Desmond J Doherty’s Derry-based "Valberg" series has been optioned by Revolution Films. The London-based production company was founded by Andrew Eaton and Michael Winterbottom, and its acclaimed film and TV productions include 24 Hour Party People, 9 Songs and Rush.
Valberg will be adapted for the screen by Glenn Patterson and Colin Carberry, the award-winning writing duo behind Good Vibrations, the film about the 1970s Belfast music scene.
Valberg is "a sort-of Swede in Northern Ireland," as Peter Rozovsky puts it in his Detectives Beyond Borders blog. The trilogy of novels begins with Valberg (2013), as Chief Inspector Jon Valberg and his PSNI officers pursue a brutal assassin creating mayhem in Derry.
In Sins of the Fathers (2014) the assassin is back on the street after inflicting brutal revenge on the jury that wrongly sent him down for child murder. Now he is working his way up the legal ladder, targeting cops, lawyers and judges. Valberg leads the hunt to nail the killer and expose his accomplices.
The trilogy concludes with Darklight, which is launched later this month at the location of the book's dramatic opening scene in Ebrington.
A corrupt lawyer is nailed to a chair in the middle of Ebrington Square in Derry. Why? Valberg wonders if it is a last-minute entry for the Turner Prize in the city’s Year of Culture.Guildhall Press will launch the new book at Eighty81 (the former Turner gallery) with the author and screenwriters at 7 pm on 20 November 2015 as part of the Foyle Film Festival.
Read more about Desmond J. Doherty and other Irish solicitors turned writers.
