Category Archives: Fiction

DCL Agency

FOR IMMEDIATE  RELEASE:

Contact: Betsy Lerner 212-645-7606

Betsy@dclagency.com

VIKING’S SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER THE ORPHANMASTER IS OPTIONED.

Nationally recognized independent bookseller Mitchell Kaplan and award winning Hollywood producer Paula Mazur (The Mazur/Kaplan Company) are adding Viking’s major summer release, the debut thriller THE ORPHANMASTER by Jean Zimmerman, to their feature slate of bestselling titles including The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society  and Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.

Represented by Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency in association with Creative Artists Agency, Zimmerman’s historical thriller, set in 1663 in the hardscrabble Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (present day lower Manhattan), pairs a beguiling Dutch she-merchant with a dashing British spy who together hunt down a demonic serial killer preying on the colony’s orphans.

The Orphanmaster will be published on June 19, 2012  by Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

###

The Orphanmaster is getting a starred review in Booklist, published by the American Library Association. Among the praiseworthy epithets: “compulsively readable”!

“In 1663, New Amsterdam colonists are plagued by a malevolent, cannibalistic spirit known as the witika (a version of the Algonquin wendigo); by difficult relations with the local Lenape tribes; and by the despotic cruelty of Director General “Peg Leg” Stuyvesant. Suspicions run rife as orphan children disappear, and when the orphanmaster, Aet Visser, comes under suspicion, his trader friend, Blandine van Couvering, reluctantly joins the handsome English spy, Edward Drummond, in finding the truth. Their mutual attraction is hardly surprising, but the grisly clues they uncover, and the depravity they expose, will shock even veteran readers of historical thrillers. A fascinating perspective on colonial politics and human behavior, this compulsively readable, heartbreaking and grisly mystery set in a wild, colonial America will appeal to fans of Robert McCammon’s fast-paced and tautly suspenseful Mister Slaughter (2010) and Eliot Pattison’s Bone Rattler (2007).”

— Jen Baker

What could be nicer than having the opportunity to meet the booksellers of your home town (and thereabouts). Today I talked with representatives of Book Culture, an excellent store on the upper west side of Manhattan, around the corner from where I went to college and grad school and my daughter now goes to college. I also met people from Posman Books, at whose Grand Central Station location I have browsed away many a delightful hour and came away with many too many books while waiting for my train. Also, the owners of the Village Bookstore in Pleasantville, just a few miles down the road from my home in Ossining, where I often go for book-and-movie dates with my husband (across the street is that fantastic independent film house, the Jacob Burns Center).

Village Bookstore, thoroughly independent

The Orphanmaster will not be published until June, but these meet and greets are to answer booksellers’ questions about the novel, to tell them a bit about how it evolved and why it’s an exciting project (hopefully they will agree!). My publisher, Viking, has gone to all kinds of trouble to put these sessions together on the west coast and now the east, much to its credit. And I get to meet the people behind the kinds of bookstores I like best.

Bookpage.com called The Orphanmaster one of the “most buzzed-about debuts of 2012,” grouping it with “several promising first novels vying for a spot in your beach bag this summer.”

Hurray for The Orphanmaster‘s first appearance in the press! (That I know of, anyway.)

I’m posting some fun essays on the Orphanmaster page on this site later today, about  fashion and food and the role of nature in the lives of Blandine and Drummond and the other characters. So look for these short articles. Lots of beautiful illustrations, mainly of the Golden Age in Holland, to reflect the rich-to-overflowing world the New Amsterdam colonists came out of.

I had the pleasure of meeting the lovely French publisher for The Orphanmaster. I am trying to imagine what French readers will think of the of-Dutch/French-extraction but oh-so-American Blandine Van Couvering in all her spunky determination. I hope that the book will travel well over the Atlantic, bringing a whiff of the Witika with it.

In 1663, Cafe Just In