IP Picks🔎: A Parisian Procedural with Strong 'Jack Ryan' Vibes
âž•A Bollywood-inspired rom-com and a campus-set murder mystery
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Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
I really like this week’s picks, so we’ll get to them quickly. But first, a few bite-sized nuggets:
• The International Thriller Writers handed out their awards this week and the winners will already be familiar to loyal Optionist readers: S.A. Crosby’s All the Sinners Bleed (which has been racking up nominations and wins everywhere) and Luke Dumas’ creepy-cool The Paleontologist.
• Eruption, the Michael Crichton/James Patterson thriller, was just published. It is Amazon’s top-seller and the most requested book in libraries, which is a good early indicator of sales. I shared my skepticism about the movie rights last month. And there’s still no deal. But maybe the early sales figures will prove me wrong.
• The story that I flagged last week about the teacher alleged to have sexually manipulated his students seemed to get even more awful after the appearance of this Boston Globe explainer on Massachusetts’ age-of-consent statutes. It shows just how ill-equipped the law is when it comes to dealing with sexual predators. Interestingly, it comes just a week before the release of Jill Ciment’s memoir Consent, which details the relationship that the author had with artist Arnold Mesches that began when she was 17 and he was 47 (!!), and which lasted through 40 years of marriage until his death at 93 in 2016. That, along with the Anne Hathaway movie The Idea of You, has kicked off a discourse about age-inappropriate relationships (a Washington Post review here and more on the debate here, here and here). I was on the fence about including the teacher/student story in last week’s column. Was it too icky? But seeing the latest wave of coverage made me realize that my hunch was right and that there’s a lot of fascination and revulsion from the public with these stories.
• Lastly, I wrote about the new exhibit on Hollywood’s Jewish founders at the Academy Museum for The Ankler — what it got right, what it missed and how it made me reflect on my own Jewishness. If you’re not a subscriber or missed it, here’s a link to read it.
Onto this week’s picks:
A rom-com about an Indian immigrant slacker who stages a Bollywood musical in his NJ neighborhood to win over a beautiful woman
A murder-mystery set aboard a deep-sea submersible
A whodunit mystery involving a murder among classmates in graduate school group project
A procedural with series potential, centered on a Black woman PI
A backlist series of procedurals featuring a U.S. embassy official who solves crimes on the side