Variety recently announced that Amazon is developing an Alex Cross TV series based on James Patterson’s bestselling detective, with pick up from The Hollywood Reporter and more!
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Variety recently announced that Amazon is developing an Alex Cross TV series based on James Patterson’s bestselling detective, with pick up from The Hollywood Reporter and more!
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Based on the terrifying and tragic true story of Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who first told the world about the famine in the Soviet Union in 1933
THE USEFUL IDIOT
by John Sweeney
Silvertail Books, January 2020
Moscow, 1932. Gareth Jones, a young Welsh reporter, arrives in the Soviet Union excited to see for himself how Josef Stalin is forging a new civilisation. He meets American and British journalists who acclaim Stalin’s great experiment—but when Jones witnesses people starving to death in Ukraine, his belief in the Soviet revolution is shattered. He must decide whether to report the truth or become just another useful idiot, saying only what the Communist secret police allow and smothering the evidence of his own eyes. In this special kind of hell, anyone could be an informer, and Jones knows his life will be at risk if he is even thought to be defying Stalin. And when the woman he loves falls under the suspicion of the secret police, everything Jones values is in danger. Can he reveal the terrible truth about the Ukrainian famine to the world, or will he be silenced forever?
THE USEFUL IDIOT is the secret history of the first great Soviet lie—wrapped up in an electrifying novel perfect for readers of Robert Harris, Ken Follett and Kate Atkinson. As Vladimir Putin rewrites the Nazi-Soviet pact and with the horrors of Chernobyl and the Cold War so recent, this thriller of fake news in 1932 is real storytelling of enormous significance.
John Sweeney is an award-winning journalist and a former long-serving BBC reporter. He is the author of ten books, including three novels: the 200,000-copy bestseller ELEPHANT MOON (Silvertail Books), another historical thriller based on true events, and two modern-day political thrillers, COLD and ROAD (Amazon Publishing). He also wrote an investigation into the Church of Scientology, THE CHURCH OF FEAR (Silvertail Books), and an account of his time spent undercover in North Korea, NORTH KOREA UNDERCOVER (Transworld).
Publication will coincide with the release on 14th February of Mr. Jones, a film telling the story of Gareth Jones by Polish director Agnieszka Holland, starring James Norton and Vanessa Kirby. It was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. You can watch the trailer at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88Rz0ye5c-4
An examination of human nature at our truest, and the inhuman lengths some take for success, some take for peace, and others, ultimately, take for justice.
BENEFACTION Book 1
by Katie Lattari
Sourcebooks, Spring 2021
Coral Dunn struggles with depression and suicidal tendencies. She inflicts self-harm to crack the tension within, but she also draws, paints, and writes what she’s feeling for release only as violent as her imagination. When she befriends a fellow artist at the Lupine Valley Arts Collective in northern Maine, she thinks she may have found true respite from her pain. But he has a use for her of his own, and it’s far too late, once he’s mined her deepest vulnerabilities, to escape his plan. Decades later, Audra Colfax is the star Painting MFA student at the Boston Institute for the Visual Arts. A gifted artist like Coral, she too is from the wilds of Maine. There, at her remote family home, she’s put the final touches on her thesis project, “Benefaction.” It’s a vivid collage of Coral’s works found scattered around the property and her own, enmeshed to tell a story of a dark past that ties the two women inextricably. It’s ready for her advisor, the esteemed Max Durant, to come up and review. He won’t know Audra obsessively engineered every last detail of his visit. Or that it had to be him from the start, advising her, so she could get to him by doing what he does best. She’d use what she’s inherited to lure him back to Maine. He has no idea she knows his worst secret, and that it’s the sole reason why he’s been invited.
What comes to light, chapter by spellbinding chapter, is that one grand, grotesque act of selfishness committed by Max as a young man, followed by years of manipulating women for art, has set into motion the machinery of his own fatal undoing. The man should pay for his crimes, and no one is more deserving of revenge than the women to whom he owes his career. Audra is well aware he’s a monster, but she doesn’t know everything that simmers beneath his surface. Spun in alternative points of view across an electric, twisty few days, BENEFACTION is a rallying call of feminist fury; a WHISPER NETWORK or BIG LITTLE LIES for artists; a GONE GIRL tale of atonement underscored by notes of MY DARK VANESSA, set in the woods during hunting season.
Katie Lattari holds a BA and an MA in English from the University of Maine and an MFA in Fiction Writing/Prose from the University of Notre Dame. In 2016 her debut novel AMERICAN VAUDVILLE was published by Mammoth Books, a small literary press; we see BENEFACTION as her commercial breakout.
Russian meddling, American fragmentation, and global politics collide in this action-packed, international thriller, first in a new series from New York Times bestselling author, Eric Van Lustbader
THE NEMESIS MANIFESTO: An Evan Ryder Novel
by Eric Van Lustbader
Forge Books, May 2020
In THE NEMESIS MANIFESTO, Eric Van Lustbader, « the master of the smart thriller » according to Nelson DeMille, delivers an epic and harrowing adventure of the predatory forces that are threatening the very fabric of democracy and kicks off a compelling new series with a singular new hero for our time. Evan Ryder is a lone wolf, a field agent for a black-ops arm of the Department of Defense, who has survived unspeakable tragedy and dedicated her life to protecting her country. When her fellow agents begin to be systematically eliminated, Evan must unravel the thread that ties them all together … and before her name comes up on the kill list. The list belongs to a mysterious cabal known only as Nemesis, a hostile entity hell-bent on tearing the US apart. As Evan tracks them from Washington D.C. to the Caucasus Mountains, from Austria to a fortress in Germany where her own demons reside, she unearths a network of conspirators far more complex than anyone could have imagined. Can Evan uproot them before Nemesis forces bring democracy to its knees?
Eric Van Lustbader the author of many New York Times bestselling thrillers, including The Testament, First Daughter, Last Snow, and Blood Trust. Lustbader was chosen by Robert Ludlum’s estate to continue the Jason Bourne series. He and his wife live on the South Fork of Long Island.
A debut YA thriller about how far teenagers are willing to go to maintain high academic standards
THE IVIES
by Alexa Donne
Crown/PRH, Summer 2021
At Claflin Academy, college admissions are killer… Even at a famed boarding school, only a select few are accepted into each Ivy League college. Olivia, Avery, Emma, Sierra, and Margot are the five girls at Claflin Academy destined to attend the top Ivy Leagues. Bound together by more than just perfect test scores, they’ve also assured their entry into the Ivy of their choice by destroying anyone who gets in their way. But what’s a little backstabbing among friends?
Harvard has always been Avery’s chosen university, but that doesn’t stop Emma from secretly applying. When she gets in, a showdown seems inevitable. So when Emma turns up dead, Olivia immediately suspects Avery is behind the murder. But the cops have their sights set on Olivia — the scholarship kid, the only Ivy who isn’t rich or powerful. To prove her innocence, Olivia will need to figure out who killed Emma before it’s too late. Because Olivia’s got a secret too: she also got into Harvard. And if Avery’s the killer, then Olivia’s next…
Alexa Donne is the author of BRIGHTLY BURNING and its forthcoming sequel, THE STARS WE STEAL (HMH Teen/Feb 2020). She lives in Los Angeles, where she wears many hats, including fan convention organizing, teen mentoring, college admissions essay consulting, YouTube-ing and podcast.