In a major pre-Frankfurt pre-empt, Holt President and Publisher Steve Rubin paid a high six-figure sum for North American rights to Mark Allen Smith's Information Retrieval in a two-book deal from Nat Sobel at Sobel Weber Associates.
The thriller follows a character who trades in confidential information and is a specialist in extracting such information from people. The central character, Geiger, is a "meticulous torturer", who, when presented with a mark that's a child, winds up uncovering his own secret past as he decides to save the boy.
Smith is a screenwriter who also worked extensively as an investigative news producer for television. On the foreign rights front, Sobel has sold the book in Italy.
