August Paperback Spotlight
I've encountered many authors over the years, but I'm always delighted when their works do well and they also happen to be the kind of people I'd like to spend time chatting with regardless of their literary skills. Three fascinating, and very different, authors - Chelsea Cain, Charles Finch and Vikas Swarup - have books coming out this summer in paperback.
I remember first encountering Chelsea Cain a couple of years ago at a meet-the-author party that Minotaur threw for her in New York a few months before the publication of Heartsick, the thriller that turned the serial-killer genre on its head. Glamorous and funny, with her jungle red-lipstick smile and huge friendly eyes, Cain conveyed the impression of someone absolutely delighted to be on the cusp of success (always an elusive thing) and someone you just knew would wear that success well.
Well, success came, with Heartsick landing on bestseller lists and stirring up the mystery world for its depiction not only of a glamorous female serial killer (Cain couldn't help herself but write an interesting and offbeat murderess) but of the cop whom she toyed with, and who in turn, became obsessed with her.
Heartsick was the first in a trilogy, followed by Sweetheart and Evil at Heart, all of them bestsellers, all of them well-received and all of them showing Cain's knack for combining creepy obsession with humor, passion with intellectual puzzles, and storylines that were surprising. For those who've somehow missed Heartsick and its first follow-up, they're back in stores in new paperback editions, with the third book, Evil at Heart, coming in September.
 I first encountered Charles Finch when I conducted a video interview with him for The Wall Street Journal, tied to the publication of his second novel,
The September Society. Finch had the seriousness of a grad student who was up on his subject but he also had a little bit of the unease of someone awed at first by the whole modern publishing process. I spoke with him before he headed off to England to continue his studies of an author who published in an earlier age - the Elizabethan era - in particular Herbert Spenser and "The Faerie Queen." How's that for a modern-day crime-writer's background?
As it turns out, Finch's Victorian thrillers, featuring gentleman sleuth
Charles Lenox, display not only his literary depths, but his appreciation for that literary tool too often overlooked: splendid plots. In August, Minotaur is publishing a new paperback edition of Finch's third Charles Lenox novel,
The Fleet Street Murders. Here, Lenox investigates two Christmas murders involving journalists. Finch manages to place us in Victorian England and surprise us with new insights into newspapers of the age.
 I first met Vikas Swarup through Slumdog Millionaire, the sensational adaptation of his bestselling novel Q&A. A follow-up novel, Six Suspects
, demonstrates Swarup's satirical skills in describing Bollywood stars, politicians and self-righteous (and foolish) American businessmen. The novel is also a kind of riff on the closed-door settings of certain Agatha Christie novels and the game of Clue. Here, after an industrialist is shot to death at a party to celebrate his acquittal for murder, the police find that out of 300 guests, six are armed. Then the process of elimination begins. A success in hardcover, the paperback is available now, and lovers of mysteries can see how an Indian novelist can have fun with the form and find new ways to keep readers on their toes.
[back to top] |
