In a aggressive six-house public sale, Putnam Books for Younger Readers has acquired The Escape Sport, a YA thriller thriller co-authored by Lunar Chronicles creator Marissa Meyer and Lintang sequence creator Tamara Moss. Jill Grinberg at Jill Grinberg Literary Administration bought North American rights for the two-book deal to Putnam senior government editor and publishing director Ruta Rimas and editor Gretchen Durning. Publication is scheduled for April 2026.
Meyer and Moss, longtime critique companions, have been in search of a possibility to collaborate when Meyer, who loves escape room puzzles, got here up with an concept. Whereas fixing a Mona Lisa heist puzzle together with her household, Meyer imagined a homicide thriller involving an escape-room-themed recreation present, a million-dollar prize, and an unsolved crime from the present’s previous season. She recommended the chance to Moss, they usually each started plotting clues and twists.
As a result of Meyer lives in Washington state and Moss lives in Perth, Australia, their correspondence happened in any respect hours. Meyer is an “avid outliner, and this labored nice for a collaboration,” Moss informed PW. “Dwelling in numerous time zones meant I might write my pre-planned chapter whereas Marissa was sleeping. She’d learn it throughout her day, make a number of edits, write her personal chapter, and ship it again so I’d get up to new materials.”
Meyer mentioned, “One among my favourite issues was going to mattress, understanding that work was nonetheless taking place on the opposite aspect of the world. Even with our plan in place, generally we might begin writing a chapter and notice it wanted to be one thing totally different than what we had in thoughts. We spent a whole lot of time determining how and when to insert numerous clues and pink herrings, and which viewpoint character made essentially the most sense to disclose them. After we acquired caught, we might have a Zoom name to speak issues via.”
Additionally they depended upon each other’s storytelling strengths of their co-writing course of. “I’m not a lot of a romantic today,” Moss admitted. “I like writing deep friendships and chemistry between characters, however when you’re swooning, that’s Marissa. She’s additionally the brains behind many of the codes and puzzles, whereas I centered on the homicide thriller. I’m going heavy on character work; she’s a famous person at plot construction.”
Meyer agreed “100%,” calling their approaches “complementary. Working with Tamara pushed me to suppose extra deeply about characterization and backstory.” She liked “having the ability to brainstorm and bounce concepts off one another as we labored via the extra difficult parts.”
Not solely is The Escape Sport a dual-author mission: it’s a dual-editor mission with Rimas and Durning sharing editorial duties. The 2 have labored collectively since 2019, when Rimas arrived at Penguin and Durning served as her assistant, and their tasks have included Sabaa Tahir’s Nationwide Ebook Award-winning All My Rage, Ginny Myers Sain’s Darkish and Shallow Lies, and Jessica Goodman’s The Counselors.
Rimas, who mentioned she grew up on the “heart-racing” novels of Caroline B. Cooney, Lois Duncan, and Christopher Pike, felt a right away pleasure for The Escape Room. “I thought of this manuscript a drop-everything-and-read submission the second Jill dropped it into my inbox,” she mentioned. “It completely blew me away with its intelligent plot, attention-grabbing characters, and spectacular twists.”
Durning, an Agatha Christie fan, appreciates “understanding there’s a proper approach to match all of the items collectively, and the satisfaction when all of it falls into place—whether or not or not I accurately guessed the killer by myself.” She mentioned that apart from its central thriller, The Escape Room has “a whole lot of smaller puzzles to determine,” plus “a quick tempo” and a set of game-show contestants that embody a mathematician, an escape room designer, a cryptographer, and the sufferer’s sister.
Putnam BYR president and writer Jen Klonsky known as The Escape Room “an absolute must-publish for us right here at Putnam Younger Readers. I’ve admired Marissa for years, together with her lengthy and spectacular profession within the YA house, and after studying this guide, I do know Tamara is poised to achieve the identical heights.”
