Part of Series
Having established her reputation with the enormously successful, two-time Emmy Award-winning television series Prime Suspect, author/screenwriter Lynda La Plante enhanced it with her more recent popular CBS TV miniseries, Bella Mafia. The same unbeatable storytelling power she brings to her films is the engine that drives her new thriller, Cold Heart, from its disturbing beginning to its shocking climax. ;;;;;;;; A single gunshot into a Beverly Hills swimming pool ends the life of movie mogul Harry Nathan, a man with so many enemies—including a widow and two ex-wives—that the challenge for PI Lorraine Page at first seems to be the surfeit of suspects. Newly established as an independent private investigator, Lorraine comes to the case hungry and determined to succeed—but Harry Nathan's death is the beginning, not the end, of a trail of lust and conspiracy leading to the darkest corners of the international art world. A sordid trail of video evidence implicates other leading Hollywood figures in the case, while Lorraine finds her own investigations hampered by the personal intervention of new police chief Jake Burton, a man who appears to know everything bad about her but still seems determined to know more. ;;;;;;;; As the failures of her past come back to haunt her, Lorraine finds that solving this murder is no longer just a job, it's about recapturing her own self-worth. A first-rate crime story, a love story, and more—it's precisely the kind of superior suspense novel we've come to expect from Lynda La Plante, one of the preeminent originators of realistic crime drama.
Author
Lynda La Plante (born Lynda Titchmarsh) is a British author, screenwriter, and erstwhile actress (her performances in Rentaghost and other programmes were under her stage name of Lynda Marchal), best known for writing the Prime Suspect television crime series. Her first TV series as a scriptwriter was the six part robbery series Widows, in 1983, in which the widows of four armed robbers carry out a heist planned by their deceased husbands. In 1991 ITV released Prime Suspect which has now run to seven series and stars Helen Mirren as DCI Jane Tennison. (In the United States Prime Suspect airs on PBS as part of the anthology program Mystery!) In 1993 La Plante won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for her work on the series. In 1992 she wrote at TV movie called Seekers, starring Brenda Fricker and Josette Simon, produced by Sarah Lawson. She formed her own television production company, La Plante Productions, in 1994 and as La Plante Productions she wrote and produced the sequel to Widows, the equally gutsy She's Out (ITV, 1995). The name "La Plante" comes from her marriage to writer Richard La Plante, author of the book Mantis and Hog Fever. La Plante divorced Lynda in the early 1990s. Her output continued with The Governor (ITV 1995-96), a series focusing on the female governor of a high security prison, and was followed by a string of ratings pulling miniseries: the psycho killer nightmare events of Trial & Retribution (ITV 1997-), the widows' revenge of the murders of their husbands & children Bella Mafia (1997) (starring Vanessa Redgrave), the undercover police unit operations of Supply and Demand (ITV 1998), videogame/internet murder mystery Killer Net (Channel 4 1998) and the female criminal profiler cases of Mind Games (ITV 2001). Two additions to the Trial and Retribution miniseries were broadcast during 2006.
