Lisa Scottoline said, “I’m thrilled to be at Putnam and working with the genius team led by Ivan Held. I love their energy, expertise, and commitment, and I know we’ll make new readers and reach new heights. I am simply over the moon, going forward!” [caption id="attachment_113892" align="alignright" width="200"] Lisa Scottoline, Photo by April Narby[/caption] The three domestic thrillers acquired by Putnam will follow on the heels of recent bestsellers like After Anna and One Perfect Lie. They will be riveting and emotionally resonant stand-alone novels of suspense centered on strong female characters up against impossible odds. ETERNAL is Scottoline’s first work of historical fiction, and the first book in the trilogy is set in Fascist Italy during the reign of Benito Mussolini. Spanning ten years during World War II as Fascism rises and the Italian Holocaust begins, the novel tells the story of the beautiful and fiercely independent Elisabetta “Betta” D’Orfeo, who finds herself caught in a love triangle with her two closest friends, one a rising star in the Fascist party, the other a reserved Jewish mathematics prodigy. Family secrets and betrayals change Betta’s circumstances until she is forced to make a devastating choice in a world gone mad with bloodlust and war. Reminiscent of novels like The Nightingale, Pachinko, and of Elena Ferrante’s the Neapolitan trilogy, ETERNAL is an engrossing, sweeping story that explores themes of love, family, liberty, and justice in wartime history. Scottoline has been researching the Italian Holocaust since her undergraduate days in a year-long seminar at the University of Pennsylvania, which she took with author Philip Roth, who she cites as a reason for writing ETERNAL. As reported by AP, Scottoline said, “’We did a close, almost line-by-line, analysis of the books he chose for us, evidence of Roth’s famous saying that he became an author because he ‘liked sentences’…I myself became an author because of him, his seminar and his books, especially his survey of the harrowing first-person accounts of the Holocaust…I knew that someday I would write about the Holocaust in Italy and have been researching and studying it since then. I owe it to Philip Roth,’ she added. “I will mourn him always.’” About Lisa Scottoline After a successful career in corporate law, Scottoline released her first legal thriller, Everywhere that Mary Went, in 1994. Her debut was an immediate bestseller and was nominated for an Edgar Award, the most prestigious award given in crime fiction. Her second novel, Final Appeal, won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original in 1995. She has gone on to write 31 novels to date, all of which have appeared on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. Her novels consistently receive rave reviews, including from the Washington Post who called her most recent domestic thriller After Anna a “deliciously distracting thriller [with] a stunner of a story line.” And Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised her wildly popular Rosato & Associates series as “punchy, wisecracking thrillers.” Scottoline also writes humorous nonfiction and a weekly column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, called “Chick Wit,” with her daughter Francesca Serritella.