Harvill Secker bags ‘biting’ thriller by Baker

Harvill Secker has signed a “biting” thriller by Chandler Baker, author of the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick Whisper Network (Sphere) among other novels.

Katie Ellis-Brown, deputy publishing director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights including e-book and audiobook to Cutting Teeth from Peggy Boulos Smith, on behalf of Dan Lazar at Writers House. The e-book will publish in July 2023, with the hardback and trade paperback to follow in August 2023.

Cutting Teeth follows three mothers, Darby, Mary Beth and Rhea, who are on personal quests to reclaim aspects of their identities subsumed by motherhood – their careers, their sex lives, their bodies. Their children, though, disrupt these plans when an unsettling medical condition begins to go around the Little Academy preschool: the kids are craving blood.

Then a young teacher is found murdered and the only witnesses are 10 adorable four-year-olds. But as the police draw closer to the truth, it soon becomes clear that the children are not just witnesses, they’re suspects… and so are their mothers.

Ellis-Brown said: “This was the first book I read upon my return from parental leave, and it’s the best unofficial guide to parenting I could have asked for. Chandler has taken familiar character tropes and transformed them into real people – people we recognise, can relate to and who reflect the very best and the very worst of ourselves.

“This is so much more than a murder mystery; it’s an ode to mothers and fathers, to our bodies and our relationship with them, to community and friendship and, of course, to our children… and how, though we adore them, they really can bleed us dry.”