Media Murder for Monday

It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

Chris Evans is in final negotiations to join Netflix’s Pain Hustlers, starring opposite Emily Blunt. The story, which is described as tonally similar to American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street, centers on Liza Drake (Blunt), a high-school dropout dreaming of a better life for her and her young daughter. Liz lands a job with a failing pharmaceutical startup in a strip mall in Central Florida. Her charm, guts, and drive catapult the company and her into the high life, where she soon finds herself at the center of a criminal conspiracy with deadly consequences. Acclaimed short story and nonfiction writer, Wells Tower, is penning the script.

Disney+ has teamed with Beta Film and Morena Films on an adaptation of the young adult mystery novel franchise, The Invisible Girl (La Chica Invisible) from YA author Blue Jeans, the pen name of Francisco de Paula Fernández González. Daniel Grao and Zoe Stein have landed the leads, playing a father and daughter who must overcome their differences to solve a murder case that has shaken the peaceful lives of the inhabitants of picturesque Cárdena.

Christian Bale stars in the first trailer for David O. Russell’s upcoming film, Amsterdam. The story is set in the 1930s and follows three friends who witness a murder, become suspects themselves, and uncover one of the most outrageous plots in American history. The cast includes Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Robert De Niro, Alessandro Nivola, Andrea Riseborough, Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Rock, Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Shannon, Mike Myers, Taylor Swift, Zoe Saldaña, and Rami Malek. 20th Century Studios is releasing it in theaters this fall on November 4.

TELEVISION/STREAMING SERVICES

Ben Aaronovitch’s bestselling crime fantasy series, Rivers of London, is to be adapted for television. Rivers of London is part urban fantasy and part police procedural, and centers on Detective Constable Peter Grant. A newly graduated police officer from London, he is recruited in the first book by wizard and inspector, Thomas Nightingale, to the Folly, a police unit working on supernatural crimes.

Stephen Graham (Peaky Blinders) will star in one of the lead roles for the crime drama series, Bodies, for Netflix. The eight-part series is based on Si Spencer’s mind-bending 2015 graphic novel which starts with a murder in Whitechapel. Four different detectives are trying to solve the murder in different time periods: 1890s overachiever Edmond Hillinghead, dashing 1940s adventurer Karl Whiteman, kickass female 2010s Detective Sergeant Shahara Hasan, and Maplewood, an amnesiac from post-apocalyptic 2050, who brings a haunting perspective. Together, the four set out to uncover a conspiracy spanning 150 years.

Showtime’s Your Honor will end after its upcoming second season. Your Honor originated as a limited series but after its breakout ratings success, it was renewed for a 10-episode second season last year. In the series, Bryan Cranston stars as Michael Desiato, a respected New Orleans judge whose teenage son is involved in a hit-and-run that leads to a high-stakes game of lies, deceit, and impossible choices. Season 1, which was based on the Israeli series, Kvodo, created by Ron Ninio and Shlomo Mashiach, became the most-watched debut season on Showtime ever with 6.6 million weekly viewers.

Ashley Thomas has been cast as the male lead opposite Mia Isaac and Adrienne Warren in Hulu's drama series, Black Cake, with Zetna Fuentes (This Is Us) tapped to direct the pilot episode. Based on the book by Charmaine Wilkerson, Black Cake is a family drama wrapped in a murder mystery with a diverse cast of characters and a global setting that spans decades. In the late 1960s, a runaway bride named Covey (Isaac) disappears into the surf off the coast of Jamaica and is feared drowned or a fugitive on the run for her husband’s murder. Fifty years later in California, a widow named Eleanor Bennett loses her battle with cancer, leaving to her two estranged children, Byron (Thomas) and Benny (Warren), a flash drive that holds previously untold stories of her journey from the Caribbean to America. These stories shock her children and challenge everything they thought they knew about their family’s origin.

Marc Menchaca has signed on to star alongside André Holland, Don Cheadle, Alessandro Nivola, and Tiffany Boone in the Apple TV+ six-episode limited series, The Big Cigar, centered on Black Panther leader, Huey P. Newton (Holland). The series is based on the eponymous Playboy magazine article by Joshuah Bearman and tells the extraordinary, hilarious, almost-too-good-to-be-true story of how Newton relied on his best friend, Bert Schneider (Nivola), the Hollywood producer behind Easy Rider, to elude a nationwide manhunt and escape to Cuba while being pursued into exile by the FBI. Menchaca is set for the series regular role of Agent Sydney Clark, a former lawyer and Vietnam vet from Oklahoma who lives undercover as a dirty hippie while pursuing Newton, who is wanted on charges of killing a teenage prostitute.

The CW network announced premiere dates for several of its programs. The CW’s new shows, The Winchesters and Walker Independence, will both debut in October. The latter is a Walker spinoff set in the late 1800s, where an affluent Bostonian travels to Independence, Texas, to uncover the truth about her husband’s killer.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

The New York Times reported on a new podcast that casts Sherlock Holmes as the villain. Moriarty: The Devil’s Game is a 10-episode audio drama written by Charles Kindinger, which debuted recently on Audible. It stars Dominic Monaghan (best known for playing a hobbit in the Lord of the Rings films and Charlie Pace on Lost) as James Moriarty, Holmes’s nemesis, with Phil LaMarr as Holmes.

A new Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast is up, featuring the mystery short story "Nobody Home" by Joseph S. Walker, as read by actor Sean Hopper.

On Crime Time FM, Mark Olshaker (Mindhunter) chatted with Victoria Selman about her thriller, Truly, Darkly, Deeply, serial killers, and profiling the criminal mind.

On the Spybrary podcast, Erich Wagner reviewed the nonfiction book, The Spy Who Changed History, by Svetlana Lokhova, which will especially appeal to readers "with an interest in pre cold war Soviet deep cover espionage."

My Favorite Detective Stories welcomed psychologist, science editor, and ABC News contributor, Joanna Schaffhausen, about her series featuring police officer Ellery Hathaway and FBI profiler Reed Markham.

Queer Writers of Crime profiled Knock Off the Hat: A Clifford Waterman Gay Philly Mystery, penned by Richard Stevenson and published after his death of pancreatic cancer at age 83. Stevenson was best known for his Donald Strachey mystery series, which won a Lambda Literary Award.