Lesley Manville to Star In New PBS Mystery 'Magpie Murders'

Fans of female detectives have a brand new series to look forward to. Magpie Murders, a new mystery series coming to Masterpiece in the not-too-distant future has cast Lesley Manville (The Crown) in the lead role. Deadline first announced the series back in June of 2020, when PBS boarded the series as co-producer alongside BritBox UK. Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty) will direct the series.

The series is based on the best-selling novel by Anthony Horowitz, who is best known for the Alex Rider series. TV fans might not recognize the name, but they know his work. Horowitz wrote several installments of Agatha Christie's Poirot before moving to Foyle's War, which he created and wrote most of the episodes. Magpie Murder was one of his first adult books starring a detective of his own invention. (He'd previously also contributed novels to the Sherlock Holmes and James Bond franchises.)

Published in 2016, Magpie Murder is the first of Horowitz's Susan Ryeland novels. (The second, Moonflower Murders, arrived last year.) It is a "mystery within a mystery," beginning when editor Susan Ryeland receives the latest manuscript of her client, mystery author Alan Conway, only to discover it is unfinished and the author dead. The deeper she digs, the more Ryeland realizes that the key to Conway's death is buried in the clues of his final novel. The book took home several awards, including the coveted Macavity Award for Best Novel.