Joe R. Lansdale, whose mystery The Bottoms won this year's Edgar Award for best novel, is moving from Mysterious Press to Knopf, where Sonny Mehta has just made a mid-six-figure deal, U.S. and Canada, for his next two books with agent Jimmy Vines. The first in the deal, scheduled for 2003, is Sunset and Sawdust and is a thriller set in East Texas during the Depression, about a woman who kills her abusive sheriff husband in self-defense, then takes over his job and is faced with a murder that points to her.