for the many millions of Americans traumatized by the prospect of convicted felon Donald Trump returning to the White House next year, MSNBC-TV’s Rachel Maddow offers this to-do list to defend the nation’s democracy from authoritarian assault.

“Reacher” Renewed

Although I preferred the first series of Reacher to its sophomore run of more firepower-dominated episodes, I am pleased to hear that the Prime Video TV program—based on Lee Child’s best-selling novels—has been re-upped for a third season. From The Real Book Spy:

Jack Reacher will again be brought to life by actor Alan Ritchson, who has played the titular role in both seasons of Prime Video’s Reacher (Season 2 debuted in second place on Nielson’s Top 10 Streaming Charts). Earlier today, Amazon confirmed that a third season is, indeed, coming and that Lee Child’s 2003 novel Persuader will serve as the source material for the upcoming season, which is said to already be filming in Toronto. In addition to Ritchson, Variety is reporting that Maria Sten will also return, reprising her role as Frances Neagley after appearing in the first two seasons. ...

The official logline for the third season of Reacher reads, “Reacher must go undercover to rescue an informant held by a haunting foe from his past.”

The Real Book Spy’s Ryan Steck notes that “while we know Frances Neagley will be back in season three, her character does not appear in Child’s book, so it’ll be interesting to see how the show’s writers and producers make room for her in the overall plot.” No other casting choices have yet been announced.

Jack Is Back!

Having very much enjoyed the eight-episode Season 1 of Amazon Prime’s Reacher, based on Lee Child’s best-selling Jack Reacher stories, I was pleased to read recently in The Hollywood Reporter that the second season of that action-TV drama will debut next month.

“The second season,” says the magazine, “is based on Bad Luck and Trouble, the 11th book in author Lee Child’s 28-novel series featuring the character. Reacher (Alan Ritchson) gets a coded message revealing that members of his former U.S. Army unit, the 110th MP Special Investigations, are being murdered one by one. Pulled from his drifter lifestyle, Reacher reunites with three of his former teammates (played by Maria Sten, Serinda Swan and Shaun Sipos), who begin to connect the dots in a mystery where the stakes get higher at every turn, bringing about questions of who has betrayed them.”

Unlike what we saw with the previous run of Reacher, which had all of its episodes dropped simultaneously, THP notes that this new season “will roll out more gradually, with three episodes premiering Dec. 15 and the remainder of the eight-episode season coming weekly.”

You can watch a two-minute trailer for Reacher 2 here.

UPDATE: The debut of Reacher’s second season has been moved up by a day, to Sunday, December 14. “The remaining five episodes,” explains Mystery Fanfare, “will stream on Prime Video every Friday, with the finale streaming on January 19, 2024.”

READ MORE: “Reacher Season 2 Is Flipping the Amazon TV Show’s Main Characters into Villains,” by Megan Hemenway (ScreenRant).

Bullet Points: Kicking Off Autumn Edition

• Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and country singer Dolly Parton have all claimed authorship of crime or thriller novels over the last few years, so why not James Comey? The ex-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and onetime FBI director was bluntly fired from that latter post in 2017 by Donald Trump amid the worsening scandal over Russian influence on Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. Comey has since delivered speeches and written op-ed pieces for newspapers, but those endeavors were apparently not satisfying enough. So now he has signed with The Mysterious Press, an imprint of Penzler Publishers, to produce a pair of crime novels. As explained this week in a press release,

Central Park West, the first book of a planned series, features an assistant U.S. Attorney whose case against a high-profile mobster is derailed when a shocking turn of events reveals possible ties between the Mafia and the headline-making murder of a local politician. Drawing from the author’s personal experience, this high-stakes legal thriller reveals the detective work, backdoor dealings, and tradecraft involved as the FBI and Department of Justice attempt to build a case against an elusive member of one of the oldest criminal organizations in the world.

“I’m excited to take readers inside fascinating worlds I’ve come to know from my time in government and the private sector,” Comey is quoted as saying. “These stories are fiction, but, inspired by real work I’ve done, they will offer a rarely-seen view of interesting people and institutions. And I’m honored to be doing it with a legendary publisher.” Central Park West is scheduled for release in late spring 2023. There’s no word yet on the plot of book two.

• Literary Hub managing editor Emily Temple surveyed 25 reading lists for this fall season from 22 notable outlets (newspapers, magazines, and some Web sites) in order to come up with a tally of the 72 most-recommended books, fiction and non-fiction. Of those dozens of choices, I believe only two novels—Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age and Richard Osman’s The Bullet That Missed—can unquestionably be defined as crime or mystery fiction.

• The annual Irish crime-writing festival Murder One was launched only in 2018, and for the last two years—ever since the COVID-19 pandemic struck—it has had to be presented exclusively online. Not this year, though. From October 4 to 9, Murder One is scheduling events to take place at the DLR LexIcon Library and Cultural Centre in Dún Laoghaire, just south of Dublin. Among 2022’s scheduled guests will be U.S. novelists Laura Lippman and Jean Hanff Korelitz, English fictionists Ann Cleeves and Mick Herron, Irish writers Catherine Ryan Howard and Brian McGilloway, and Agatha Christie biographer/TV presenter Lucy Worsley. Many of the in-person events will also be live-streamed online. For booking details, click here.

• In Reference to Murder reports that actor Shaun Sipos (Outer Range) “has been tapped as a major lead opposite Alan Ritchson in the upcoming second season of Reacher. From writer and showrunner Nick Santora and based on the novels by Lee Child, the series follows Jack Reacher (Ritchson), a veteran military police investigator who has just recently entered civilian life. In a one-year deal, Sipos will play David O’Donnell, who served with Reacher in the Army’s unit of special investigators and is like a brother to Reacher. While Season 1 was based on the first book in Child’s Jack Reacher series, Ritchson revealed in May on Instagram that Season 2 will follow the eleventh book in Child’s series, Bad Luck and Trouble. David O’Donnell is a prominent character in that book, the only novel in the series he is featured in, which explains Sipos’ one-season deal.”

• Congratulations to the Sisters in Crime organization for 35 years spent “fighting the patriarchy.”

• How does Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo compare with the great Sherlock Holmes? “Despite being a very different character, and harking from an entirely different time and space,” The Columbophile blog opines, “Columbo may be the closest to Holmes of all their peers in terms of mental dexterity. But how much do these men really have in common when making a detailed comparison? Well, despite one being an upper-crust, cynical and occasionally drug-dependent Victorian-era Brit, and the other being from humble Italian-American stock, a grafter who has worked harder than others to get ahead, there is much to connect the two detectives—and those similarities expand way beyond a mutual love of tobacco.” Enjoy the whole story here.

• So much for that dream... In answer to the question, “At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?,” Randall Munroe, the author of What If? 2, estimates the threshold was passed “sometime before the population of active English writers reached a few hundred,” which would have been right around the year 1500.

• Sadly, my book radar sometimes fails me. For instance, I entirely missed noticing this last July’s release of The Blood Ogre, the latest novel from Craig McDonald, best known for his pulpish Hector Lassiter series. Steven Powell offers this description:

The story revolves around the reputation of two remarkably prolific writers, Lester Dent and Walter B. Gibson. Dent suffered a nervous breakdown and early death in 1959, perhaps brought on by the impossible schedule of churning out Doc Savage novels by the dozen and averaging two million words a year on his typewriter. In his final days, Dent had hallucinations in which he would see and interact with Doc Savage characters. In 1965, Doc Savage and The Shadow novels are enjoying renewed popularity. The Shadow author Walter B. Gibson has a knack for publicity rooted in his parallel career as a magician. People start witnessing a black-clad figure looming around the Greenwich Village house where Gibson penned the final Shadow novel in 1949. Gibson claims it is a ‘living mind-projection’ of The Shadow. But if a hero can rise from the pages of an authors literary output, then what other, more sinister, characters will follow him?

Powell calls The Blood Ogre “devilishly good” and “an affectionate tribute to a bygone era.” Frankly, it’s meta-fictional conceit reminds me rather too much of Paul Malmont’s The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril (2006), a novel I was unable to finish. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed McDonald’s books in the past, so will likely look this one up, too.

• Not long before he starred in the high-tech NBC-TV private eye drama Search, actor Tony Franciosa appeared in an unsold pilot for the same network called The Catcher. The weekly program would’ve starred Michael Witney as Noah Hendrix, a former agent with the Seattle Bureau of Missing Persons, who now operates as an investigator chasing runaways and fugitives. I’ve never seen the full pilot, but I did discover a four-minute clip on YouTube that features Franciosa, Witney, Jan-Michael Vincent as Hendrix’s associate Sam Callende, and blues musician Piano Red. See it while you can!

• My, how times—and budgets—have changed! Back in 1968, it was considered extravagant for NBC to fork out $400,000 for every 90-minute episode of the crime-drama “wheel series” The Name of the Game. Compare that with some of today’s most expensive small-screen shows. According to the Internet research company VPN Overview, the Amazon Prime production Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power costs $60 million per installment. The Disney+ programs Hawkeye (2021), The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), WandaVision (2021), Loki (2021), and Obi Wan Kenobi (2022) each budgeted $25,000,000 per episode, while Netflix spends $13,000,000 per episode on The Crown (2016-).

• Have you ever wanted to watch the first, black-and-white, half-hour episode of Jack Webb’s police drama, Dragnet, dating back to December 14, 1951? Well, here’s your chance.

• I didn’t realize, when I applauded the recent revival of The Washington Post’s Sunday Book World section after a dozen years, that its return would coincide with the end of another Sunday Post component I have come to appreciate immensely: the nearly 68-year-old Outlook section of commentary and news analysis. “The decision to retire the Outlook section,” Robert G. Kaiser and Steve Luxenberg explained in its last edition, on September 16, “and to consolidate the paper’s opinion journalism in the editorial department, is a measure of how dramatically the newspaper business has changed in its march from print to digital publication.” Outlook was one of the models I used when I created a four-page editorials section for my college newspaper, and I’ve enjoyed reading it whenever I have been in D.C. since, or have picked up the Sunday Post from a newsstand. Rolling its variety of contents into the Opinions pages is not an unreasonable solution, but it’s also not a happy one for those of us who once traveled directly from the front section of the Post to Outlook.

Get Ready for More “Reacher”

Reacher, the eight-part Amazon Prime series based on Lee Child’s best-selling Jack Reacher thrillers, debuted on February 4—and has already amassed a goodly amount of praise among critics (see here and here, for instance). Shotsmag Confidential’s Ayo Onatade is especially complimentary of star Alan Ritchson, insisting that his portrayal of self-designated “hobo” and former military police investigator Reacher “will win over fans, not solely because of how he physically looks but also because of his acting as well. He has this quietness about him that epitomises the way in which Reacher is in the books, along with his confidence and at times weary patience.”

Now comes word that Reacher has been renewed for a second season—not surprisingly, given its viewer reception. “According to Amazon,” says Deadline, “the series ranked in its top five most-watched series ever in the U.S. and globally over a 24-hour period. The company added that it also was among its highest-rated original series, with subscribers giving it an average rating of 4.7 out of 5.”

Season 1 of Reacher is based on Child’s first novel, Killing Floor (1997). In addition to Ritchson, it features Malcolm Goodwin as Oscar Finlay, the Harvard-educated chief of detectives in a small Georgia town, and the delightful Willa Fitzgerald as Roscoe Conklin, an officer in Finlay’s department. (I have so far made it only halfway through the show, but I’m hoping there will eventually be some explanation of Conklin’s masculine moniker—surely it must be an allusion to the 19th-century New York politician Roscoe Conkling.)

There’s no word yet on which of Child’s books will be adapted for Season 2 of Reacher.

READ MORE: “How Lee Child’s Killing Floor Was Transformed Into Reacher,” by Heather Martin (CrimeReads); “A Reacher We Can Appreciate,” by Oline H. Cogdill (Mystery Scene).