Ron Howard to direct 'The Girl Before'

"Angels & Demons" director Ron Howard will soon helm a movie adaptation of the J.P. Delaney thriller "The Girl Before" for Universal Pictures.

Michael De Luca is producing the movie with Imagine Entertainment's Howard, Brian Grazer and Erica Huggins, reports deadline.com.

Universal Pictures has bought the movie rights to "The Girl Before", a novel that Ballantine Bantam Dell Random House will publish in the fall of 2016.

"The Girl Before" is a story of a traumatised woman who falls in love with an extraordinary minimalist house and with the man who designed it. But when she discovers that three years earlier, another damaged woman died at the hotel, she starts to wonder if her own story is just a re-run of the life of the girl who died.

This becomes yet another big movie deal for a thriller book with a woman in jeopardy and with the word "girl" in the title. The others were "Gone Girl" and "The Girl On The Train", which Tate Taylor is directing for DreamWorks.