Tommy Dean

My main genres of interest are crime, mystery, thriller, and suspense. I’m very interested in finding books that combine all of these genres to create fresh hybrid structures.

I’d love to find more mysteries and thrillers with strong female main characters who act with agency, who ask for forgiveness later, and who want to tear down the systems around them.

I need thrillers to start with a burning fire of a plot, to light the match, and see how fast the main character can run before stopping to fight back. So many “thrillers” I see are more suspense or slow-burning mysteries rather than plots that get my heart racing. Put your characters in danger, escalate that danger, and make them vulnerable to death or injury before they learn how to save themselves.

I’d love to find Book Club Fiction that marries upmarket writing with deep characters, a sense of mystery, and has thought-provoking themes. Readers today want to be entertained with accessible writing, but they also want characters who yearn and make the best kind of mistakes that invoke questions about how we live our own lives.

I love stories fueled by gossip and lies that hold families together and tear them apart. I love it when past crimes bubble to the surface. I love stories set in small towns, rural locations, and the Midwest. Stories of blue-collar workers, and the generations that eschew this work to go to college, to live in a city, to forget where they came from, only to be yanked back to the provincial settings of their youth.

If you’re pitching literary fiction, I want deep emotional resonance, with characters who come to life through their actions and responses to the world around them. I’m searching for stories that investigate the mysteries of being human; the sorrow and the joy of connecting to the diverse population. I want your best sentences and your sharpest language, with specific and unique characters I can imagine coming to life.

I’m looking for true crime in the vein of Murderland or Killers of the Flower Moon. I want non-fiction that reads with the tension and pace of fiction. I want to feel like I’m on the stage of the story with the characters, to feel like I’m also living this moment in time. Think scene, conflict, antagonists, and a main character who, though they might be unlikable, is deeply interesting!