One Step Too Far by Lisa Gardner
A one-off.
A publicity pitch instead of a blurb—specifically, a craft-essay pitch to CrimeReads editor Molly Odintz for a Lisa Gardner essay tied to her Frankie Elkin series.
Not commissioned, not sent—just how I’d pitch it if I were on the publisher’s side of the desk.
Subject: Pitching Lisa Gardner on what the Bigfoot hunters know
Recipient: Molly Odintz, managing editor for CrimeReads
Hi Molly,
Pitching another craft essay by Lisa Gardner, who CrimeReads ran in March 2024 with “10 Lessons I Learned in 30 Years of Writing Suspense.”
A true and quietly strange institutional gap: The North American Bigfoot Society maintains a better database of missing persons on U.S. public lands than any federal agency does.
In One Step Too Far (2022, #2 in the Frankie Elkin series), Frankie meets “Bigfoot Bob,” a private investigator by pay and Bigfoot hunter by hobby—a character drawn from the real cryptozoologist-investigator community. Gardner would share what she found in her research, how Bob came together as a character, and what fiction can do with that gap between what gets searched for and what gets recorded.
Gardner has been writing in this territory across multiple series. In When You See Me (2020, Detective D.D. Warren), Dr. Regina Jackson makes the related point from the forensic side: “I have a lab filled with millions of dollars’ worth of equipment, and I can tell you none of it works as well as a good dog’s nose.”
The fourth Frankie Elkin novel, Kiss Her Goodbye, was released in August 2025.
Offer: 1,500–2,000 words, either written fresh for CrimeReads or coordinated through Grand Central, like the March 2024 piece.
Best,
Ashley Duongtran
Toe-Curling Tales
Original pitch by Ashley Duongtran for Toe-Curling Tales.
Not commissioned, not sent—written for the love of the book.