SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN, the long-awaited second book from Dwayne Alexander Smith, is a dual POV rom-com suspense.
SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN
by Dwayne Alexander Smith & Pamela Samuels Young
Atria, July 2024
(via The Friedrich Agency)
Jackson Jones and Mackenzie Cunningham are both private investigators operating out of Los Angeles. While Jackson specializes in high-end clientele whose swagger matches his own, Mackenzie is scrappy, defensive, and easily underestimated. Despite many years in the same industry, they first meet when they are both hired to find the same missing woman. Unaware that they’ve entered a competition, they keep bumping heads until it’s clear that something suspicious is afoot. Equally attracted to and frustrated by one another, they soon realize that the client who hired them might actually be setting them up! Just as they shift from rivals to partners, Jackson and Mackenzie find themselves fighting for their lives, a string of bodies piling up around them. With no one to trust but each other, they race to solve the case before they can be forced to pay the price for their involvement.
Dwayne Alexander Smith is the author of Forty Acres, which was previously in development as a Feature Film at Netflix, with Luke Cage’s Cheo Hodari Coker attached to write, and Jay-Z attached to produce. Dwayne is also under contract with Audible to write an eight-episode original radio play for Kevin Hart and Charlamagne Tha God’s imprint. When Dwayne received an NAACP Image Award in 2014 for his debut novel, he happened to meet a fellow author named Pamela Samuels Young, whose novel Anybody’s Daughter won an award that same year.
Pamela Samuels Young has been widely published in both commercial suspense and erotica, and many of her characters have legal backgrounds that mirror Pamela’s own. Netflix is also developing Pamela’s work, having optioned the first two books in her Vernette Henderson series, which follows a Black female attorney from Compton, working in a corporate firm. Felicia D. Henderson is attached as Executive Producer (Empire, Everybody Hates Chris, Sister Sister).
It’s 1954 on far-flung Verona Island, a tropical paradise with a fragile economy and a rising crime rate. Prostitution is legal and Lila Gulliver is proud of her business, a high-end brothel where her clients are guaranteed privacy and discretion. When Carità Bercy, a young, destitute, and beautiful blind woman arrives at her door seeking employment, Lila decides to give her a chance. 
The bloody finale of Dave Gurney’s previous case has left him and his wife Madeleine shell-shocked and determined to return to normality. But when an old friend comes calling for Gurney’s insight on a cold case, it’s Madeleine who pushes him to lend his thoughts. Try as he might, Gurney can’t resist getting drawn into the murder case—this one, involving a debauched former tennis star and a beheaded corpse. His initial efforts incite fury from both sides of the law: the criminal forces behind it, and the law enforcement personnel who stand to lose everything if Gurney succeeds in uncovering the truth. For the first time in his life, Gurney finds himself on the run but even the risk of losing his marriage, his reputation and his best friend can’t stop his relentless quest for answers. Gurney will learn that justice comes at a great cost.
Icing her hands. Grieving her boyfriend. Trying not to get fired. Each day feels the same for Joan Johnston. Her life gets a boost of excitement when a new massage client—Carmen Bronze, a high-maintenance romance novelist—corners Joan into becoming her research assistant for her next bestseller.
Hannie didn’t train to be a soldier — her youthful dream was to finish law school in Amsterdam and join the League of Nations. But Hannie’s volunteer work with the Red Cross puts her on the radar of key resistance recruiters, who spot her fearlessness and outrage, recognizing her for the heroine she’ll someday become. As the simmering menace of Nazi-occupied Holland reaches a boiling point, Hannie becomes ever more daring, assassinating powerful Nazis point blank, blowing up munitions factories, constantly improvising with last-minute Resistance orders. She also falls deeply in love at a tremendous cost. But throughout it all, Hannie’s greatest weapon is her determination not to become a monster herself: