Eric Garcia
Sexy Rexy?
Random House's Jonathan Karp is so impressed with Eric Garcia's new novel, Hot and Sweaty Rex, he's willing to throw his literary reputation behind it. "I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is the best dinosaur mafia novel ever written," says Karp, editorial director and Garcia's editor.
Garcia began to dominate that underpopulated literary niche with his first novel, Anonymous Rex. There he introduced Vincent Rubio, a private detective who happens to be a velociraptor disguised as a human—turns out reports of dinosaurs' extinction were exaggerated. They still walk among us, albeit in scaled-down proportions that enable them, encased in latex suits, to pass as human.
Garcia followed up his debut with a prequel, Casual Rex. Hot and Sweaty is the third installment in the genre-bending series, which combines mystery, science fiction, noir and, above all, comedy. It's the kind of originality that inevitably gets an author branded a "cult" novelist. "I think anytime you sort of get this rabid group of followers you get labeled, 'cult,' which is totally cool with me," Garcia says. On the other hand, he adds, "I would not be uncomfortable with the label 'J.K. Rowling—level superstar,' either."
Stardom for this novelist seems likely to arrive via the screen. Matchstick Men, Garcia's one published non-Rex novel, was made into a movie released in September. Exposure from the high-profile film, which stars Nicolas Cage, is expected to stoke interest in Garcia's other books.
The Rex titles will get a more direct publicity hit with the forthcoming SciFi Channel series based on the books, scheduled to debut next summer or fall. Garcia is heavily involved in the series, writing scripts and acting as co-executive producer. Though he thinks of himself as a novelist first, he's done the math and knows that even a marginally successful television show will reach more people than a blockbuster novel.
Garcia has also recently sold a title to ReganBooks, Cassandra French's FinishingSchool for Boys. The author describes the dinosaur-free novel as "Sex and the City meets Misery. It's sort of my twisted take on chick lit, so again, I'm genre jumping," he says.
As for whether there will be a book four in the Rex series, Garcia reports he's keeping an open mind. While he says, "I don't have anything in me that is burning to write the next one," this 30-year-old husband, father and dog owner living in suburban L.A. clearly feels a strong affinity for Vincent, the slightly dangerous protagonist of his signature series. "If I was a cool P.I.," he admits, "that would be me."
Despite having a tail and claws, Vincent is quite a hit with the (human) ladies, and Garcia notes his editor's predilection for playing up the inter-species sex angle. "At least as it relates to my books, I know that interests him." Karp agrees. "He's not afraid to take risks. A lot of authors are a little skittish when it comes to inter-species sex, but Eric Garcia dove right into it," he says. "And I have to say, I thought those scenes were pretty hot." —Karen Holt
Great Expectations: Karp believes the SciFi Channel series will propel Garcia from cult novelist to bestselling author. "He's too unconventional and too goddamn funny to play it straight and he's not going to have a predictable career," says Karp. "But this kind of imagination and inventiveness ultimately finds its audience."
Colin Harrison
New York's Thriller Laureate?
"I feel as a writer that you're obligated to be interesting from the first sentence," says Colin Harrison. "I'm fascinated by what will capture and hold a reader's attention. What hooks them? What makes a paragraph beguiling?"
Exploring the power of language is a full-time job for Harrison—actually, two full-time jobs. In addition to being the author of four highly praised novels (the Washington Post called Afterburn "extraordinary, maybe even a masterpiece"), he's a senior editor at Scribner (where he edited the best-selling Jarhead) and was formerly deputy editor of Harper's magazine. This bipolar literary life means, says Harrison, "that I read my work as a writer but I also have an editor wheel spinning in my head. And it gives me empathy for my writers in the loneliness of the task."
His newest novel, The Havana Room (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Jan.) is the story of a man who, by the merest chance, falls from the heights of power and wealth in New York City and finds himself embroiled in a dangerous, potentially lethal state of affairs.
"Colin's an astute observer of human nature with x-ray vision for human foibles," says FSG editor-in-chief John Glusman. "What happens when a man makes a wrong choice, gets involved with the wrong woman or a dirty business deal? His plotting is superb and his characterizations utterly convincing. He also has the rare ability to step away from his work, turn it upside down and shake it around till he's satisfied."
Harrison grew up outside Philadelphia, son of the headmaster of a Quaker boarding school and an actress mother. "It was a very safe place, that's probably why I'm fascinated by the convulsive danger of the city. New York City scares me, motivates me, beckons me and turns my head around. As a kid from the country, it's still magical to me."
While Harrison credits the influence of writers such as William Styron ("he has enormous rhetorical power and wasn't afraid to use it") and David Foster Wallace ("when I worked with him at Harper's, he taught me to really push language"), he's no literary elitist—"that's a very dangerous thing to be. There are a lot of commercial writers who are great storytellers and some are geniuses at technique. I learned how to end a chapter on a hook from reading commercial fiction." His own tastes run the literary gamut. "Late at night, I'm just as likely to pick up an obscure volume on stock market analysis, The Godfather or my daughter's Archie comics."
Building on the success of Afterburn, FSG plans a 75,000 first printing, an author tour and, in Glusman's words, "an aggressive marketing and advertising budget." The galleys have been packaged with a CD that includes the first chapter and an author interview.
All this attention is welcome, but Harrison has no trouble keeping it in perspective. "I've begun to have a gathering sense of how difficult it is to be a writer. The business is very volatile and it's hard to stay in there year after year. I'm trying as a writer to play the long game." —Lucinda Dyer
Great Expectations: "We see Colin as the thriller laureate of New York," says Glusman, "someone who knows the ins and outs of city life as intimately as Tom Wolfe. Given the spectacular review coverage of Afterburn, Colin is perfectly positioned to make that next leap—we think The Havana Room will turn Colin Harrison into a bestselling author."
Karin Slaughter
A Case of Genre-Switching
William Morrow knew it had a winner back in 1999 when they snapped up Karin Slaughter's (yes, that's her real name) first manuscript, Blindsighted (it was published in 2001). According to executive editor Meaghan Dowling, "We really thought she had what it takes—we all had that instinct. So we took a gamble right from the get-go with a pretty significant offer—three-books, mid-six figure advance—for an unpublished writer and she really delivered." Evidently so: early reviewers compared the Atlanta-based newcomer to such veterans as Patricia Cornwell and Thomas Harris. Slaughter's latest, A Faint Cold Fear, was published last month; it's already hit bestseller lists in the U.K. and Ireland.
Slaughter originally intended to write historical novels and, after a decade-long search for an agent, had amassed a collection of personally written rejection letters. "I knew how rare it was for editors to actually sit down and write why they didn't like the book. So after two weeks of thinking they were stupid and had given up on the next great thing, I thought, 'Well you know, maybe they're right,' and tried to incorporate their advice in my writing."
After her agent suggested she switch genres, it took only 21 days for Slaughter to write the bare bones of her first thriller. As she puts it, "I always loved the genre but I never thought I'd be smart enough to plot one. You have to juggle so much, but it was easier to do than I thought. My challenge was that I wanted to give my characters some sort of emotional depth—a response to what I thought was lacking in the genre. I wrote the kind of book I wanted to read, where the characters were just as important as the plot."
Unlike most mystery writers, whose plots revolve around a single protagonist, Slaughter's Grant County series showcases three main characters in a rural college town in Georgia. Dr. Sara Linton is a pediatrician and the town coroner; her ex-husband, Jeffrey Tolliver, is the police chief; and detective Lena Adams is the only female on the local force. "There's something about having this triumvirate that's very unique," says Dowling. "Nobody is a foil or feels like a stock figure—these are really three-dimensional, well-developed characters."
Some of Slaughter's scenarios are pretty grisly, but she is unapologetic about the brutality in her books. "As a Southerner, like Flannery O'Connor, James Dickey, Faulkner, I'm interested in transcendence. And for me, to show that transcendence in my characters, I have to write about their ordeals. I do go through pretty graphic scenes in my books, but that's very much on purpose. I think as a woman it's very important to talk and write about violence. The message we need to send to people who are traumatized by any sort of assault is that they have a right to be angry and that's what I wanted to write about." —Hilary S. Kayle
Great Expectations: Dowling tells PW, "With Karin, word of mouth is spreading like wildfire—that's the key thing. She's becoming a real brand-name author. There are also certain characters in mystery series who become beloved—people know them by their first names and they become personalities in their own right. That's where Karin's characters are at this point. That's when I think you really take off."
David Corbett
Addressing Serious Issues
All the traditional elements of crime drama are there—upbeat pacing, gripping suspense, vivid characters—but don't expect to breeze through a David Corbett novel. Corbett, whose first book, The Devil's Redhead (Ballantine, 2002), was widely praised and received an Anthony Award nomination, does more than spin a yarn.
"A reader has to be ready for David," says Corbett's editor, Mark Tavani. "It's not a cozy, it's not a thriller. It's crime fiction but it's very serious. There's a line we need to walk between overplaying that and understating it."
Corbett's second novel, Done for a Dime, follows police detective Dennis Murchison and his racist partner Jerry Stluka as they search for the killer of a legendary blues musician. What initially appears to be a single brutal murder turns out to be a tangled web of deceit and corruption that addresses such hot-button topics as racism, power-brokering by real estate developers and police/citizen relationships.
"I think the crime novel is a great vehicle for discussing social issues. There is no social novel anymore and I think the crime novel provides that vehicle now," Corbett tells PW. "It's a cousin of the urban novel. What Richard Price and Dennis Lehane do really isn't that different, and what I'm trying to do is someplace in there. When you write about cities, you're going to write about corruption and crime and that's my focus: how do cities, and urban decision-making, become the way they are; how does money constantly become the prime mover behind everything; and who are the power players and why. That's the story of unions, working people, development and redevelopment and the people involved. That's the gift the crime drama gives you."
Having spent 15 years as a private investigator for a San Francisco firm, Corbett knows these issues firsthand. He worked on a number of high-profile criminal and civil rights suits, including the Lincoln Savings & Loan case, the People's Temple Trial and a RICO civil litigation brought by the Teamsters against former leaders associated with organized crime.
"It's odd, I didn't read mysteries or crime novels until I became a P.I.," says Corbett. "Then I read The Long Goodbye and Double Indemnity and I got why people read them. Though I still didn't think they were true to my experience. I don't think most P.I. novels are true to what P.I.s do, but I understand the allure and I certainly realized that Chandler and Cain had an incredible prose style. In fact, Cain had a major influence on me in terms of pacing—his books rip up."
Ballantine is extremely high on Corbett, says Tavani, and is marketing him carefully. "The main thing is finding the right audience, not just the biggest. Not everyone can pick up his books and deal with the weight of the issues. So the main thing is to go through the mystery routes—Bouchercon, the Web sites that reach these readers, endorsements from the authors—we need to first reach the people that know the genre and understand it." —Michael Archer
Great Expectations: "I think the expectation for David is to be recognized as the absolute premier crime fiction writer in the business," says Tavani. "A comparison for him is Richard Price—an author who can tell a full and amazing story within the genre. I think there's potential for him to be discovered in Hollywood and to write a book that maintains its seriousness and can pull in an even bigger audience to put him, sales-wise, with Michael Connelly and Denis Lehane. We know we have our hands on somebody who's probably the most talented writer in the genre."
Barry Eisler
Right as Rain
John Rain, a freelance assassin specializing in death by "natural causes," might have been just another operative loose in the world of international intrigue were it not that his creator, lawyer-turned-novelist Barry Eisler, was fascinated by the man and tried—successfully, by all accounts—to make other people fascinated too. "How does a guy learn to get away with murder by making it look like an accident?" Eisler writes in a press release that accompanies Hard Rain, the second book in the series, after last year's Rain Fall, his debut novel. "Where did he come from, what formative experiences did he have? What makes him tick?"
The idea for the series came to Eisler a decade ago when he was in Tokyo to practice law (technology transactions) and judo and was struck by an imaginary scene of two men following another man down the street. He asked himself who the two men were, realized they were assassins and started filling in the gaps from there. "The more answers I got, the more questions I asked," he says. "It started feeling like a story." (This image became the opening chapter of Rain Fall.) John Rain is "really interesting, a bundle of contradictions," Eisler explains. "He's half-Japanese, half-American, a loner who wants to belong. He's troubled by what he does but he keeps doing it. His character propels the story forward."
In his bookstore appearances—a five-city West Coast tour for the first book ballooned to 15 cities nationwide for the second—Eisler draws listeners in by having them imagine Rain's complicated, perilous circumstances: how cagey he has to be, how watchful of his back. According to the author, "The right way to do a reading is as a presentation. It's strange just to sit down and read without giving a context." After an appearance for Rain Fall at Kepler's in Menlo Park, Calif., three booksellers wrote glowing letters to Eisler, says Putnam senior editor David Highfill. "Buyer Karen Pennington reported more books sold per capita than for any other book she'd seen in 18 years, 95 sales out of 100 attendees. We knew then a star was in the making."
Eisler had a hard time finding an agent for the Tokyo-based series. When agent Nat Sobel signed on, he took the manuscript first to Japan, where it was bought by Sony Publishing in a heated and pricey auction. PW reported on the unusual sale, which stirred the interest of New York publishers and Putnam preempted here with a healthy two-book contract. Eisler has since signed a second contract, and Rain Storm, in which Rain is courted by the CIA, is due out next summer. Among his literary influences, Eisler cites Andrew Vachss, for his spare style; Stephen King, for his honesty; Cormac McCarthy and T.S. Eliot for the cadences in their work; Pat Conroy, for his beautiful prose ("It's what I aspire to"). —Suzanne Mantell
Great Expectations: "As an editor, you dream about writers as practical and clever and savvy and smart as Barry is," says Highfill, noting that Rain Fall was a Penguin Rep Pick and one of PW's best books of 2002. "We loved the book for its Japanese atmosphere and noir technique. It worked as a character piece and as an action piece. But we didn't know how good Barry was in person. He is an adept, polished speaker, handsome and funny. He'll continue to be out there with booksellers, selling as many books as he can We will do more and more with each book." Rights to the Rain books have been sold in 12 countries, and film rights have been purchased by Jet Li.
David Rosenfelt
Going to the Dogs
Before David Rosenfelt wrote legal thrillers, he honed his skills via TV movies. But even in his first endeavor (To Love, Honor and Deceive, ABC, 1996) Rosenfelt displayed a knack for intricate and revealing details, a talent that's carried over to his novels for Mysterious Press—his 2002 debut, Open and Shut, which was nominated for an Edgar; last June's First Degree; and Bury the Lead, due out in June 2004. For example, Rosenfelt specified in the ABC script that when one of the characters comes across an upturned tricycle, one of its wheels should still be spinning—a tricycle whose wheel is still spinning, he explains, means that a child was recently riding it and is possibly still within reach of those trying to locate him. What Rosenfelt refers to as "a little quirk" in fact spurred the movie's characters into a critical course of action.
Rosenfelt, a self-confessed Court TV junkie, is as self-deprecating as he is talented. He explains that his departure from his position as the head of marketing for Tri-Star Pictures was "nothing courageous," that there was no aesthetic urge roiling inside him to leave the world of commerce to write. "I never got trained as a writer," Rosenfelt says. "For instance, I can't plot out a book in advance. The publisher is nice enough to not demand a complete outline in advance even though the contract probably calls for it."
Whatever Rosenfelt's method, it seems to be working. In the words of Martha Otis, advertising and promotion director at the AOL Time Warner Book Group, "I think first off that to read [David's books] is to love them; I'm a really huge fan." Part of the reason for her admiration, Otis explains, is the author's use of humor—"they're really a different kind of legal thriller than most people are used to." Asked to pinpoint Rosenfelt's uniqueness, his editor, Kristen Weber, says "it's definitely the voice. I was laughing out loud when I was reading Bury the Lead."
Bury the Lead continues the adventures of Andy Carpenter, a defense attorney who is, by Rosenfelt's account, "irreverent, intelligent, sarcastic, dry—the sort of guy you'd like to hang out with." Carpenter practices in Paterson, N.J., where Rosenfelt grew up; the author now lives in Southern California with his wife and 35 dogs. Two years after the 1993 death of Tara, their golden retriever, the Rosenfelts established the Tara Foundation to rescue old or sick dogs. Some 4,000 dogs have been saved to date, Rosenfelt reports, "most of them golden retrievers." (The name of Andy Carpenter's pooch is—you guessed it—Tara.) —Claiborne Smith
Great Expectations: Otis reports that Mysterious Press will be featuring Bury the Lead in its e-mail newsletter, which has a subscription base of 13,000. The house will also offer all of Rosenfelt's books free to a certain number (as yet unspecified) of readers who are the first to call in after seeing print ads publicizing the offer. "We really believe that people who read him will be fans right away," Otis says. Also in the works is a targeted Book Sense mailing for Bury the Lead which will include copies of his two previous titles. "I'm determined," Otis says, "to make him a star." She'll evidently have plenty of opportunities: Rosenfelt is currently putting the finishing touches on the fourth Andy Carpenter book and has just been signed for installments five and six.
Jonnie Jacobs
Zeroing In on O'Brien
"I do like variety," says attorney-turned-novelist Jonnie Jacobs, who holds graduate degrees in both English and counseling. "For me, it's satisfying to keep pushing yourself. I do try every time to attempt something new; it's like stretching a muscle." Or, in the case of Intent to Harm (Oct.), her sixth mystery featuring attorney Kali O'Brien, peeling an onion, because with each book Jacobs tries to create more layers, more secrets to uncover. "Kali's still trying to get comfortable in her skin. I'm learning more about her as I write," says Jacobs. "This book's very different. It's got a more complex plot. There are more points of view. The other Kali books were more about Kali and a case. This is more of a suspense, and Kali is a part of it."
Intent to Harm opens with a bang—a couple of them, to be exact. Kali hardly gets to meet her new client, who insists on doing the introduction s in a deserted spot near Tahoe City, when a sniper strikes, killing the client and wounding Kali. Jacobs credits an overheard conversation back when she was still a practicing lawyer with giving her the idea for a mystery client. "The 'what if' is spurred by everything around you. I read the newspaper; I listen," she says. Although early influences include the Nancy Drew series, Perry Mason and Jane Austen, Jacobs's personal Rx for writing is: "read widely and critically, live fully and observe things. Then write."
Up until a few years ago, Jacobs split her time between two very different series, the Kali O'Brien books, featuring a tough but tenderhearted heroine, and books starring mother and amateur sleuth Kate Austen. Eager to gain momentum for her work, both Jacobs and John Scognamiglio, editorial director at Kensington Books, who has been her editor from the start of her career, decided it would be best to concentrate on just one series. Two years ago Kensington repackaged all the Kali books to give them a big book look. For Intent to Harm, Kensington gave away galleys at BEA in L.A. and held a cocktail party for key accounts in the Bay Area, where Jacobs lives. The author is also slated to go on a five-city tour, supported with both regional and national advertising. In addition, the mass market of her previous Kali mystery, Cold Justice, was released last month, and both it and all of Jacobs's other books are promoted on the Web site she shares with three other mystery writers (NMAmysteries.com).
To increase the suspense surrounding the Kali O'Brien series, Jacobs is taking a brief hiatus to work on her first stand-alone. "I've always started with character: why-done-it as well as whodunit," says Jacobs. In the new book, she's answering those questions from several perspectives, including that of a female police officer. Although she knows where the book is headed, Jacobs does not work from an outline. "Sometimes I write two or three drafts," she says. "I do a lot of rewriting. Rewriting is key to writing." —Judith Rosen
Great Expectations: "There's more to Kali O'Brien than just a cozy story," says Scognamiglio about the decision to concentrate on just one of Jacobs's series. "I think Jonnie has the potential to go farther [with the Kali O'Brien books] than [with] Kate Austen. With suspense, the sky's the limit. We've built a great foundation with the previous Kali books. Now it's time to take a leap forward."
Jonathon King
Inspired in Tennessee
Jonathon King, a reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and author of three mysteries, knows humanity. "In 23 years as a reporter, I've interviewed and walked with and worked with and listened to cops, judges, homeless people, grieving parents, crackheads, mayors and transplant surgeons—a pretty wide spectrum," he says.
Dutton senior editor Mitch Hoffman agrees that journalism has given King "this incredible eye for detail and character," and adds, "the other nice thing about journalists is that they're very good about working on a deadline."
For now, Dutton has King on a once-a-year schedule. His first novel, The Blue Edge of Midnight (2002), won an Edgar and hit the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. It was followed this past April by A Visible Darkness, and Dutton will publish his third, Shadow Men, in April 2004.
Although all three of King's novels feature Max Freeman, a former Philadelphia police officer working as a private investigator in Florida, Shadow Men will be the first to bear the words "A Max Freeman Novel" on the cover. "It's a signal to people who may have read the first two books to stick with us," says Hoffman.
King is in good company in Florida, the state that has produced such mystery and crime writers as Carl Hiaasen, Charles Willeford, Les Standiford and Elmore Leonard. "It's a fascinating place," King notes. "Florida really was the last frontier. There was a transcontinental railroad to California before there was a railroad to Miami. There were electric streetlights in New York before there was a single house light in south Florida."
Ironically, King has left Florida to write his books. In early 2000, the author took some accumulated vacation and spent two cold months in an isolated cabin in the Tennessee mountains, where he wrote the first draft for The Blue Edge of Midnight. Today he recalls, "The gamble was leaving my wife and two kids, then four and seven, alone in Florida for two months. You don't come back after that and say, 'Eh, it didn't come to me.' " He has returned to the cabin, owned by his father-in-law, for each successive book.
Another mystery writer with a Florida past is Michael Connelly, who once worked alongside King as a police reporter for a different Florida paper and was the first to read that draft of The Blue Edge of Midnight. In addition to Connelly, King names James Lee Burke, Dennis Lehane and Pete Dexter as writer role models, than quickly rattles off a wide-ranging list of influences that includes Russell Banks, Richard Price and Flannery O'Connor.
The 49-year-old author answers questions with the confidence and directness of someone who has conducted hundreds of interviews himself. He falters only once—when he hears that his publisher has labeled him a rising star. "That's intimidating," he says. Then he recovers. "But I'm having great fun writing fiction. When I started out I heard all those stories about how difficult it is to get published and how you're going to struggle. It's almost embarrassing for me to say how great it's been." —Natalie Danford
Great Expectations: According to Hoffman, "King is on an absolute upward trajectory. When we started talking about him we thought of him in the tradition of writers he's now being compared to, like Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane, and I can see a path where his career grows in a similar way, not just critically, but commercially."
Michael McClelland
From E-book into Print
Michael McClelland sampled success as a novelist before his debut title, Oyster Blues, ever made it into print. Unable to get a traditional publisher interested, he accepted an offer from PocketPCPress to release it as an original e-book in 2001.
"It became the number seven e-book bestseller at Amazon.com, which sounds great, but in fact only translates into a few hundred copies," says McClelland. "But it made me feel good and it was beer money."
Eventually, McClelland got more than beer out of the deal, leveraging the novel's electronic sales into a two-book hardcover contract with ibooks. That led to Pocket Books acquiring the mass market paperback rights to Oyster Blues, which it is publishing in February.
The novel takes place in a humidity-soaked world of down-and-outers—some lovable, some not—that stretches from the Dominican Republic to Miami. The narrative sprints on booze, bullets and lies. There's a sweet romance and enough laughs to bring to mind the reigning monarch of funny crime novels.
"People say I remind them of Carl Hiaasen," says McClelland. "I hate to make that claim because he's 50 million copies ahead of me."
Still, the comparison does not displease McClelland. And the two writers have more in common than a sense of humor. Both are Florida natives whose fiction reflects the strangest side of a state known for eccentricity. And, like Hiaasen, McClelland made a living as a newspaper reporter before becoming a novelist, spending 10 years covering politics and environmental issues in Tallahassee.
McClelland, 46, isn't yet quitting his day job—teaching English at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio—but he's finally got a foothold on the career ladder he's always wanted to climb. He dreamed of a creative writing career even as an undergraduate writing for the student newspaper at Florida State University.
He made his first serious run at a novelist's life in 1989, moving to the beach and devoting himself full-time to writing a book. "I had read enough so that I was a pretty good critic," says McClelland. He was such a good critic he realized he wasn't any good as a novelist. He returned to FSU and earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in creative writing. His years as a reporter taught him discipline and how to pay attention to details. But it took being immersed in a community of creative writers to really hone the skills he needed to pen a novel, he says.
Though he moved to Ohio to take a teaching job three years ago, his heart and writing remain rooted deep in his home state. Florida is also the setting of his second novel, Tattoo Blues, which he recently completed. Despite the similarities in their titles, his two books do not have the same characters and are not the beginning of a series.
That's not to say the characters won't pop up again in future books. "Ultimately, I would like to see him maybe combine the characters in a book," says Kevin Smith, McClelland's editor at Pocket Books. —Karen Holt
Great Expectations: With its strong narrative drive and compelling characters—including deftly written female characters—Oyster Blues has the qualities to attract an audience beyond the hardcover mystery fan, says Smith. And, says the editor, McClelland is "every bit as funny as Carl Hiaasen," and should be as popular. "We're hoping to tap into that Hiaasen market," says Smith. "I think that's the perfect audience for him."
