Deals ‘n more

Yesterday’s Publishers Marketplace deal roundup had a curious entry:

Kimberly Scott’s first novel, UNDERTOW, a legal thriller set in Boston,

and the first in a series, originally published in Australia by Pan

Macmillan under the pseudonym Sydney Bauer, to Carole Baron at Madison

Park Press (for an exclusive six-month window) and to Natalee

Rosenstein at Berkley, by Harvey Klinger at Harvey Klinger (NA).

Madison Park Press is the original publishing arm of Bookspan, which has been doing more of its own books of late (they published James Grippando’s LYING WITH STRANGERS a full year before HarperCollins is set to this June, and finished up Paullina Simons’ Russian historical trilogy when no American publisher would touch it.) But being curious about the whole pseudonym thing, it turns out that Sydney Bauer has quite the website on offer. The next book, GOSPEL, will be out in Australia in 2007, with ALIBI to follow in 2008. She’s also a big Jack Reacher fan.

Meanwhile, here’s another series that is bound to attract many crime fiction fans:

Brian Thompson’s untitled Bella Wallis Mysteries, set in fin de siecle

nineteenth-century London, starring a writer of sensationalist fiction

whose search for plots for her own novels leads her to become embroiled

in real mysteries, to Toby Mundy and Louisa Joyner at Atlantic Books,

in a very nice deal, in a two-book deal, by David Miller at Rogers,

Coleridge & White (World).

And I am totally sold on this one:

John Ford’s debut THE MORGUE AND ME featuring an eighteen-year-old who takes a unusual summer job — at the local morgue — and uncovers the truth behind a violent death that the Medical Examiner has ruled, quite suspiciously, to be a case of suicide, to Catherine Frank at Viking Penguin, by Sara Crowe at Harvey Klinger (NA).

Although having once interned at the local morgue – if you want to call the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner that – it’s not really *that* unusual…