Following a successful slate of U.K. releases and U.S imports, author Cynthia Murphy will pen new YA thrillers under a three-book deal with Delacorte Press. Associate editor Alison Romig acquired world rights from Stephanie Thwaites at the Curtis Brown Group.

Murphy made her debut in 2021 with The Last to Die, a YA thriller released in the U.K. by Scholastic U.K. (she is now published by Puffin under Penguin Random House U.K.). She’d first tried her hand at writing urban fantasy, then moved on to middle grade (and was told that her writing was “too dark” for that age range), but finally returned to the genre she’d always felt most comfortable as a younger reader: thrillers and horror.

“I’d been through that tumultuous journey, and [when] I got to my last [book], I thought maybe I should just go back to the beginning and write something that I would have read when I was 12 and see if that works,” Murphy said.

Her sophomore project Win, Lose, Kill, Die, a nailbiter set at the fictional Morton Academy, follows a group of competitive overachievers as they’re hunted down one by one. Win, Lose, Kill, Die was the first of her titles to release in the U.S., in 2023, and it struck a chord with readers on TikTok, which has now become a hub for readers (and publishers) looking for the next big book. Win, Lose, Kill, Die started going viral following Madison Brooke Williams’s video showing nothing but the first page, and encouraging readers to find the book if they wanted to know more. One viewer was Alison Romig, associate editor at Delacorte, who said she “was immediately intrigued by it.”

“It was a fantastic first page,” Romig said. “It ended on a cliffhanger that was already twisty and promised really good thrills to come.”

Scholastic U.K.’s subrights team approached Romig in 2022 with Murphy’s backlist titles to consider importing to the U.S., and all it took was one reading of Win Kill Lose Die for Romig to want more from the writer. “It was just enthralling. I instantly knew that this was the voice I was looking for,” Romig said.

The Thrills Continue

The first in Murphy’s forthcoming trio of releases is Keep Your Friends Close, which she describes as “if [Mean Girls’] Regina George murdered everybody, rather than just being horrible.” The standalone novel, which is set within the Win, Kill, Lose, Die universe, will release on September 2, 2025. Murphy’s return to Morton Academy came at Romig’s suggestion.

“It all goes back to that initial love that I had for Win, Lose, Kill, Die,” Romig said. “I know that ferocious thriller readers will love those elements—the secret societies, the dark academia, the cults, the unreliable narrator. When we were talking about how we wanted to kick off our editorial relationship, I really wanted to go back to Morton and I thought it would be a fun way to start things,” she said.

Keep Your Friends Close centers on Chloe, a student at Morton Academy who finds her social life in free fall after her best friend snatches the Head Girl position away from her. Chloe begins venting her frustrations via her Book of Crime and Punishment where she and her friends imagine suitable punishments for those who have wronged them. But when people start dying in similar circumstances from the book, Chloe races to uncover who’s behind the string of murders before the killer catches up to her.

“We talked a lot about what someone would do to protect this idea of what’s theirs,” Romig said of early conversations with Murphy about Keep Your Friends Close. “It is [about] this very malicious idea that just because you feel you’ve worked for something or you expect something, are you actually entitled to it?”

One of the aspects Murphy appreciates most about her editors is the opportunity to play with new genres, which readers can expect more of in forthcoming projects. “If I want to start throwing in crazy creepy things, [my editors] don’t mind that, which is lovely, because I don’t feel the pressure to be churning out the same thing over and over again.”

For the second currently unnamed title, scheduled for a 2026 release, Murphy is putting her art history degree to good use. She describes the novel as “slightly more horror than thriller” and said it will have “lots of weird things happening around artwork that’s discovered.” Book three is slated for 2027.

As Murphy cements her stay in the YA thriller genre, she hopes to continue exploring the underbelly of humanity and its motivations. “I think mysteries and crime and, even horror, [are about] people in the crux of a situation where they’re going to show who they really are,” she said. “To play with people's moral boundaries is really interesting.”