IP Picks🔎: A Death-Defying Socialite Spy and a Cat-and-Mouse Chase Across Europe
âž• a backlist coming-of-age novel about three female cadets at West Point
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along. And to the new subscribers who joined this week: Welcome aboard.
As longtime readers know, we feature many backlist titles — books at least a couple of years old — alongside frontlist titles, which the book industry calls just-published books. We have a good one today! As the strike continues, it looks like many of the options on published materials are going to expire instead of being extended or re-upped for another term. It means a lot of good material might return to the market in the near future. We’ll be keeping an eye out for this stuff over the summer to bring you the best second-chance stuff we see. Stay tuned for an all-backlist special edition in July.
All this underscores that the unsettled, difficult times brought on by the strike can also bring opportunities. Looking back on this time, don’t be surprised if we find many people used these days to identify their next great project, and hitting the ground running the minute the strike ends.
On to this week’s picks, which include a period spy thriller, a cat-and-mouse chase across Europe and an insane true-crime story about a rapist gaslighting his victim. The full rundown:
A real-life historical thriller about a socialite-turned-secret agent who spied on the Russians and Germans for the United States after WWI.
A period cat-and-mouse thriller set in 1960s Europe where a small-time enforcer trails a woman who stole money from his mob bosses across the continent and in the process becoming romantically entangled with her.
A suburban thriller about two neighbors in London whose conflict over a Black Lives Matter lawn sign spirals out of control and becomes increasingly violent, to the point where it ends up in a trial for attempted murder.
A West Point-set drama about three female friends navigating life at the ultra-masculine Academy.
A true-crime thriller about a woman whose rapist managed to become her lawyer (unbeknownst to her) and how he used that position to stop the prosecution (of course), and also to harass and gaslight her.
