A couple of years ago it was picked up by United Artists for Tom Cruise, but now Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi's The Monster of Florence seems set to happen at Fox, with George Clooney playing Preston's real-life amateur sleuth. The book concerns Preston's move to Italy, and his burgeoning obsession with a thirty-year old series of unsolved murders. He and his partner Spezi (an Italian reporter) made impressive new inroads into a trail that had gone thoroughly cold, but their investigation ruffled some feathers among the Italian authorities, who at one point even jailed Spezi for being the killer himself (he wasn't). Christopher McQuarrie has been working on the script since the Cruise days, and it's still his version, co-written with Nathan Alexander, that will go before the cameras. McQuarrie will also co-produce. So it's back to Italy for Clooney, following his sojourn there in The American. Is The Monster of Florence destined to be the European Zodiac? We can but hope. | 
