I wouldn’t be doing my job

if I didn’t–what do they call it on TV–give a shout-out to my favorite Soho Crime writers. Now that I’ve dispensed with my two “canned” posts, I’m going to indulge in a little house promotion:

• Just to the right,  you’ll see that Sarah has written a nice little review about Chinatown Beat, the first in a new series by debut author Henry Chang. Chinatown Beat is a change for Soho Crime, not least because it’s grittier than anything we’ve published in awhile, but because it’s the first Soho Crime novel to be set in the U.S. We’re celebrating Henry’s first book with a launch at Partners & Crime on Oct. 11 at 7 p.m. Join us–to borrow a phrase from Veronica Mars–for some “dim sum and dem sum.”
• I maybe once joked to Cara Black that the best thing she could do to promote her wonderful Aimée Leduc series is to kill or be killed in Paris, but I was kidding. KIDDING! Her seventh title, Murder on the Isle Saint-Louis, is coming out in March 2007. In addition to the numerous events Cara always does in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, I’m also proposing to send her out into the Midwest.
• I am beyond thrilled to announce that Soho will be publishing a new book, The Secret Hangman, from Peter Lovesey in June 2007. I am such a huge fan of Lovesey’s that upon starting work at Soho, I read his entire Soho backlist, which is considerable, in two weeks. I recently told my sales force that I just want to snuggle with him. Mr. Lovesey, if you’re reading this, I have the utmost respect for your work, and we need to talk about bringing you to New York in June for Book Expo. By the way, Hi, I’m Kathy. I’m your publicist.
• We’re introducing another new series in February 2007 by Time magazine’s former Jerusalem bureau chief, Matt Beynon Rees. The first in the series is called The Collaborator of Bethlehem, and features a detective so cantankerous, he makes Colin Cotterill’s Dr. Siri look like a well-fed pussycat. The advance blurbs are piling up, and David Baldacci wrote of The Collaborator of Bethlehem, “Matt Beynon Rees has taken a complex world of culture clash and suspicion and placed upon it humanity.”

That may be all the touting I have for the moment. This September we’re publishing a new mystery, though not in the Soho Crime series, by James R. Benn called Billy Boyle that Lee Child called “an instant classic.” This is also the first in a new series, and he’ll be reading at Partners & Crime on September 14 at 7 p.m. I hope you’ll join us then.

If you’re interested in Soho Crime, please sign up to receive our monthly crime newsletter on our website (the Fall catalog should be going up soon). And if you ever find yourself struggling to promote your own work, ask yourself, “What would James Patterson do?” You know, without the half-million dollar marketing budget, TV commercials and subway ads.