Krystyna Green, Publishing Director at Constable (Little, Brown) has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights for three titles in Charlie Bird’s Mindful Murders series.
The series features the classic combination of a chalk-and-cheese crime-fighting duo: the mindful, meditating cop, Vincent Caine and his partner, DI Shanti Joyce, seconded to the West Country from her natural habitat of inner London. The first title in the series, A Boy Named Art, takes them to the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Somerset where the body of a celebrated performance artist is discovered floating in a formaldehyde-filled tank.
Bird is a joint pseudonym for two established authors who write as a team: Laurence Anholt is one of the world’s most successful children’s author/illustrators published by numerous publishing houses including PRH; while Paddy Magrane is a crime author, journalist and qualified psychotherapist. They’ve said “the series grew out of many years of meditation, vegetarian Cornish pasties and living amidst the wild beauty of the West Country.”
Madeleine Milburn described the series as “Fargo meets Broadchurch – a suspenseful West Country police procedural with a heavy dose of leftfield humour and quirkiness. This is a series that will run and run.”
Green also expressed her excitement “I’m absolutely delighted to have been offered the opportunity of publishing this series; we’ve hit the ground running in terms of the authors’ fantastic writing credentials and cannot wait to introduce their joint venture to a wide-reaching audience.”
A Boy Named Art will be published in hardback by Constable in May 2019.
