Sherry Rankin's "The Killing Plains"

Sherry Rankin grew up in New Jersey where she became an early and avid reader of mystery fiction. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and currently lives in Abilene, Texas where she has taught writing and literature at a local university for twenty years.

She has written scholarly articles and worked as an editorial consultant, manuscript reader and ghostwriter, but her avocation has always been creative writing.

Her novel, Strange Fire, was shortlisted for the 2017 Daniel Goldsmith First Novel Prize and won the 2017 CWA Debut Dagger Award.

Here Rankin dreamcasts an adaptation of her debut thriller, The Killing Plains:

The Killing Plains is set in the fictional town of Crescent Bluff, a tiny backwater place nestled in the bleak desert landscape of West Texas. It’s true cowboy country, with more cattle than people and more rattlesnakes than cattle—a place still haunted by the spirit of the Wild West and by atrocities past and present.

Houston detective Colly Newland hates the place, but when her former mother-in-law, the matriarch of the powerful Newland family, summons her to Crescent Bluff to investigate a series of particularly heinous murders in which a family member is implicated, Colly complies. She feels responsible for the death of her husband and daughter, and she wants to pay her emotional debt to the Newlands so she can turn her back on them forever.

Colly is a determined, sarcastic, resilient, no-nonsense person driven by a powerful inner moral integrity; she has a big heart, as well, which makes her more vulnerable than she likes, so she hides it behind a tough exterior. My dream actress to play Colly would be Kate Winslet, who seems capable of executing any accent to perfection. I was blown away by her performance in the HBO series Mare of Easttown and would love to see what she could do with the character of Colly in a movie version of The Killing Plains.

Matthew McConaughey would be ideal in the role of Russ Newland. He’s the easy-going local police chief and also the twin brother of Colly’s late husband; Russ is a peacemaker who is trying (with mixed success) to balance the competing demands of family solidarity and his duty as a lawman.

For Avery, the bitter, hard-edged younger rookie cop—I can’t imagine anyone better than Aubrey Plaza. Hilary Swank would nail the role as Colly’s sister-in-law Brenda Newland. For matriarch Iris Newland, the spider in the center of the family web—Sigourney Weaver. For the brilliant cosmopolitan child psychologist Niall Shaw, Idris Elba.

Visit Sherry Rankin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue