FABER AND FABER ACQUIRE TWO NOVELS BY BEST SELLING CRIME WRITER LAURA LIPPMAN

Faber & Faber are thrilled to announce they have signed the New York Times bestselling author, Laura Lippman, to their crime & thriller list for her next two novels. The deal for UK and Commonwealth rights, which Senior Editor Angus Cargill did with Arabella Stein on behalf of Vicky Bijur, sees her move from HarperCollins’s Avon list.

Cargill said the signing was ‘a real coup for the list. Laura is an author I’ve long admired, one of America’s finest and most interesting thriller writers, and we hope to now take her work to the next level here in the UK’. And When She Was Good, the first book of the deal, will publish as a mass market paperback original in May 2013, with the ebook preceding it this November. Cargill described the novel as a ‘perfect slow-burn thriller, about Heloise, a single mother, whose seemingly normal life hides some very dark secrets. Secrets that threaten to emerge when the dead body of a suburban madam is discovered.’

Lippman’s 19th novel, untitled as of now, will follow in the autumn, and be published simultaneously with Morrow, her longterm US publisher. It is about one of Baltimore’s last number runners, who disappears in the 1970s, tipped off by a source that the federal government are on to him, leaving behind a wife, three young daughters and a mistress. And, somewhere, a lot of money. The story picks up thirty years later when a retired homicide cop working on cold cases to supplement his pension develops a fascination with the murder of a beautiful stripper — who happened to be the number runner’s mistress and the woman he entrusted with a suitcase full of cash when he fled.

Faber press release via It's a Crime.