Hound

Publishers Weekly and Library Journal Fall Announcement ads Boston area pre-publication bookseller dinners. Galleys and author signing at BEA/BookExpo NY. Galleys and author signing at NEIBA Trade Show. Advance Access galley mailing Pitch to mystery features and reviewers, bloggers, specialty bookshops and magazines. Massachusetts-based media campaign. Boston area readings, then expanding to New England. Baker & Taylor Independent Press Quarterly New England libraries marketing Mystery Bookshops Top Independent Accounts Mailing List Advertising in mystery, trade, and literary magazines. ALA Midwinter 2010 display ALA Midsummer 2010 display. Author's website: http://vincentmccaffrey.com

A book dealer becomes a sleuth in this slow-building mystery about Boston, books, and murder."Death was, after all, the way Henry made his living." A bookhound, Henry Sullivan buys and sells books he finds at estate auctions and library sales around Boston and often from the relatives of the recently deceased. He's in his late thirties, single, and comfortably set in his ways. But when a woman from his past, Morgan Johnson, calls to ask him to look at her late husband's books, he is drawn into the dark machinations of a family whose mixed loyalties and secret history will have fatal results. Hound, the first novel featuring Henry Sullivan, is the debut work of a longtime Boston bookseller. It is a paean to books, bookselling, and the transformative power of the printed word. Even as it evolves into a gripping murder mystery, it is also a reminder that there are still quiet corners of the world where the rhythms of life are calmer, where there's still time for reading, time for getting out for a beer with friends, time to investigate the odd details of lives lived on the edges of the book world. As the true story unfolds, its mysteries are also of the everyday sort: love found and love lost, life given and life taken away. At the center is Henry himself, with his troubled relationships and his love of old books. There's his landlady Mrs. Prowder whose death unsettles Henry's life and begins the sequence of events that overturns it. There's the secret room his friend Albert discovers while doing "refuse removal," a room that reveals the story of a woman who lived and loved a century ago. And throughout the novel are those of us whose lives revolve around books: the readers, writers, bookstore people, and agents-as well as Henry, the bookhound, always searching for the great find, but usually just getting by, happy enough to be in the pursuit. "McCaffrey, the owner of Boston's legendary Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, succeeds in conveying his love of books in his intriguing debut." -Publishers Weekly "Hound is billed as a mystery, and it's a good one, but its fuse is long and its pace befitting an old bookshop. That's a good thing....