Booksiwanttoread2011

Nothing like a bit good news for a Friday afternoon.

Via my google alert for Denise Mina comes news of her next book, The End of the Wasp Season. Out next May, Amazon UK carries the following blurb for the book:

When wealthy Sarah Erroll dies a violent death at her home in a posh part of Glasgow, the local community is stunned by what appears to be a truly gratuitous act. Heavily pregnant with desperately wanted twins, DS Alex Morrow is called in to investigate and soon discovers that there is more to Sarah's murder than it first seems. On the other side of town, Thomas Anderson is called into the headmaster's office at his boarding school to be told that his tyrannical father - a banker responsible for the loss of many livelihoods in the recession - has committed suicide by hanging himself from the old oak tree on the lawn of their home. Thomas returns to the family home to find his mother and sister in a state of numb shock. The head of the household is dead, yet their initial reaction is not that of grief, but relief. As Alex Morrow slowly unravels the connections between the two cases, she must also deal with the death of her own father and her brother's continuing criminal activities. Trying her hardest to disentangle herself from her family's disreputable history, she faces the challenge of an uninspired police force who have zero sympathy with Sarah Erroll, a middle-class victim who it appears was acting as an high class escort. Can Morrow solve the mystery of a cold-blooded murder without support? In THE END OF THE WASP SEASON she faces her greatest challenge yet as her work and home lives collide with potentially disastrous consequences.

As Kara asked when I told her this morning, 'Does this mean there won't be any more Paddy Meehan books?'

Denise Mina's Field of Blood

Spotted via a google alert:

"BBC Scotland is to bring the first of Glasgow crime writer Denise Mina’s Paddy Meehan detective novels to the small screen next year.

The Field of Blood, written and directed by David Kane, will begin filming next month and casting of the two-part production will be announced soon.

The good news is that they're not adapting Denise Mina's Garnethill for the screen. I feel particularly precious about Maureen and Leslie, and I know in advance that I'll wince at whoever they cast for those particular parts in a screen adaptation. (I'm sure that adaptation is coming at some point, though).

That's the good news.

The bad news is that Field of Blood is being adapted for the screen by David Kane. The same bloke who brought the Rebus novels to the screen. That really doesn't bode well. And what with Scotland only having 17 working actors at any one time, we'll no doubt be seeing an overlap of actors from the Rebus adaptation in the tv version of Field of Blood.

I hate to be unduly harsh to Kane - fingers crossed he's not one of those types who look themselves up on the internet - 'cos I love his original work for tv and film. His self-penned This Year's Love; Dream Baby; and a Shadow On The Earth were all wonderful but I had to switch Ken Stott's Rebus off after seven minutes. (It would have been five minutes but I had pins and needles at the time.)

Fingers crossed. Happy to be proved wrong some time next year.