I really love this series for the mismatched detectives, the scenes of beautiful Bath, England, and the interesting cases and mystery, not to mention the fine acting. Lighter fare, certainly, but a welcome addition to UK mystery series.
No word on Series 4 at this time.
From Deadline:
The BBC and BritBox have commissioned a spin-off of BBC drama favorite Death in Paradise, with Kris Marshall’s DI Humphrey Goodman character making a return in the UK.
Marshall played the lead role in the show’s third-to-sixth season before being replaced by Ardal O’Hanlon and Beyond Paradise will spotlight his return to being a DI in his home nation. Beyond Paradise will be distributed internationally by BBC Studios and be available in all Britbox international markets outside of Australia.
Beyond Paradise will be on BBC1 in the UK and BritBox in the US in 2023.
From the Washington Post:
His first book, Blue Water, Green Skipper, was a non-fiction account of his 1976 adventure competing in the the Observer Single-handed Trans-Atlantic Race, which began in Plymouth, England, and ended in Newport, Rhode Island.
After W.W. Norton & Company acquired the American rights to the book, it also agreed to publish Woods’ first novel.
That book, 1981’s Chiefs, about three generations of lawmen and the murder of a teenager in a small southern town, won literary awards and was made into a CBS miniseries starring Charlton Heston, Danny Glover, Billy Dee Williams and John Goodman.
The book’s success launched Woods’ prolific career as a novelist that saw him write five books a year for G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
MACAVITY NOMINEES 2022
BEST MYSTERY NOVEL
The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown and Co.)
Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby (Flatiron Books)
1979 by Val McDermid (Atlantic Monthly)
Bobby March Will Live Forever by Alan Parks (World Noir)
We Begin at the End, Chris Whitaker (Henry Holt)
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
BEST FIRST MYSTERY NOVEL
Who is Maude Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews (Little, Brown)
Girl A, Abigail Dean (Viking)
Deer Season by Erin Flanagan (University of Nebraska Press)
Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala (Berkley)
All Her Little Secrets by Wanda M. Morris (William Morrow)
BEST MYSTERY SHORT STORY
“Lucky Thirteen,” by Tracy Clark (Midnight Hour, Crooked Lane Books)
“Sweeps Week,” by Richard Helms (EQMM, July/August 2021)
“Curious Incidents,” by Steve Hockensmith (EQMM, January/February 2021)
“The Road to Hana,” by R.T. Lawton (AHMM, May/June 2021)
“The White Star,” by G.M. Malliet (EQMM, July/August 2021)
“The Locked Room Library,” by Gigi Pandian (EQMM, July/August 2021)
“Julius Katz and the Two Cousins,” by Dave Zeltserman (EQMM, July/August 2021)
BEST NONFICTION/CRITICAL
Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World by Mark Aldridge (HarperCollins)
How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook from Mystery Writers of America edited by Lee Child with Laurie R. King (Scribner)
The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most
Remarkable Escape in History by Margalit Fox (Random House)
The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene by Richard Greene (W.W. Norton)
Tony Hillerman: A Life by James McGrath Morris (University of Oklahoma)
The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense by Edward White (W.W. Norton)
BEST HISTORICAL MYSTERY: Sue Feder Memorial Award
The Venice Sketchbook by Rhys Bowen (Lake Union)
Clark and Division by Naomi Hirahara (Soho Crime)
The Hollywood Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal (Bantam)
The Bombay Prince by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)
Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey)
Death at Greenway by Lori Rader-Day (William Morrow)
Magpie Murders
A dead mystery author. An incomplete manuscript. Suspects galore. This juicy setup for Anthony Horowitz’s (Foyle’s War) bestselling novel, Magpie Murders, is coming to MASTERPIECE in an adaptation by Horowitz himself starring Academy Award®-nominee Lesley Manville (The Crown, Phantom Thread). Magpie Murders airs in six spellbinding episodes, Sundays, October 16 – November 20, 2022 at 9/8c on PBS.
Magpie Murders: Program Description
A mystery author dies under suspicious circumstance, with his last book seemingly unfinished. This leaves two mysteries: What happened to him? And how does his latest potboiler end? Lesley Manville (The Crown, Phantom Thread) stars as the author’s editor, Susan Ryeland, who assumes the role of detective in the case. Meanwhile, Tim McMullan (Patrick Melrose) plays the fictional sleuth in the incomplete novel, whose investigation parallels Susan’s. Based on Anthony Horowitz’s (Foyle’s War) bestselling novel, the six-part series also stars Conleth Hill, Michael Maloney, Alexandros Logothetis, and Claire Rushbrook. “There is true satisfaction in watching the pieces of Horowitz’s puzzle click into place,” applauded The Telegraph (London). In addition, The Sunday Times (London) declared, “Yikes, this is excellent.”
I’m a good writer, but a terrible poet. It’s true, I have taken countless writing courses over my schooling and even as an adult, and I always dreaded the poetry units. Even though I can write a beautiful line now and again, poetry is not my gift as a writer. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. In fact, the art of poetry has inspired several of my novels, and I know that it will have a huge impact on my career in the future. But it won’t be the poetry I write.
My appreciation of poetry all started with Emily Dickinson. I fell in love with Dickinson when I was a teenager sitting in my American Literature class. I guess as a day-dreamy fifteen-year-old, I was fascinated with her writing about nature, life, and death. She struck the right notes with me at the time and has stuck with me as my preferences for literature have changed over the years.
Twenty years later, my first novel featuring Dickinson released. Crime and Poetry was the first book in the Magical Bookshop Mysteries. In the novel, the protagonist solves a murder that takes place in a small village near Niagara Falls, New York with the poems of Dickinson. It was my chance to share everything I knew of Dickinson after years of study but allowed me to remain within the safety of my wheelhouse as a writer, which is writing contemporary cozy mysteries. The cozy subgenre is my first love as a writer, and I will always write them, but after writing Crime and Poetry and the subsequent books in the series that used the works of other famous nineteenth century writers, such as Alcott, Poe, Whitman, and Thoreau, I had the itch to write something deeper about Dickinson. This desire eventually led to Because I Could Not Stop for Death, my first historical mystery that features Dickinson as the sleuth.
Going into the book, I knew a lot of Dickinson, but what I discovered was there was so much to learn. The biggest surprise for me was discovering that Dickinson traveled to Washington DC in 1855 to visit her father who was finishing his term in the House of Representatives. The fact was so contrary to the typical image of Dickinson, which was a woman in white bent over a desk writing day and night. I knew this historical event had to be a cornerstone of the plot.
I was a librarian for fifteen years, and being a librarian in this case was an advantage and a disadvantage. As an advantage, I knew how to research efficiently and effectively. I also knew that if I wasn’t able to find something I needed, another librarian somewhere most likely could. As a disadvantage, I knew that I would never been able to know and digest everything known about Emily Dickinson, and I would have to force myself to stop researching at a point and actually write the book. That does not come natural to a librarian. Every librarian will tell you that she had researched a reference question more than once long after the patron was gone.
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Amanda Flower is a USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award-winning author of over forty mystery novels. Her novels have received starred reviews from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and Romantic Times, and she had been featured in USA Today, First for Women, and Woman’s World. In addition to being a writer, she was a librarian for fifteen years. Today, Flower and her husband own a farm and recording studio, and they live in Northeast Ohio with their adorable cats.
Here are a few photos of Marge Piercy with her Cats and some information on her memoir Sleeping with Cats. Just an FYI, the memoir is not all about cats. It's a wonderful read.
ABOUT SLEEPING WITH CATS: Marge Piercy, a writer who is highly praised as both a poet and a novelist, turns her gaze inward as she shares her thoughts on life and explores her development as a woman and writer. She pays tribute to the one loving constant that has offered her comfort and meaning even as the faces and events in her life have changed — her beloved cats.
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Born in center city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes.A popular speaker on college campuses, she has been a featured writer on Bill Moyers’ PBS Specials, Prairie Home Companion, Fresh Air, the Today Show, and many radio programs nationwide including Air America and Oprah & Friends. Her poems are read frequently on Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac. Praised as one of the few American writers who are accomplished poets as well as novelists — Piercy is one of our country's best selling poets — she is also the master of many genres: historical novels, science fiction (He, She, and It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction in the United Kingdom), novels of social comment and contemporary entertainments. She has taught, lectured and/or performed her work at well over 400 universities around the world.
AUTHOR! AUTHOR!
On January 30, 2003, an article in a daily newspaper caught my eye. The piece reported the arrest of a 69-year-old man at his home just miles from where I lived at the time in Columbia, South Carolina.
Ten years earlier, in a box of used books purchased at a yard sale, I came across a book by a prison inmate—written while he awaited execution.
Those two discoveries stimulated my interest and imagination, and subsequent investigations have led me here.
Homeland Insecurity, on one hand, is the story of two men accused of taking the lives of three fellow human beings.
A fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in Mahwah, New Jersey.
And two young police officers in El Segundo, California.
Two killers born 8 days apart in 1934.
Two men who died 57 days apart in 2017.
Crimes committed 140 days apart in 1957.
At a time when Americans were beginning to feel less and less confident about the safety of their families.
One convicted murderer spent nearly fifteen years on death row at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton—where he continually professed his innocence.
The other perpetrator escaped identification for more than 45 years.
At the same time, Homeland Insecurity is an account of the hits and misses of the law enforcement agencies and legal institutions which—over the course of nearly five decades—eventually stumbled upon justice.
Finally, it is a look at the post-World War II American experience leading up to the murders in 1957, and the profound changes to come after.
When Rock & Roll, rebels without a cause, and catchers in the rye burst upon the American scene.
When the fear of nuclear annihilation and real-life scary monsters crept into the national consciousness.
And when those three murders in 1957, and a growing sense of national insecurity, may have had mutual effect.
In researching the murder of Victoria Zielinski in March of 1957, I ran into a number of roadblocks. My interest was originally stimulated by the 1968 book, Brief Against Death, written by eleventh-year death row inmate, Edgar Smith. The book described the crime, his arrest, arraignment, indictment, trial and conviction—posed questions about the jury’s guilty verdict—and gained Smith a powerful advocate, William F. Buckley Jr.
Research on the crime and its immediate aftermath relied heavily on Smith’s accounts (taken with a grain of salt and held up to scrutiny by other sources)— media and police reports from the time of the murder—and on trial transcripts.
It wasn’t until after Smith’s discharge from prison after nearly fifteen years that he wrote a follow-up book, Getting Out, describing subsequent events—and the many appeals to state and federal courts, and to the Supreme Court, which ultimately led to his freedom in 1972. It took me quite some time to locate a copy of Getting Out, and much longer to learn of Smith’s fate after his release.
I navigated around that roadblock by writing to William F. Buckley in 1995. Buckley graciously responded to my inquiry with a somewhat shocking update on Edgar Smith—he was back in prison, this time in California.
It was another five years before, with the help of an attorney acquaintance in California, I discovered the whereabouts of Edgar Smith. I wrote him a letter in 2000. He kindly replied—but apologized for not agreeing to meet me for an interview.
After numerous denied parole appeals, Edgar Smith passed away in 1917 at the age of 83—after spending all but four of his final 60 years behind prison walls.
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