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Roundfire Books signs debut thriller from Salman Shaheen
Roundfire Books, fiction imprint of Collective Ink owned by Watkins Media, has signed the debut thriller from politician Salman Shaheen. Vicky Hartley, deputy managing director at Watkins Media, acquired the world rights to Freebourne directly from the author.
The book follows unemployed MindTech entrepreneur Dr Harry Coulson, who after learning of his wife’s affair with his best friend and business partner, gets divorced and arrives in the English town of Freebourne, looking to start a new life.
The synopsis continues: "But any hopes of quietly picking up the pieces of his broken world are shattered when he steps off the train to discover the body of a young woman lying in the snow. It’s almost as if she’d been left there for him to find.
"Harry does everything he can to help. But as a stranger arriving on the night Freebourne witnesses its first murder in over a century, he not only becomes a suspect in the woman’s killing but finds himself caught in a deadly game between science, faith and free will – in a secret far darker and more terrifying than anything he could have imagined."
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Hartley said: "The whole team were really excited when Freebourne landed on our desks. As a thriller, it’s absolutely gripping and a page-turner from the very beginning, staying with you long after the final, mind-blowing revelation. Unlike many thrillers, it also makes you think, asking big political and philosophical questions, and it’s beautifully written, never willing to compromise on its literary style or its rich characters and setting, despite the pace of its plot.
“Freebourne starts out as a small-town murder mystery, but don’t let that fool you – it soon becomes something completely original and it took us totally by surprise. I won’t give the ending away, but I’m sure readers will be talking about it."
Shaheen, who is also a Labour councillor for Hounslow in west London, said: "I’m delighted to be working with the fantastic team at Roundfire Books to bring out my debut novel Freebourne. I’ve always been drawn to dark, speculative stories that shock you sufficiently to question the pace of technology we take for granted and what it means for the human condition. Anything from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror.
"But one piece of advice I received early on, from my late friend and mentor Jill Paton Walsh CBE: ‘If you want to try to say something meaningful about the world, you should smuggle it in a murder mystery.’ And thus Freebourne was born as a somewhat genre-defying thriller and I couldn’t be happier that it has found a home with Roundfire Books."
