Dame Stella's Newest A Paperback Original?

Even though former MI-5 Director General Stella Rimington's second Liz Carlyle novel, Secret Asset, has been out in Great Britain and Canada for nearly a year, the US release date was pushed back several times. Now it's finally due to appear here... in paperback. Sadly it's bypassed the hardcover market altogether for some reason, even though her fantastic debut novel, At Risk, got a hardcover publication from Knopf. Amazon lists the mass market book at $12.16, which seemse awfully high for a paperback, but judging from the dimensions they give it will be one of those tall, skinny paperbacks (somewhere between a mass market and a trade in size) that are basically just a justification for the publisher to charge a little extra. Secret Asset comes out in America on May 29.

Meanwhile, according to an Amazon.co.uk listing, the third Liz Carlyle novel, Illegal Action, is due in Britain (in hardcover) on August 2. It concerns the timely topic of post-Cold War Russian espionage in London, and an attempt to silence a vocal Putin critic.