Deadline reports that Anika Noni Rose (Dreamgirls, Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, Elementary) has optioned the TV/film rights to Daniel José Older’s urban fantasy series Bone Street Rumba. The first book of the series, Half-Resurrection Blues, was published January 6 by Roc Books; you can read our review as well as an excerpt of the novel.
Rose has optioned the series through her production company Roaring Virgin Productions. It’s unclear if she plans to adapt the Bone Street Rumba books into a series of films, or if we’ll be seeing another urban fantasy TV series in the future.
Here’s what you need to know about Half-Resurrection Blues and its partially-dead protagonist Carlos Delacruz:
Carlos Delacruz is one of the New York Council of the Dead’s most unusual agents—an inbetweener, partially resurrected from a death he barely recalls suffering, after a life that’s missing from his memory. He thinks he is one of a kind—until he encounters other entities walking the fine line between life and death.
One inbetweener is a sorcerer. He’s summoned a horde of implike ngks capable of eliminating spirits, and they’re spreading through the city like a plague. They’ve already taken out some of NYCOD’s finest, leaving Carlos desperate to stop their master before he opens up the entrada to the Underworld—which would destroy the balance between the living and the dead.
But in uncovering this man’s identity, Carlos confronts the truth of his own life—and death.
Tor.com has published three original short stories by Older, all set in the Bone Street Rumba world: “Skin Like Porcelain Death,” “Anyway: Angie,” and “Kia and Gio.” A fourth story, “Ginga,” is coming this summer.
