What We're Watching

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Now that we've totally filled our TBR lists/stacks, how about a catch up on what's filling our time when we're NOT reading.

In our house, we are glued to The Pitt every week. I have loved Noah Wyle since he was baby John Carter on ER, but even so I never imagined he would do something this good. The acting (from the entire cast) and writing and directing are fabulous, and the show is a look at America today that tells you more than any news story. And the camera work! Watch, if you will, how the scenes are set up, how the camera pans from one group to the next as the scenes change. It's really brilliant. Alas, after today there are only two episodes to go. Will Dr. Robby get to take his sabbatical?  

We are also watching a series called The Capture on Prime, starring Holliday Grainger, whom you may know as Robin Ellacott in the series adapted from Robert Galbraith's Cormoran Strike novels. I'd read that The Capture was the best police series since Line of Duty and halfway through season 1 we are gripped!! It is currently in the third season and if I had the time I'd be bingeing it.

From Wikipedia, which gives a better summary than I can: "The series is centred on DI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger), a fast-track Metropolitan Police detective drawn into a vast conspiracy involving real-time deepfake technology, mass surveillance and manipulated video evidence." Yikes!

It will definitely make you want to avoid CCTV cameras!! 

And since you can't be serious all the time, I am enjoying the spring season (how many ever this is...) of The Voice, my guilty pleasure. Coaches this season are Adam Levine, John Legend, and--yay!!--Kelly Clarkson, my favorite Dallas girl. (Actually, she's from Burleson, which is a suburb of Fort Worth, but close enough.)

Also, we are watching the new season of The Rookie. Yes, I know it's preposterous, but it's also funny and sharp. We've watched every season for eight years and are very attached to the characters.

Fellow Reds, what's on your screens these days?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, we saw The Capture, and loved it! We are in PARADISE, so clever and smart and scary. Total escapist, in a way. Or terrifying.  YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS with Jon Hamm (who is not my fave, but he is so good in this!) Also THE MEMORY OF A KILLER, about an  ice-cold mob hit man (leading a double life as a middle-class husband/ copier salesman) who is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. (what could go wrong?) Such a good premise! 

RHYS BOWEN: At the moment TV has to be super distracting and not in any way stressful. So Britbox. Escape to the Country. Glass blowers. Etc. luckily there have been two major tennis tournaments I’ve watched non stop 

LUCY BURDETTE: The only thing I’ve been watching is the new season of The Lincoln Lawyer. It’s comfort viewing in its own way, and not as silly as it was getting in the last season. (Lorna, in those silly new lawyer outfits drove me crazy.) I will have to ask John about The Capture and start it with him if he hasn’t seen it. 

We are also watching basketball–both of our UCONN teams made it into the Final Four, the men capturing the slot in a last minute 3 pointer that had all the tension a writer could want! The following weekend will be the Masters so that will keep us busy too:).

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Everyone I know is raving about THE PITT, so I guess I’m going to have to give it a try. I DO love Noah Wyle.

As usual, I’m going to put in a plug for Kdramas. I just watched two fantastic shows back to back. TEMPEST, streaming on Hulu (or Disney+) is both an international political thriller and an amazingly heart-pounding romance. Part of the story is set in DC’s State Department, with John Cho (love him!) as an undersecretary trying to stop a nuclear attack on the Korean penninsula. It’s only nine episodes (many Kdramas are 16) so it’s a terrific way to dip your toe in.

For something more immersive but equally riveting: CRASH LANDING ON YOU available on Netflix. This show has everything: mystery, intrigue, humor - loads of humor, heartbreak, delightful found families and, most importantly the best couple chemistry you’ll ever see from Hyun Bin, playing a stern-outside, marshmallow-inside North Korean officer and Son Yi-jin as an heir to a fabulously wealthy corporate family who, as the title says, crash lands on him after a crazy paragliding accident. The chemistry was real - the stars got married after the show was released and now have a three-year old! 

Jenn, if you haven’t seen this already, I think you’d love it.

JENN McKINLAY: I loved CRASH LANDING, Julia!!! So good! Very interesting to see the differences in North and South Korea. My recent fave K-Dramas are VINCENZO, Italian mafioso who is also Korean - very edge of the seat action with a solid bad guy, and ROMANCE IS A BONUS BOOK, set in a publishing house where their love of books and writing was just so nice and refreshing. Love me the K-Dramas!

Hub and I are watching ROOSTER, starring Steve Carrell as an author in residence on a college campus, very fun. And we just finished The LOWDOWN, starring Ethan Hawke, small town newspaper writer/bookstore owner in Tulsa who gets embroiled in political crimes. Also, excellent.

HALLIE EPHRON: I've been looking forward to seeing PROJECT HAIL MARY on the big screen and my daughter Molly and I went last weekend. The theatre was packed and the movie was a lot of fun. Highly recommended. In the meanwhile I'm slowly streaming the rest of RIOT WOMEN. It's heavy/heady stuff and requires many deep breaths between innings.

DEBS: Such fun suggestions! I love John Cho so will definitely check out TEMPEST, and ROOSTER and THE LOWDOWN sound fun.

How about you, dear readers? Tell us what you're watching!

Round Top 2026--Debs' Pictorial Essay

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Last week I made what has, since 2017 (and excepting 2020,) become my annual trip (which I've written about several times!) with my daughter to the Spring Antiques Show in Round Top, Texas. What is more fun than a road trip with one of your favorite people!! (Just for a little brush up on Texas geography, Round Top is in central Texas, about halfway between Austin and Houston and a good ways south of Dallas. The drive takes us about four hours.) 

"Round Top" is actually a collection of venues scattered around the tiny town, but the jewel--and one of the few ticketed venues--is Marburger Farm. But golly has Marburger changed in the last decade! The March issue of D Magazine led with "The Dallasification of Round Top," meaning it is now considerably less about antiques and more about designers and fashion. Here we are in our Round Top duds.

I'm barely scratching the surface in my hat (absolute necessity because of the sun) and bandana, while Kayti is totally rocking it, squash blossom necklace and all.

In 2021, a Dallas real estate developer bought Marburger Farm, and the spring show was the soft launch of some of their changes. They've moved existing buildings, installed more permanent tents, put in walkways and landscaping and a new permanent covered food area--that last one is a big improvement! We liked most of the changes, but some of our favorite vendors were missing. 

A view of the new "square."

Inside a new tent, which are now three aisles instead of two.

Now if they would just put in giant fans! It was so hot.

Here's something I would have bought if I'd had money (a lot!) or space.

These panels were original artwork, not photos. I especially loved them as Rick and I have been watching the Beatles Anthology and had just seen the boys wearing those gorgeous Sergeant Pepper's costumes.

And something I could have bought and regret NOT buying:

This was a vendor's personal collection of much-loved Jan Karon novels, which I adored but hadn't thought of in years. The vendor only wanted $40 for the entire set, but I was worried about space in the car--and space at home, so after looking at them twice, I passed them up.

Here are some things I would NOT have taken for any amount of money.

I mean, seriously, who would want that? And it was a couple of thousand bucks!

Ditto this one.

And this one, although if you were going for kitsch...

Not for sale--the local law enforcement.

Last year there was a theft and a chase!

Day 2 we visited The Compound, a new venue that we absolutely love. Check out the website! It is so charming, with great vendors and a beautiful setting.

Also, Blue Hills, one of long-time Round Top faves. We also managed something on our Round Top bucket list: Champagne from the vending machine in The Compound! Here's Kayti with the Champagne machine last year.

And in the little area seating nook, this year. We visited with some nice ladies from Dallas while we sipped from our plastic cups.

There was no Feast in the Field at Rancho Pillow this year, but we were happy to hang out at some of our favorite restaurants in Round Top. Here's the patio at Prost, which has a huge outdoor wood-fired pizza oven. The evenings were gorgeous, and the sky was so bright, away from our big city light pollution.

We missed a couple of other venues we like, and Junk Gypsy, but we ran out of time. We really needed three days!

My big finds were not antique-y--a couple of Peruvian alpaca pillow covers for our living room sofa, a kantha, and some plants. Oh, and a very pricey tomato, cucumber, and sage candle!

But who knows what next year might have in store?

Dear Reds and readers, are there any road trips in your future? And do you like antiquing--or "junking" as some folks are more likely to call it?

Mark Pryor--Fact or Fiction

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I'm very happy to have our Jungle Red friend Mark Pryor back on the blog today! His new book, THE MOST MYSTERIOUS BOOKSHOP IN PARIS, is out today, and not only does it feature one of my favorite fictional detectives, Hugo Marston, but it's the first book in a spin-off series! How can you beat bookshop, Paris, and a handsome ex-FBI profiler? Oh, add chocolate! And Mark's special expertise, as he will explain.

Mark Pryor:  Fact or fiction? If it's really weird, it's probably true...

I will be doing a fair few book events over the next month or so, and I can guarantee one question will be asked of me at each one. And, to be clear, it's a question I love answering because I'd ask it, too:

"Do you use any of your real-life criminal experiences in your books?"

Oh, let me back up and be clear: those "criminal experiences" do not involve me committing crimes (not that I'd admit to, anyway!), but refer to my sixteen years as a prosecutor and my current profession, a criminal defense attorney.

In that time, I've handled dozens of murder cases, and thousands of other criminal cases, everything from the theft of a watch from Target to gang-related robberies and assaults and... well, if you can think of a type of crime, it's probably landed on my desk. 

So what's my answer? Well, I'm a lawyer so it's not a straight Yes or No, of course. It's both, and here's what I mean.

Yes: what I use is my knowledge of the investigative process. When a crime happens, usually murder in the case of my books, I know what steps the police take to secure the scene and collect evidence. This lets me set a genuinely accurate process in place but also, if I choose, allows me to insert mistakes (or clues) by whoever is investigating. I don't have to call a detective or rely on Google (or, heaven forfend, AI) to get it right. Or wrong, if that's what I'm going for.

No: the truth about most real-world crime, murder included, is that it is one of two things, either (1) grubby, sordid, and "unsexy" in the sense that it wouldn't be at all interesting to read about. For example, a man strangling or beating his wife to death in a drunken, jealous rage. Horrific and tragic, and I don't mean to minimize that, but novel-worthy? Probably not. If not in that category then those few cases that aren't dismal and gross, well, to be honest they are (2) often so weird and bizarre that if I tried to put them in a fictional story, you'd throw that book across the room with an anguished cry of "Ridiculous! That could never happen!"

Two quick examples of this: Picture a recycling plant and the large conveyor where people are sorting the types of recycling, when someone ponders aloud, "Would you look at that - why would someone recycle a mannequin?" and someone closer to this odd sight hits the "Stop" button while pointing out that it's not a mannequin at all. The investigation was quick - mail and papers around the body led police to a specific street address, where blood in a recycling can matched that of the victim, and a nearby surveillance camera captured the killer dumping the body. It also captured what was beside the recycling bin: a trashcan. And in case you didn't know, if you put a body in a trashcan, it goes to the dump and is never seen again.

Which is to say, if I write a novel where my murderer is standing there, a body over his shoulder while deciding whether to use the trash can or the recycling bin, and he goes for the recycling, you would be understandably irritated and incredulous. But it happened. And is why he was caught. 

Second example: a 1985 murder of a beautiful young mother, beaten in her apartment by a person or persons unknown. Here are some of the oddities associated with that case, and why writing it as fiction would render a story contrived and unbelievable:

• At the time, the police collected a written alibi statement from the jealous ex-boyfriend (and as we all know, it's always the jealous ex-boyfriend!), but never checked it;
• Twenty-five years later, a phone call out of the blue pointed police to that ex-boyfriend, the call coming from his current jealous wife (!);
• The cold case detective, Tom, and I visited the scene of the crime, and the woman living there was an absolute carbon copy of the victim, she looked startlingly like her;
• Tom then found the alibi witness, still living in her same neighborhood in Austin;
• That witness remembered the suspect, but not if she was with him at the time of the attack, but told Tom she used to keep a diary of her life;
• She literally went up to her attic and found the diary for that week, and busted the alibi (helping lead to a conviction at trial);
• The suspect's wife then did an about-face and sided with her husband at trial, throwing a dramatic fit when the guilty verdict was read.

All of that was pretty interesting and exciting to be involved in, no question, but if I stitched that sequence of events and coincidences into a novel, you'd be rightly skeptical. 

Which, I suppose, brings us to that famous saying, that truth is stranger than fiction. Is it? Not always... but when it is, it's too strange even for mystery novelists and our ever-discerning readers!

DEBS: Mark, these are great stories! But I agree, not very good for book plots. My husband is a former cop and would agree with you that in real life most criminals are really dumb. Fortunately for us, if not for fiction.

I'd much rather read about fictional crimes, especially ones set in Paris!

Here's more about The Most Mysterious Bookshop in Paris:

Hugo Marston, former head of security at the U.S. embassy in Paris, has retired and is ready to realize his lifelong dream of owning a mystery and antiquarian bookshop. But when a blackmail scheme targeting a chocolatier leads to murder, Hugo is again called to investigate in the first Paris Bookshop Mystery.

And more about Mark:

Mark Pryor is the author of the Hugo Marston series, set in Paris, London, and Barcelona. With nine books in the series thus far, THE MOST MYSTERIOUS BOOKSHOP IN PARIS is the first in a new spin-off series. It sees Hugo Marston still in Paris, and with the same characters around him, but instead of working at the US Embassy Hugo has opened his own mystery bookshop!

Mark also authored the Henri Lefort trilogy, historical mystery novels set in 1940s Paris, and has two books set right here in Austin, the psychological thrillers HOLLOW MAN and DOMINIC.

Away from books Mark is a former prosecutor, and now a partner at a criminal defense firm in Austin, Texas. He began his career as a journalist in England, where his beat was also crime-related - the police blotter. He has been a guest analyst on CourtTV, and appeared on CBS News's 48 Hours, NBC's Dateline, and Discovery Channel's Discovery ID: Cold Blood