For rights and subrights, please contact Leah Pierre at the Ladderbird Agency
MURDER GRANNIES
Four elderly women trying to save their neighborhood from gentrification accidentally become professional killers.
The bullies always win. Retired art teacher Bethany Walpinski’s only looking to survive: keep her head down, enjoy her true crime shows, and give thanks for the three women whose friendship is tighter than date-night shapewear. She can’t save her beloved neighborhood of fifty years from dying, or the community center at the heart of it from closing its doors forever. There’s not enough fight in any one person to stop all the badness in the world. Until fate puts a knife in Bethany’s hand, and her granddaughter’s abusive ex-husband lies dead at her feet.
For four women obsessed with CSI, disposing of the body is the easy part. The half million dollars they find in his pickup truck? Well, that’s more complicated. And when the wrong people come looking for the money, Bethany uncovers a conspiracy rooted deep in the city’s pockets, where greed and gentrification put the life of a whole neighborhood up for sale. Bullies run the world. But now Bethany’s fighting back, one body at a time.
PUNCH DRUNK MAGIC
Research psychologist Mel Goodman was raised by witches, but left her small Michigan hometown to build a life based on science, reason, and predictability. When the machinations of her soon-to-be ex-husband bring everything crashing down, Mel takes refuge in the one place she’d hoped to escape: her mother’s Pagan shop. All she wants is a little peace and quiet while she decides what to do next. But the universe has other plans.
A handsome detective shows up on her doorstep with news of a murdered local witch. Lieutenant Devin Westfield needs Mel’s help to navigate the stubbornly secretive Pagan community she grew up in. But the clock is ticking; there are clues that suggest this victim might only be the first.
As Mel steps back into the world she left behind, her magic begins to flourish, threatening the rational worldview she worked so hard to cultivate. She struggles to control her empathy and the psychic visions in her scrying bowl. Meanwhile, the murderer is searching for another victim, and her easy camaraderie with Devin is growing into something much more complicated. With her life and her community in danger, Mel must accept her magic to find the killer. To find love, though, she must accept herself.
TIMBER
A proposed 5 book series centered around a reality TV docudrama about the Oregon Logging industry, putting a queer lens on relationships, gender expectations, workplace culture, and navigating personal identity in the public spotlight. Season One is currently on submission with potential as a standalone romance. Contact Leah Pierre at Ladderbird Lit for full series proposal.
Book 1:
Aspiring producer and secret idealist Anna MacKenzie needs this reality docudrama on Oregon logging to launch her career. She expected the studio executives and her ambitious ex to fight her dream of making sympathetic, positive television. She wasn’t expecting the biggest fight to come from a giant, grumpy, backwoods lumberjerk determined to sabotage her show.
Henry West is not about to let some Hollywood slimeball come in with pretty promises and throw the private lives of everyone he cares about into the national spotlight for public ridicule. Not even for the cash infusion his family’s logging business desperately needs. Not even when said slimeball comes with eyes like the shifting shadows on mossy stone, and a mind as sharp and devious as his own.
In their war of contract loopholes and Disney princess theme songs, the line between fighting and flirting quickly blurs. But a cease fire proves even more dangerous, as glimpses of each other’s dreams and vulnerabilities leaves them wanting more. Giving in to the pull of attraction would risk her career, his family’s reputation, and both their hearts.
HOW TO KISS A NEMESIS
It’s about time enemies-to-lovers went to therapy
Gracie Wilkins is a fully functional, grown adult. That’s what she’s hoping to prove after a lifetime of disasters, failed relationships, and messy mistakes. Now she’s well on her way to chief operating officer of the fastest growing matchmaker app on the market and almost never gets into screaming matches with her workplace nemesis, the always Mx. Perfect coding team-leader, Emery Overing.
Until the couple who cofounded the app get caught in a screaming match. The truth, that the iconic faces of true love and happy ever after are teetering on the edge of divorce, threatens the company’s public launch and the payoff of all Gracie’s hard work. She’ll do anything to ensure the company succeeds and her with it, even step in when one of the cofounders bails on the couples counseling ordered by the board of directors. Gracie can pretend to be in a troubled marriage for four months, when it means realizing all her hopes and dreams. But when it turns out both sides of the founding couple bailed and she’ll be faking couples counseling with her nemesis, Emery Overing, she has to decide just how far she’s wiling to go to uphold the lie.
And as the lines blur and their intimacy grows, she has to figure out how much of her attraction to them is fake, after all, and whether falling in love with her nemesis will be her greatest disaster yet.