Viking's Wendy Wolf bought a book about an 18th-century Bostonian who was a forerunner of today's financial manipulators and real estate sharks. He was Andrew Dexter Jr., whose story is told by Brandeis historian Jane Kamensky in The Exchange Artist, which Wolf bought for North American rights from Tina Bennett at Janklow & Nesbit.... Pocket Books, in the person of publisher Louise Burke and senior editor Mitchell Ivers, bought what is thought to be the first book to be done on the Washington-area sniper attacks in October. It will be called 23 Days of Terror and will be written by U.S. News & World Report writer Angie Cannon and the magazine's staff; the publisher plans it, with pictures, for next April.... Carroll & Graf's Philip Turner bought two books from novelist and historian William R. Trotter: an action adventure with an archeologist pursuing a legendary sea beast in the remote Faroe Islands, and a reissue of his out-of-print Winterfire, a WWII thriller set in Finland; Betsy Nolan was the agent for the world rights deal.... Geoff Shandler at Little, Brown bought world rights to a new book by Doug Stanton (In Harm's Way), described as a sort of Black Hawk Down about U.S. Special Forces fighting in Afghanistan; the seller was Sloan Harris at ICM.... We got the first name of the author of a new Viking bio of Allen Ginsberg wrong in a story last week; he is Bill Morgan.