My new novel THE INVISIBLE ARCHITECT, the sequel to the bestelling MURDER BY DESIGN, is now available for pre-order! The second adventure for Edison Bixby, the irreverent detective that Publishers Weekly hailed as “a cross between James Bond and Adrian Monk.”
Here’s the story.
Imperfect design creates a perfect murder in an outrageously funny and fiendishly clever mystery by #1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Goldberg.
My name is Wally Nash. I’m an actor, but my day job is working for Edison Bixby, the brilliant, obscenely wealthy insurance investigator who got shot in the head and now can’t stop himself from saying whatever crosses his mind. That’s where I come in—I apologize for him, while he figures out how the man-made world makes crime possible.
There’s a killer out there exploiting bad design to commit murders that look exactly like accidents…because they are. A jogger trips and drowns. A car goes where it shouldn’t. A person sits in the right place at the wrong time. The design does the killing, leaving the murderer invisible.
Except Bixby can see him. And here’s the creepy part: The killer wants him to.
So what’s the game? How many people have to die before it’s over?
And will one of them be me?
THE INVISIBLE ARCHITECT comes out in March 2027.
UNSOLD PILOTS BOOK LEADS TO RESEARCH STUDY
In other news, it seems that my book UNSOLD TELEVISION PILOTS was the basis of recently published UCR Study. I haven’t read the study yet, and this article may not be capturing the true nature of the conclusions… but based on what I’ve read here, I think their conclusions are a big leap.
A study led by UC Riverside Assistant Professor of business Demetrius Lewis found that rejected television pilots are rich sources of creative ideas that can help make future shows more successful.
In fact, television series drawing on novel content from rejected pilots rather than from previously broadcast shows tended to attract larger audiences.
[…]The study, recently published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, used AI to examine thousands of American pitches for prime-time television from 1955 to 1995, a period that included the rise of some of television’s most recognizable programs.
The pilots had been painstakingly gathered by television author and producer Lee Goldberg, who spent years searching through warehouses containing old industry records. He examined documents from pitch meetings and other materials describing proposed television programs.
[…]Older rejected ideas may be especially useful because they are less tied to current television trends. A pilot written 20 years ago, Lewis explained, may offer more creative possibilities than one rejected last year.
“The older content is going to be kind of further away from the kind of current audience exposure, and is going to be more fruitful then for reimagining and recombinating,” Lewis said.
There’s no acknowledgment, at least in this article, of the ethical and legal implications of using someone else’s TV series ideas as the basis for developing “your own” (and I use that term lightly in this context). It would certainly be a problem for professional TV writers/WGA members. But, like I said, I haven’t read the study and may be misinterpreting it.
