Analyze That!

Although it was not a perfect book, I very much enjoyed Jed Rubenfeld’s 2006 debut novel, The Interpretation of Murder, which found a young New York City psychiatrist, Stratham Younger, working with a visiting Sigmund Freud in 1909 to solve the case of a penthouse strangulation and a subsequent high-society kidnapping attempt. (I even included Interpretation in January Magazine’s “Best of 2006” feature.)

So I was excited to read in GalleyCat that Rubenfeld has a sequel in the works. It will be called The Death Instinct and, according to Sarah Weinman, “is set roughly ten years after The Interpretation of Murder, opening with the Wall Street terrorist attack on September 1920, in which the heroes of the first book, police detectives Stratham Younger and James Littlemore, are caught up.” (Actually, only Littlemore is a policeman, but that’s quibbling.) A representative of Rubenfeld’s British publisher, Headline, is quoted as saying: “I’ve never read such a strong proposal: it has all the verve and drama of the first book, with the same electric sense of excitement about the murder mystery and about a completely different, darker side to Freud.”

Apparently, though, Interpretation’s U.S. publisher, Henry Holt, wasn’t thrilled enough to buy Rubenfeld’s sophomore effort. After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a marketing campaign, only to see sales fall well below expectations, Holt has let the rights to The Death Instinct go to Riverhead Books, instead.