…and still more deals

but this time, not from Marketplace, because one has to spread the wealth a little bit. So instead I turn to my other main source of dish, Booktrade.info:

Kate Elton, Publishing Director of Arrow, has acquired three new books for Century and Arrow by Karin Slaughter, bestselling author of Blindsighted, Kisscut and A Faint Cold Fear.

Slaughter had two major UK bestsellers last autumn with Kisscut, which went straight into the Sunday Times paperback list at #2, and A Faint Cold Fear, which was a Sunday Times hardback bestseller. Her new novel, Indelible, will be published by Century this September, simultaneously with the Arrow paperback of A Faint Cold Fear. One further novel in the Grant County series, Faithless, is already under contract, and the new deal is for a stand-alone thriller plus two more Grant County novels.

This piece of news is interesting because Slaughter’s success is, so far, much greater in the UK than it has been in the US, her native country. There, she’s a bestseller, but mostly in terms of the NYT Extended list, not the main one. And like the last contract, Century makes the deal before her US publisher, William Morrow, although one would expect the latter to follow suit in due course (if they haven’t already done so.)

Although I’m a fan of Slaughter’s Grant County books and get each one around publication time, it’s a curious mix of liking her writing and her sense of place, but feeling that the books aren’t really the right vehicle for her voice. Maybe it’s because of the pre-publication buzz that accompanied the publication of BLINDSIGHTED (her debut novel) back in 2001, or having some degree of knowledge of her tastes and which writers she admires (full disclosure: she used to post to the mystery newsgroup where I hung out regularly for years). Maybe it’s because which each successive book, I have a harder time suspending disbelief that the horrific crimes described (in graphic detail, for that is one of Slaughter’s big selling points) would happen in such a cluster in a small town. Maybe it’s because her short stories (especially “Necessary Women” in the TART NOIR anthology and “The Blessing of Brokenness” in LIKE A CHARM), unburdened by the conventions and constraints of a continuing series, really demonstrate what her writing is capable of. Or maybe it’s me: I keep reading her books expecting something “extra”, something approaching the kind of melding of literary fiction and suspense that I want, and never quite finding it.

Ultimately I think the letdown I feel is a good thing because it means I recognize there’s the capacity for more, to (for lack of a better term) “break out” of the genre constraints, perceived of otherwise. Which is basically a long-winded way of my saying that I’m looking forward to the stand-alone novel very much (though it won’t be released until 2006 at the earliest), and I’m hoping that book will be able to allow her to meld her writing style and her imagination in a way that the series books, perhaps, do not.