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Pan Macmillan has acquired a standalone thriller from Lin Anderson, plus the 17th instalment of the author's forensic crime-fiction series featuring Rhona MacLeod.
Alex Saunders, commissioning editor, bought world rights to both titles from Jenny Brown at Jenny Brown Associates. The Party House will be published on 4th August 2022 and the MacLeod title will follow in 2023 to mark the 20th anniversary of the series.
The synopsis for The Party House reads: "Situated in a remote area of the Scottish Highlands, the village of Blackrig was shocked following the disappearance of 17-year-old Ailsa Cummings five years ago. While a recent pandemic has stirred up old tensions and cultivated an animosity in the small community towards outsiders. Unhappy that a nearby estate is to reopen its luxury ‘party house’ to tourists results in an angry mob causing damage to the property’s hot tub, only to unearth the buried body of the missing girl in its foundations. The discovery ignites old suspicions and fears among the villagers, especially the men, who’d known Ailsa at the time of her vanishing."
Saunders commented: "It gives me great pleasure to be signing up an exciting standalone psychological thriller from Lin Anderson. It’s been wonderful working with Lin on her long-running crime series featuring forensic scientist Rhona MacLeod in recent years and I can’t wait for new and existing readers to immerse themselves in The Party House. It’s something slightly different from Lin, but features all the qualities that readers love so much about the Rhona books: an atmospheric sense of place told through elegant prose, satisfying plotting that twists and turns, and characters whom you come to care a great deal about. Readers of The Hunting Party and The Sanatorium will love this new entry point into Lin’s writing."
Anderson said: "I’ve had the idea for the psychological thriller The Party House for a while, so I am delighted that this new deal with Pan Mac includes the novel along with book 17 in the long running Dr Rhona MacLeod series. I always wondered what it would feel like to be a suspect in a murder enquiry, instead of an investigator. How that might affect you, your family and your community, especially in a small highland village, which is harbouring its own secrets. Hence The Party House was born."