IP Picks🔎: A 'Psycho' Crypto-Bro Kidnapping
➕ A 'Sliding Doors' love affair and a sleuthing social-media star
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along.
I want to kick things off this week with a quick, five-star recommendation and a few updates on some previous picks. Why? Well, to quote one of our country’s greatest philosophers, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Sage words indeed, Ferris.
First up, the debut novel from friend of the Optionist, Gary Baum, comes out next month. In Pursuit of Beauty is a juicy, Coppertone-scented beach read about a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who’s trying to resurrect her reputation by covering up a long list of unhappy clients and hiring a ghostwriter to pen a sympathetic, self-serving memoir. Baum’s novel has already made it onto one summer reads list. And while we generally try to avoid any overt displays of favoritism here, I think there's a movie here. Rights are available and repped by Shane Salerno at Story Factory.
Now, onto the updates. You may recall that last summer I flagged Sarah Stewart Taylor’s Agony Hill. The author’s mystery debut is a 1960s-set procedural about a Boston cop who joins the Vermont State Police as a detective. I knew that a period rural mystery series was a heavy lift, but I was impressed by both Taylor’s vivid world-building and the relationship between her main character, Frank Warren, and his neighbor, the amateur detective Alice Bellows. Taylor put her ‘60s setting to great use, weaving debates about the Vietnam War into the story. The second book in the series, Hunter's Heart Ridge, is slated to hit shelves in August, so it seemed like a good time to circle back to her earlier title. The new book centers on the death of a former ambassador at an exclusive, private hunting club. Everything I liked about the first book is here again and the rights are still available (Kayla Grogan/Aevitas reps). I’ll repeat what I said the first time around because it still applies with the follow-up: I know period rural mystery isn't for everyone, but I really think there's something here. It's a nice combination of cozy drama and whodunit procedural.
Moving on…Last week, I called out Maggie Stiefvater's forthcoming adult debut The Listeners — an inspired-by-fact story about Axis diplomats being held at a posh West Virginia resort during WWII. I really dug the setup as well as the book’s light fantasy elements. The story centers on the hotel’s staff and not the detained German, Japanese and Italian envoys. Benyamin Cohen, a writer at The Forward, reached out and pointed me to a story he wrote about the real history that served as the book’s inspiration. I'm still partial to Stiefvater's book, but if its fantasy elements don’t float your boat, there's also a fact-based version that can be spun out of Cohen's story (which is also a fascinating read).
Finally, I want to return to one last Optionist pick from a few weeks back, Notes on Infinity. Just this week, the book’s author, Austin Taylor, had an op-ed in The Boston Globe about being a working class, farm-raised Maine girl who attended Harvard and didn't feel like she fit in there. Despite her ambivalence about the venerable institution, she wanted to defend it against Donald Trump's recent attacks. Of course, the novel and the op-ed are very different, but what remains constant is Taylor's singular voice. I liked it then and I like it now. If anything, it just reinforced what I responded to in Notes on Infinity in the first place.
On to this week’s picks! We’ve got a couple of procedurals, a domestic drama and an amazing true-crime story. The full lineup:
🔒 This Week: A Crazy, Real-Life Crypto Crime
🚪A Sliding Doors drama set over the course of a decade about two people who meet in a baby play group and hit it off. In one timeline, they have an affair; in the other, they resist
🏥 A thriller set in a psych ward about a woman trying to prove she didn’t murder her sister, with juicy roles for two actresses in their 20s or early 30s
👮🏻 An influencer and a cop team up to solve a murder in a great odd-couple procedural
₿ A wild and true crypto-crime story that’s instantly familiar, but unlike anything on screen lately
📚 Plus: A fresh look at some recent Optionist picks that are in the news this week
