Telemystery, your source for one of the most comprehensive listings of crime drama, amateur sleuth, private investigator, mystery and suspense television series, mini-series and made-for-television movies, now available on or coming soon to DVD or Blu-ray disc, is profiling one series and one special being released this week.
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Deputy Police Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) is a former Atlanta detective brought to Los Angeles to head a special unit of the LAPD in The Closer. A top-notch investigator who closes nearly every case, she is an expert at digging into a person's secrets and obtaining confessions, despite constantly struggling with her own imperfections.
This season, Brenda and the team face unexpected challenges, including a change in location as the LAPD moves into new headquarters. Brenda's lack of familiarity with the offices — and interrogation room — threatens her confidence, something the others also experience as they try to adjust to their new surroundings, all the while taking on new and horrific cases. Plus, a bureaucratic shakeup ignites competition in the ranks. Who will wind up top dog?
The Closer: Season Six is available on DVD, Amazon Instant, and iTunes (click on the icons above for more details), and consists of 15 episodes that originally aired on TNT during July through September and in December, 2010.
The seventh and final season of the series premieres July 11th, 2011.
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Julia McKenzie stars as Miss Jane Marple in "The Pale Horse", an episode that is generally considered one of the four episodes that are part of Series 5 of the current Agatha Christie: Marple adaptations of the author's work. But it did not air here in the US last summer as part of PBS's Masterpiece Mystery! when the other three did — indeed, it just aired 10 days ago on the network — and thus is being released separately on DVD now. (Just to make things a tad more confusing, Marple: Series 5 on Blu-ray disc, also being released tomorrow, includes all four episodes of the fifth series.)
The book from which the screenplay is adapted, also titled The Pale Horse, does not feature Miss Marple. This situation is not unusual, in that Christie only wrote 12 novels and a handful of short stories featuring the character, and other non-Marple novels have been successfully modified to include the amateur sleuth.
In the episode, Miss Marple receives a mysterious list of names from her friend Father Gorman, who sent it moments before he was brutally murdered on a London street. She soon discovers that people on the list are dying. A clue leads her to the Pale Horse Inn in Hampshire, a spooky establishment run by three modern-day witches. As she closes in on the truth, one of the guests is found dead in his bed, and Miss Marple learns that her own life may be in danger.
As a bonus, the Agatha Christie Marple: The Pale Horse DVD set of 2 discs includes a 1997 television adaptation of the novel that more closely follows the original storyline (i.e. Miss Marple is not featured). Colin Buchanan stars as Mark Easterbrook, a historian who, after learning of a list of names found in Father Gorman's shoe, travels to the Pale Horse Inn to discover it run by witches, led by Thyrza Grey (played by Jean Marsh).
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Visit the Telemystery website to discover more television mystery series currently available on and coming soon to DVD, Blu-ray disc, or video on demand.