By Semih Zaim
From long-running detective franchises to true-crime investigations and European noir, publishers’ shelves are once again proving fertile ground for television and film. 221B looks at some of the crime books currently making their way from page to screen around the world.
Crime fiction has always enjoyed a close relationship with the screen, but the current wave of adaptations suggests that producers are looking far beyond the latest bestseller. Established detective franchises, literary European crime novels, psychological thrillers and nonfiction investigations are all being developed simultaneously, while streamers and broadcasters increasingly search internationally for stories with built-in readerships and expandable worlds.
Here are some of the most notable crime and true-crime books currently heading to film and television.
Rules of Prey – John Sandford | US
One of American crime fiction’s longest-running detective franchises is finally receiving a major television adaptation.
MGM+ has greenlit an eight-episode series based on John Sandford’s Rules of Prey, the first novel in his bestselling Prey series. Jensen Ackles will star as Lucas Davenport, the former Minneapolis detective at the centre of the novels, and will also executive produce.
Published in 1989, Rules of Prey introduced Davenport in a hunt for a highly organised serial killer. Sandford has since expanded the franchise to more than 30 novels, giving MGM+ substantial material should the adaptation grow beyond its first season.
Bruce Terris created the series and serves as showrunner, while Daniel Sackheim is directing the opening episodes. Production was scheduled to begin in Toronto in September 2026. MGM+ plans to launch the series across markets including the US, UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, Brazil and Mexico.
The scale of Sandford’s bibliography makes Rules of Prey particularly significant: rather than adapting a self-contained thriller, MGM+ is potentially building a long-term detective franchise.
Red Water – Jurica Pavičić | Croatia / Germany / France
European crime fiction is also providing increasingly ambitious material for international coproductions.
Beta Film, Germany’s ZDF/Arte and Croatian producer Antitalent are developing a six-hour television adaptation of Croatian writer Jurica Pavičić’s Red Water.
The novel begins with the disappearance of a 17-year-old girl from a small Croatian coastal town. When the police investigation fails and the approaching Yugoslav wars push the case out of public attention, her family begins its own search for answers.
Rather than functioning solely as a missing-person mystery, the story stretches across political and social upheaval, linking an intimate crime to decades of Croatian history.
Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović is directing the series, with Ljubica Luković writing and Danijel Pek producing. Shooting is scheduled for 2027, while Beta Film will handle international distribution. The project previously won the Council of Europe Series Coproduction Development Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival.
It is a striking example of how European noir is increasingly being packaged for a wider international television market without abandoning its local historical identity.
The Alphabet House – Jussi Adler-Olsen | Denmark / Germany
The creator of Department Q could soon have another major television property.
German production company Saxonia Media has optioned the screen rights to Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s debut novel The Alphabet House and is developing it as an international television series.
The psychological thriller follows two RAF pilots who are shot down over Nazi Germany during the Second World War and attempt to survive by assuming the identities of mentally ill German officers aboard a hospital train.
For the adaptation, the story is expected to begin in 1970s Britain before moving back to wartime Germany, adding a Cold War framework to the original narrative.
Saxonia Media describes the project as a premium international series and has positioned the book as one of Adler-Olsen’s major works that has yet to receive a screen adaptation.
For crime audiences familiar with Department Q, the project offers a different side of Adler-Olsen: less conventional police procedural, more historical conspiracy and psychological suspense.
Murder on Lake Garda – Tom Hindle | Italy / UK
British crime novelist Tom Hindle’s Murder on Lake Garda is becoming an Italian-language Disney+ series.
The six-part adaptation, currently titled Delitto sul Lago di Garda, has been greenlit as an Italian Hulu Original for Disney+ and is being produced by Fremantle-owned The Apartment.
The story revolves around an extravagant wedding held on a private island on Lake Garda. When a body is discovered on the shore and police are unable to immediately reach the island, the wedding guests become both investigators and suspects.
Laura Bispuri is directing, while Alessandro Fabbri leads the writing team.
Hindle’s novels have sold more than 500,000 copies in the UK, but the adaptation is particularly interesting because Disney+ is not simply transferring the English-language book directly to screen: it is relocating and reshaping the material as an Italian original.
It reflects another growing adaptation strategy — taking internationally marketable crime IP and giving it a distinctly local production identity.
Meantime – Frankie Boyle | Scotland
Glasgow provides the setting for a considerably darker and more unconventional detective story.
Sky has commissioned a six-part adaptation of Scottish comedian and writer Frankie Boyle’s crime novel Meantime, with James McAvoy in the lead role.
McAvoy plays Felix McAveety, an addict who becomes an obvious police suspect after his best friend is found murdered in a Glasgow park. Instead of waiting for the authorities to clear his name, Felix begins investigating the killing himself, aided by a crime novelist and one of his more unpredictable friends.
Jon S Baird is directing the series, which is produced by Happy Tramp North and Expectation in association with Sky Studios.
The adaptation is scheduled to air on Sky and stream on NOW in 2027.
Where many current literary adaptations revolve around highly competent detectives, Meantime moves in the opposite direction, building its mystery around a deeply unreliable amateur investigator.
She Lies in Wait – Gytha Lodge | UK
ITV is turning Gytha Lodge’s Jonah Sheens novels into a six-part television crime drama.
She Lies in Wait centres on DI Jonah Sheens and an investigation connected to a group of teenagers who went camping in the New Forest in 2002, when one member of the group mysteriously disappeared.
The narrative moves between past and present as the investigation begins to expose what happened during that trip.
Martin McCann has been cast as Sheens, with BAFTA-winning filmmaker Marc Evans directing. Ed Whitmore is adapting Lodge’s novel, while Clapperboard Studios is producing in association with Studio TF1.
Filming began in Ireland in 2026.
The project also illustrates why publishers’ existing detective series remain attractive to broadcasters: Lodge has already created a continuing protagonist and a wider fictional world capable of supporting further adaptations.
The Enigma of Room 622 – Joël Dicker | Switzerland
After The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, another Joël Dicker mystery is moving toward television.
Dicker announced in 2026 that his bestselling novel The Enigma of Room 622 is being adapted as a Prime Video series.
The mystery begins at a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps, where a writer discovers something unusual: there is no Room 622.
The missing room is connected to an unsolved murder that took place at the hotel years earlier during a gathering involving one of Geneva’s most powerful banks. What follows is a multilayered investigation involving corporate rivalry, hidden identities, romantic entanglements and the unresolved killing.
The novel is also unusually self-referential: a fictionalised version of Dicker himself becomes part of the investigation.
That structure could make the adaptation one of the more formally ambitious whodunits currently in development.
Rock, Paper, Landmines – Yugo Aosaki | Japan
Japanese mystery fiction is also receiving major international streaming treatment.
Prime Video will launch a live-action adaptation of Yugo Aosaki’s award-winning mystery novel Rock, Paper, Landmines worldwide on November 13, 2026.
Produced by Japanese studio The Seven, the drama stars Nana Mori and Aju Makita and transforms apparently familiar games into elaborate psychological contests.
The source novel became a major success within Japan’s mystery publishing scene, winning or ranking across multiple major Japanese crime and mystery lists.
Kazuaki Seki directs, with Akira Morii producing. Prime Video plans to release the series in more than 240 countries and territories.
Its international rollout demonstrates how streaming platforms are increasingly looking to national crime-literature traditions beyond English-language publishing for globally exportable IP.
When True Crime Books Become Drama
Fiction is only half of the current page-to-screen crime boom. Nonfiction crime books are increasingly becoming the foundation for prestige scripted series rather than conventional documentaries.
Guilty Creatures – Mikita Brottman | US
Apple TV has ordered Guilty Creatures, a scripted thriller based on Mikita Brottman’s true-crime book Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida.
Julia Garner will star and executive produce, with Lewis Pullman joining the cast. Craig Gillespie will direct and executive produce, Sarah DeLappe is adapting the book and Stuart Zicherman will serve as showrunner.
The story examines a relationship between two lovers that ultimately becomes connected to murder and an extraordinary secret maintained for nearly two decades.
Rather than structuring the adaptation primarily around the mechanics of the investigation, Apple describes the project as an exploration of the psychology of the people involved and the emotional consequences of living with murder for 18 years.
That approach places Guilty Creatures firmly within the current prestige true-crime trend: the crime provides the narrative engine, but psychology, relationships and moral complicity become the larger subject.
El Castillo / El Proxeneta – Mabel Lozano | Spain
Spanish platform Movistar Plus is taking a different route into nonfiction crime with El Castillo, inspired by Mabel Lozano’s nonfiction book El Proxeneta.
The six-part police drama explores the rise of organised prostitution networks and sex-trafficking operations in Spain, following investigators as they begin to recognise changes taking place across the country’s brothel industry.
Raúl Arévalo, Valentina Vidal, Omar Ayuso and Laia Marull lead the cast. Isabel Peña and Eduardo Villanueva created and wrote the series, with Elena Martín Gimeno and Sandra Romero directing.
Following its presentation at the San Sebastián Film Festival, El Castillo is scheduled to premiere on Movistar Plus on October 8, 2026.
Its source material also shows how the boundaries between crime drama, investigative journalism and true crime continue to blur. Instead of recreating a single famous murder case, the series uses nonfiction reporting to dramatise a much broader criminal system.
Why Crime Publishing Remains So Valuable to Television
What connects these projects is not simply genre.
A long-running series such as Prey offers franchise potential. A novel such as Red Water combines crime with national history. Murder on Lake Garda provides the closed-circle mechanics of a classic whodunit, while Guilty Creatures arrives with the authenticity and public fascination attached to true crime.
For broadcasters and streamers, books also bring something increasingly valuable: a tested story, an existing audience and, frequently, enough narrative material to extend a successful adaptation beyond a single season.
But the most interesting trend may be geographical. The current adaptation pipeline does not move only from British and American bestseller lists to Hollywood. Croatian, Danish, Swiss, Spanish, Italian and Japanese stories are entering an increasingly international development and distribution system.
Crime fiction has always travelled well.
Now, more than ever, so do its screen rights.
This article was published in the MIPCOM 2026 issue of 221B Magazine.
