Doubleday and Anchor Books have acquired North American rights for two new political thrillers by Georgia politician Stacey Abrams. Both of the new novels will feature Avery Keene, the star of Abram's latest novel, While Justice Sleeps, which was published May 11 and has already sold more than 130,000 copies. The new books will be published in hardcover and as e-books and will later be published in trade paper by Anchor.
While Justice Sleeps concerns what happens when a Supreme Court justice falls into a coma and his clerk, given power-of-attorney, finds herself at the center of a vast Washington conspiracy.
Linda Loewenthal at The Loewenthal Company represented Abrams in the deal.
Prior to turning to thrillers, Abrams was the author of eight romance novels under the pen name Selena Montgomery. PRH's Berkley imprint announced earlier this month that it was reissuing the first three titles in the line, Rules of Engagement, The Art of Desire and Power of Persuasion, a trilogy which has been out of print. According to NPR, these titles sold more than 100,000 copies when they were first published more than 20 years ago.
In an interview with PW earlier this year to mark the publication of While Justice Sleeps, Abrams said the spark for novel came in 2008, while Abrams was at lunch with a lawyer friend, chatting about judges who hold lifetime appointments. “If you’re an Article III judge, you can only be removed for high crimes and misdemeanors or death,” Abrams explains. “So I thought, ‘Oh my God, what if you had a judge on the Supreme Court who was in a coma? There’s literally no mechanism in federal law and the Constitution to address that issue.’ And I sat down and wrote the first scene.”
