Blackhurst thrills with two novels for Headline

Headline has bought two psychological thrillers by Jenny Blackhurst.

Senior commissioning editor Kate Stephenson acquired UK and commonwealth rights excluding Canada from Laetitia Rutherford at Watson, Little.

Headline will publish the first book on the new contract, The Night She Died, in paperback, e-book and audio formats in autumn 2018. The novel opens with “beautiful and complicated Evie White” leaping off a cliff to her death on her wedding night with her best friend and her husband left to find out why.  A “twisted trail of clues” suggests they never knew the real Evie at all.

Stephenson said: “We are so thrilled to have agreed a new deal with Jenny; she is one of the most talented and committed authors I’ve had the pleasure of working with and we couldn’t be more proud to publish her at Headline.”

She added: “Jenny’s sales to date are phenomenal, as is the reader response to her particular brand of page-turning suspense, and we have no doubt that she is a rising star of the psychological thriller genre.”

Blackhurst has published three novels with Headline so far, in a partnership that began with How I Lost You (2014) which has sold 24,150 copies via Nielsen BookScan figures, and Before I Let You In, shifting 19,826. She is published in the US by Emily Bestler at Simon & Schuster and her books are translated into six languages.