Inkshares launches UK imprint with two new crime novels

US publisher Inkshares is launching its UK imprint this summer with two new crime novels by Fulton Ross and Christopher Huang. 

Founded in 2014, Inkshares uses a community analytics model – in which readers provide feedback on incomplete manuscripts – to source literary début novels for publication. Over the past 10 years, the independent publisher said it has had single title sales of more than 100,000 units and sold to the major houses for translation in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Brazil.

Later this year, its first completed adaptation will stream on Apple TV. "Mrs American Pie", based on the 2018 novel by Juliet McDaniel, stars Laura Dern, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Bibb, Allison Janney, Ricky Martin, Josh Lucas and Carol Burnett.  

Adam Gomolin, co-founder and c.e.o. of Inkshares, said of the new imprint: “Inkshares has always had both a head and a heart. The head is that we can use community and data to better understand which manuscripts will resonate. We may all read the same words, but we don’t feel the same thing. The heart of Inkshares is that in the age of mega-publishers pushing out the mega-brands, we could build a house out of début novels from talented unknowns. We’ve heard our method called everything from romantic to naive to imbecilic, but everyone at Inkshares has fought to prove that idea reality in the US. We are now thrilled to be one of the many publishers fighting to do the same in the UK. The mercury of our industry is the vitality of the début novel, not Spare.” 

The first title to launch as part of Inkshares’ UK imprint is The Unforgiven Dead by Fulton Ross. It comes as part of a new series of Scottish crime novels and will publish on 8th June 2023. 

The synopsis reads: “Set in the Scottish West Highlands, the thriller follows constable Angus MacNeil, gifted and cursed with second sight – da-shealladh in Gaelic lore. When the daughter of an American billionaire is found ritualistically murdered on a beach, Angus must embrace his gift or watch more murders unfold. The Unforgiven Dead takes the familiar in tartan noir – a tortured detective, a brooding landscape – and drops it into a loch of seers and spirits.”

Ross said: “The Unforgiven Dead was born in the collision of my love for tartan noir with the Highland folktales of my childhood. I wanted to use the crime novel to explore how 300 years of British government efforts to tame the wild Highlands decimated Gaelic culture. These folktales are valuable, not just as nice stories but as cultural archives and tantalising glimpses into the beliefs of the ancient Gaels before Christianity arrived and swept aside the old ways.

"Of course, British and particularly Scottish crime writing is in rude health at the moment. But I’m thrilled to make my own contribution in this way, and I’m thrilled that there is a house in Inkshares crazy enough to think they can still build a list out of people like me who nobody has heard of before.” 

The second title to launch as part of the UK imprint is Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang, to be published on 15th June. It is a standalone novel set in 1921 focused on the adopted, biracial children of Sir Lawrence Linwood. The synopsis reads: “Returning home for his funeral they discover that their father’s will anticipated his murder and awards his estate to the heir who finds his killer. The key, however, may lie in the mysterious circumstances of their own origins.”

Gomolin acquired world rights for both titles via a manuscript competition on the publisher’s website. He said of the launches: “We talk a lot at Inkshares about specificity of experience, about wanting to deliver readers something that exists within known genres but that also pushes outside the norm, and we’re thrilled to enter the UK market with two novels that so brilliantly achieve this. 

“Fulton pays homage to some of the best tartan noir of the last half-century. But he also infuses his characters and setting with a rich element of Gaelic mythology and a grounded supernaturalism. As a dram, it’s diabolically familiar and foreign in the same sip. As with his first novel, Christopher constructs a mystery that is in equal parts devious, diverse and disturbing. He’s not content to just solve a whodunnit. And he’s the only writer I know who could find a way to weave the distant reaches of the Empire into interwar Yorkshire so seamlessly. It’s an honour to have our colophon on these spines. This is what great fiction looks like. This is what should be on shelves.”