Deadly Pleasures to Read and Watch

Does it matter whether adapted books and TV series are true to their source material? The book-to-TV-series route is common, and the results can be terrific, as with the Andrew Scott version of The Talented Mr. Ripley and HBO’s Bosch series. Or they can be mixed, as we’ll see with Dept. Q, adapted from Jussi Adler-Olsen’s 2011 thriller, The Keeper of Lost Causes.

But the novel inspired by a true-crime documentary is a little rarer, which is what happened with Megan Abbott’s new book, El Dorado Drive. It borrows liberally from the HBO documentary Murder on Middle Beach (2020), about the still-unsolved case of a Madison, Connecticut, woman named Barbara Hamburg who was brutally murdered at her home in 2010.