My god, an actual debut female PI novel

And one that went to auction, even!

Lisa Lutz’s THE SPELLMAN FILES, a debut about a young PI working for

her highly dysfunctional family’s PI firm, to Marysue Rucci at Simon

& Schuster, for publication in spring 2007, in a significant deal,

at auction, by Stephanie Kip Rostan at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.

Italian rights to Mondadori, in a pre-empt.

Lutz is a screenwriter who wrote for Salon last year about her bizarre experience getting a straight-to-video movie comedy made after a decade of rewrites. One would hope she didn’t spend that much time on the book, though it certainly implies a willingness to revise, and that’s a good thing…