Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Secret Agent, Book Agent, All the Same

Chris Pavone's Thriller 'The Accident,' Set in Book World

Thriller writers have a knack for picking settings that are inherently suspenseful. A sinking yacht. The homicide unit of a police department. A secret lair stocked with covert C.I.A. operatives.
Chris Pavone, the author of the forthcoming novel "The Accident," went in a different, somewhat dubious direction: He chose the book business.

In "The Accident," which will be released on Tuesday by Crown Publishers, Mr. Pavone has fashioned a meticulously plotted thriller following a New York literary agent, Isabel Reed, who is slipped a manuscript with damning revelations about a real-life media mogul. After receiving the manuscript, Ms. Reed tries to flee her agency and the unknown villains who are following her.

"Any setting can be a good setting for a novel," Mr. Pavone said, sitting on a plush, cocoa-colored sofa in his Greenwich Village living room, shrugging off the suggestion that the industry is too cerebral, too dominated by meetings, too absorbed by reading manuscripts and filling out profit-and-loss reports to make riveting fiction.

Chris Pavone Credit Chester Higgins Jr.-The New York Times 

Mr. Pavone (pronounced puh-VOH-nee), who is 45, is not the typical suspense writer who speedily produces a book or two each year. But he does bring an unusual résumé to the task of making the publishing industry seem thrilling: He spent decades working as an editor, primarily at Clarkson Potter, an illustrated-book publisher, where he worked on nonfiction titles about interior design, dogs, cocktails and food, among other things. His first novel, "The Expats," was published in 2012 and sold nearly 200,000 copies, winning critical raves and an Edgar Award.

He is also half of a formidable publishing power couple. His wife, Madeline McIntosh, is the president and chief operating officer at Penguin Random House and one of the industry's most influential executives, often mentioned as a potential successor someday to Markus Dohle, the company's chief executive.
It was Ms. McIntosh's ascending career that indirectly led Mr. Pavone to start writing fiction in the first place. In 2008, she took a high-level job at Amazon that required the couple and their twin sons, 4 years old at the time, to move to Luxembourg, where Amazon has corporate offices.
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