 ABOUT THE AGENT: Tommy Dean is now a literary agent at Talcott Notch, specializing in mystery, suspense, thrillers, crime fiction, and upmarket fiction with danger and secrets. He gravitates towards stories with deep emotional resonance, with characters who come to life through their actions and responses to the world around them. He is searching for stories that investigate the mysteries of being human. He is always interested in clear stakes, surprise endings, and stories that make him forget the outside world. TOMMY IS SEEKING: While he's still on the hunt for unique and specific anti-hero main characters, he's also looking for lovable losers and the characters who can’t get out of their own way, who find trouble with their best intentions—those who yearn to solve mysteries, who commit crimes, who want to survive another day. He's always interested in clear stakes, surprise endings, and stories that make him forget the outside world. His main genres of interest are crime, mystery, thriller, and suspense. He's very interested in finding books that combine all of these genres to create fresh hybrid structures. Tommy would love to find more mysteries and thrillers with strong female main characters who act with agency, who ask for forgiveness later, and who want to tear down the systems around them. He needs thrillers to start with a burning fire of a plot, to light the match, and see how fast the main character can run before stopping to fight back. So many “thrillers” he sees are more suspense or slow-burning mysteries rather than plots that get his heart racing. Put your characters in danger, escalate that danger, and make them vulnerable to death or injury before they learn how to save themselves. He's love to find Book Club Fiction that marries upmarket writing with deep characters, a sense of mystery, and has thought-provoking themes. Readers today want to be entertained with accessible writing, but they also want characters who yearn and make the best kind of mistakes that invoke questions about how we live our own lives. He loves stories fueled by gossip and lies that hold families together and tear them apart. He loves it when past crimes bubble to the surface. He loves stories set in small towns, rural locations, and the Midwest. Stories of blue-collar workers, and the generations that eschew this work to go to college, to live in a city, to forget where they came from, only to be yanked back to the provincial settings of their youth. If you’re pitching literary fiction, he wants deep emotional resonance, with characters who come to life through their actions and responses to the world around them. He's searching for stories that investigate the mysteries of being human; the sorrow and the joy of connecting to the diverse population. He wants your best sentences and your sharpest language, with specific and unique characters that he can imagine coming to life. For Non-Fiction: He's looking for true crime in the vein of Murderland or Killers of the Flower Moon. He wants non-fiction that reads with the tension and pace of fiction. He wants to feel like he's on the stage of the story with the characters, to feel like he's also living that moment in time. Think scene, conflict, antagonists, and a main character who, though they might be unlikable, is deeply interesting! He's not interested in: Young Adult Sci-Fi Thrillers Fantasy Hard Science Fiction Nazi-related historical fiction Romance Romantsy HOW TO QUERY: Please send queries to https://QueryTracker.net/query/TDTN  Pitch Agents at a Writers Conference in 2026:
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