Grove Atlantic Press will launch a new crime fiction imprint, Atlantic Crime, this fall. The imprint, led by senior editor Joe Brosnan, will release approximately 18-24 titles per year. Grove Atlantic’s current crime fiction backlist of more than 300 titles will be moved to the new imprint.
“It’s a way to bring all of our crime fiction together,” said publisher Morgan Entrekin, pointing out that crime fiction accounts for 20% to 25% of Grove Atlantic’s total backlist. “It’s time.”
Describing himself as a longtime avid reader of the genre, Entrekin recalled that he initially published "only a handful” of crime novels after Grove and Atlantic Monthly presses merged in 1993. The press began ramping up its crime fiction offerings in 2003, after becoming Donna Leon’s publisher and acquiring the rights to the first three volumes in her Guido Brunetti series, which were originally published by HarperCollins.
“The market had shifted;” Entrekin recalled. “Rather than using the old model of building an author over a number of books, the Big Six at the time were getting into auctions for six-figure, seven-figure advances, and launching the first book, or in a multiple-book contract, the first two or three books, in a big way. If it worked, they’d go forward; if it didn’t, they’d give up on the author. I saw an opportunity there, to try to pick up some of these authors.”
Leon was an immediate success for the press, Entrekin said, noting that, “If you stay the course with quality writers, it will pay off in the end. And crime fiction really backlists well. If you get some traction with a crime writer, the readers will keep coming. You can build a readership through the backlist, even with modest hardcover results.”
Grove Atlantic has since used that model to acquire the backlist of a range of “up-market, literary crime authors,” per Entrekin, along with the latest works by such critically-acclaimed crime novelists as Belinda Bauer, James Lee Burke, Patrick Hoffman, Susan Isaacs, Val McDermid, Jacquie Pham, and Tom Ryan, among others. It has published three Edgar Award–winning novels: Gone by Mo Hayder in 2010, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen in 2016, and Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke in 2024, as well as numerous Barry, Macavity, and Thriller Award finalists. Three Grove Atlantic authors are finalists for this year’s Edgar Awards, which will be celebrated on May 1: Henry Wise for Holy City, Mindy Mejia for A World of Hurt, and Tom Ryan for The Treasure Hunters Club.
“I’m incredibly excited to launch this imprint,” said Brosnan, who comes from a marketing background and has specialized in acquiring crime fiction since he arrived at Grove Atlantic in 2022. “It’s been great to bring the marketing experience and apply it to this new kind of fiction program we’ve been building for the last three years.”
Grove Atlantic plans to build the Atlantic Crime list by attracting established talent in the crime space while seeking out new voices. “We’re taking some mid-career and popular authors who’ve already proved themselves who, for one reason or another, are hitting the market and looking for new homes because they weren’t resigned by their original publishers,” Brosnan said. “And we’re mixing that with new voices—people whom I think could be the next great writer in this genre, who can write books for years to come and launch a series.”
Brosnan is bullish on the imprint’s chances. “Crime is really reliable. Libraries love it. Audiobooks succeed in this genre. People churn through crime fiction on e-books,” he said. An Atlantic Crime brand makes the messaging so much easier to convey to booksellers, to librarians, to the industry folks, that we’re doing as much as we’re doing.”
Atlantic Crime is scheduled to publish five frontlist releases in its inaugural season this fall: The Predicament by William Boyd, What About the Bodies by Ken Jaworowski, Silent Bones by Val McDermid, The Whisper Place by Mindy Mejia, and We Had a Hunch by Tom Ryan. The imprint will make its official debut on September 2 with What About the Bodies, Jaworowski's second novel; his first, Small Town Sins, published by Holt in 2023, was an Edgar Award nominee. While Jaworowski will not appear at Winter Institute in Denver in two weeks, ARCs of What About the Bodies will be available in the WI2025 galley room.
“It’s my favorite type of book,” Brosnan said of Jaworowski’s latest, acquired as part of a multibook deal—a strategy Brosnan plans to employ regularly at the imprint. “It has multiple points of view. It’s not procedural; it’s not hunting a killer. It’s about people caught up in crime, going through a very chaotic week. It’s heartbreaking, it’s humorous, and it felt like the right book to bring out to launch this imprint. It shows the type of storytelling I’m looking for and we’re publishing, by an emerging voice. Ken is someone I can see investing in for a long time.”
Entrekin added: “We want authors and agents to know we’re committed; it’s not all going to ride on one book. We’re going to stay the course beyond one or two books.”
