Persistence pays.  Cornwell’s first crime novel, Postmortem, was rejected by seven major publishign houses before it was published by Scribner in 1990.  It became the first novel to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony and Macavity awards as well as the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure in a single year.  Lifetime TV has announced forthcoming movie versions of At Risk and its sequel, The Front.

See Patricia Cornwell titles at www.vjbooks.com

(Publisher’s Weekly, June 22)

Jeffery Deaver recently learned that a novelist’s life can be fraught with peril.  To lend credibility to the fictional blog he created in Roadside Crosses, he roamed the shoreline near Monterey, Califo., taking pictures to accompany the posts.  During a beach breakfast break he was “mercilessly attacked by a flock - gang is more accurate - of seagulls, who clearly had had a taste for Super-Seed bagels with cream cheese and wanted more.  They are, by the way, very big birds.”  Deaver just finished a 14-city tour (gull-free, we trust); Roadside imprint total:  210,000 copies.

Order your signed copy of Roadside Crosses by Jeffery Deaver at www.vjbooks.com

(Publisher’s Weekly, June 22)

Like Bond locations, Bourne locations are being talked about in the travel business.  Lustbader used some of the scenes in and around Ball’s luxe Amankila Hotel as settings for The Bourne Deception, which has 301,000 copies in print.  New York will soon be a real setting for Lustbader, when he participates in two panels at Thrillerfest on July 8 and 11.

Order a signed copy of Bourne Deception by Eric Van Lustbader at www.vjbooks.com

(Publisher’s Weekly, June 22)

Megaseller Koontz, no stranger to radio interviews, gives a major shout-out to the interviewers themselves in his latest opus, whose protagonist is an author: “Radio hosts, both talk-jocks and traditional tune-spinners, do better interviews than TV types.  Rare is the TV interviewer who has read your book, but eight of ten radio hosts will have read it.”  Relentless copies in print: a cool 550,000.

Order your signed copy of Relentless by Dean Koontz at www.vjbooks.com

(Publisher’s Weekly, June 22)

The Last Oracle is Rollin’s fifth Sigma Force novel - after The Judas Strain, which spent 12 weeks on our fiction and mass market lists.  Publisher’s Weekly review said, “Lots of absorbing scientific information and tantalizing sentences like “With two rifles strapped to his back and a boy and a chimpanzee in tow, Monk marched down pitch-black tunnel’ keep the pages flying by.”  More pages will be flying soon, when Sigma Force #6, The Doomsday Key, is out June 23.

(Publisher’s Weekly, June 15)

Late last year, bestselling thriller writer Joseph Finder was walking around Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, and ran into “a couple of guys” from DC Comics. He had just finished Vanished, a novel coming out this August featuring a young alienated teenager who is creating his own comic book. Finder thought it would be cool if he could actually produce the comic and use it to promote the novel. Read the rest of this entry »

Child, dubbed by New York Times critic Janet Maslin the “rock star” of the suspense genre, kicked off his 13-city North American tour May 19 to an SRO New York City crowd.  he’s currently meeting hundreds of “Reacher Creatures” (named after leading man Jack Reacher) across the country at bookstores and - new this year- military bases.  Fans can check out Child’s daily progress on his tour blog at www.leechild.com.  Delacorte reports 350,000 copies in print.

Order a signed copy of Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child at www.vjbooks.com

The Yale campus becomes the site of an increasingly tense siege in this stunning novel from bestseller White (Dead Time). After unidentified attackers quietly take over a building belonging to one of Yale’s secret societies, they transform it into a virtual fortress holding an unknown number of students hostage. As officials become aware of what has happened, the response escalates in predictable fashion, but these hostage takers are completely unpredictable. They make no demands, agree to no negotiations and execute or release hostages as they choose. Suspended Boulder, Colo., policeman Sam Purdy eventually teams with maverick FBI agent Christopher Poe and CIA terror expert Deirdre Drake in an effort outside official channels to figure out what’s going on. Brilliantly conceived and executed, this intellectually challenging and provocative thriller brings home the lesson that 9/11 might have been a mere prelude to more sophisticated assaults. (Aug.)

Order a signed copy of The Siege by Stephen White at www.vjbooks.com

(Publisher’s Weekly, June

To find the right lead title, Minotaur takes chances on newcomers as well as writers from what Martin dubs his “farm team.” Chelsea Cain, a Portland journalist who signed a seven-figure, three-book deal with the imprint in 2006, is a good example of the former tack; Cain’s first two novels in her serial killer trilogy—Heartsick and Sweetheart—both hit the bestseller lists.

The other route involves cherry-picking writers from Minotaur’s backlist (aka the farm team)—many of them accomplished genre authors the imprint has steadily done 5,000-copy print runs for. Olen Steinhauer is one such writer. Steinhauer’s The Tourist, published in March, is his sixth book, but the first in a new trilogy, which Martin said was key to giving the Edgar-winning author a higher profile. “[Steinhauer] had great literary chops,” Martin elaborated, “but I can’t make him great on book four or five of a five-book series.” (The Tourist, which has sold 51,000 copies to date, was also acquired for film by George Clooney.)

Martin’s goal is to drive home the message that Minotaur, while it is about genre fiction, is also about big fiction. To that end, the imprint recently signed a three-book deal with bestseller Nevada Barr; it will now release the next titles in Barr’s long-running series featuring Parks Service detective Anna Pigeon.

In addition to bigger print runs—upcoming 100,000-copy pushes include Norb Vonnegut’s Top Producer (mid-September) and Louise Penny’s The Brutal Telling (late September)—Martin is trying to twist the old publicity standards. The imprint has done away with shipping a crate-full of galleys—known as the Beast Box —to booksellers and the press every season. Instead it’s shipping two “discoveries” and a memory stick with promotional information about other upcoming titles. (The discoveries are two of the house’s lead titles.)

According to Martin, the less is more approach is all part of the plan “to get you reading, buying, selling Minotaur books.”

Although Martin acknowledged that consumers may not check the bindings of their books before they buy, branding is key, he thinks, within the industry. “While I don’t promote the Minotaur brand to the consumer, I do to the customer,” by which he means getting booksellers and the press on board with the new Minotaur.

(Publisher’s Weekly, Jun 8, Rachel Deahl)

“Being a former newspaper reporter, I’ve watched in recent years as the newspaper economy has crumbled…. Along the way, many people I worked with have lost their jobs to buyouts or layoffs. I am also a big fan of the TV show The Wire.  In its last season, the show explored… what was happening to the newspaper business.  Watching that show made me want to take  a shot at the story that would be a thriller first and a torch song for the newspaper business second.”

- Connelly’s reason for bringing back The Poet protagonist Jack McEvoy.  Scarecrow copies in print:  405,000. (Publisher’s Weekly, June

Order a signed copy of The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly at www.vjbooks.com