The International Thriller Writers (ITW) membership includes many of the world’s best-selling authors: David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Lee Child, Sandra Brown, Clive Cussler, Jeffery Deaver, Tess Gerritsen, and James Patterson, among others. All of these authors’ careers began with their first book. The ITW Debut Author Program seeks to support our first-book members through the publication process by providing a friendly, interactive community for the purposes of networking, mentoring, promotion, and camaraderie.

At ThrillerFest VI, to be held July 6–9, 2011 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City, New York Times best-selling author Karin Slaughter will introduce the following 21 members of the current Debut Authors class at a Saturday morning breakfast:

James Barney (The Genesis Key, HarperCollins), Ben Coes (Power Down, St. Martin's), Ethan Cross (The Shepherd, Fiction Studio), Hilary Davidson (The Damage Done, Forge: Tor), Jennifer Hillier (Creep, Gallery: S. & S.) Alma Katsu (The Taker, Gallery: S. & S.), Allison Leotta (Law of Attraction, Touchstone: S.&S.), Pascal Marco (Identity: Lost, Oceanview), Paul McEuen (Spiral, Dial: Random), D.J. McIntosh (The Witch of Babylon, Penguin Canada), Michael and Patrick McMenamin (The Devalera Deception, Enigma Bks.) , H.T. Narea (The Fund, Forge: Tor), Daniel Palmer (Delirious, Kensington), Rick Reed (The Cruelest Cut, Pinnacle), Todd Ritter (Death Notice, Minotaur: St. Martin's), Lynne Sheene (The Last Time I Saw Paris, Berkley), Jeffrey Small (The Breath of God, West Hills), Taylor Stevens (The Informationist, Crown), Brad Taylor (One Rough Man, Dutton), and Tom Waters (Secret Signs, Gallaudet Univ.).

Nonattending members of the 2010/2011 Debut Authors class include the following:

Yvonne Anderson (The Story in the Stars, Risen Bks.), Buzz Bernard (Eyewall, Belle Bks.), Sandra Brannan (In the Belly of Jonah, Greenleaf Book Group), Joelle Charbonneau (Skating Around the Law, St. Martin’s), Gary Corby (The Pericles Commission, Minotaur: St. Martin’s), Virna DePaul (Chosen by Blood, Berkley), E.J. Findorff (Unhinged, Medallion), Adrienne Giordano (Man Law, Carina: Harlequin), Howard Gordon (Gideon's War, Touchstone/Fireside: S. & S.), Ian Hamilton (The Water Rat of Wanchai, House of Anansi), Sara J. Henry (Learning To Swim, Crown), EJ Knapp (Stealing the Marbles, Rebel E-Publishers), Allan Leverone (Final Vector, Medallion ), Fred Lichtenberg (Hunter's World, Five Star: Gale Cengage), JB Lynn (The First Victim, Carina: Harlequin), Tracy March (Girl Three, Turquoise Morning), Adam Mitzner (A Conflict of Interest, Gallery: S. & S.), Nancy Naigle (Sweet Tea and Secrets, Turquoise Morning), Brian O’Grady (Hybrid, Fiction Studio), Leslie Tentler (Midnight Caller, Mira: Harlequin), and James Thane (No Place To Die, Dorchester).

None of these names are familiar to thriller readers—yet. But each year, a few members of the current class hit the New York Times and other best-seller lists. Others sell film rights, foreign rights, and win literary awards. Four members of last year’s Debut Authors class—Carla Buckley, Reece Hirsch, Thomas Kaufman, and Chevy Stevens—have been nominated for a Thriller Award for Best First Novel, which will be presented at the banquet at ThrillerFest on Saturday evening (see Jeff Ayers's preview and predictions).

So who exactly are these exciting new thriller authors? Three promising newcomers introduce themselves to you in their own words below.

ALLISON LEOTTA

Leotta is a federal prosecutor specializing in sex crimes and domestic violence in Washington, DC, whose first novel, Law of Attraction (S. & S.), is set in the world she knows best. See LJ's review.

"As a sex-crimes and domestic-violence prosecutor in Washington DC, I needed an outlet for the real-life thrillers I witnessed every day. I saw acts of evil that gave me nightmares: a rapist who kidnaped a young mother, leaving her children on the side of the road; a stepfather who impregnated his 12-year-old stepdaughter. But I also saw acts of heroism and courage: a son who saved his mother from being stabbed to death; a sex-abuse victim who came forward despite the pressure to stay silent. There were even moments of pure comedy: the witness who unsnapped his wooden leg and brandished it at the prosecutor during cross-examination; the prison inmates who smuggled a gun into the jail, so they could shoot themselves and sue the jail for negligence. I had to tell these stories. It was either become a novelist or become that lady at parties who’s always prattling on, 'Did I ever tell you about the time....'

My debut novel is about—surprise!—a young DC prosecutor specializing in sex crimes and domestic violence. I wanted to tell my readers about a challenge that haunts prosecutors:

how do you protect a victim who is truly in love with her abuser and won’t leave him? My heroine, Anna Curtis, knows what it’s like to grow up in a violent home, and she’s determined to use her role as a prosecutor to save others from that fate.

But, as happens all too often in domestic-violence cases, one of her abuse victims lies on the witness stand to help her accused lover. The lover goes free. And shortly after, the victim turns up dead. Standing in Anna's way of bringing the killer to justice is her own boyfriend, a public defender representing the accused. As Anna’s personal and professional lives collide, she struggles to understand why she and so many women are attracted to men who hurt them.

I wanted the book to be fun and exciting, but also to be real. My readers will see the details and hear the sounds of DC’s criminal justice system—and struggle with the same moral dilemmas real criminal lawyers face. It’s fiction, of course, but it’s historical fiction. The time is now, in Washington DC, from the marble halls of justice to the twisted alleys of the city’s urban poor."

PAUL MCUEN

McEuen, a Cornell University physics professor who was recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences, is the author of Spiral (Dial Press). See LJ's review.

"When I’m not writing, I’m a physics professor, supervising a group of a dozen or so students and postdocs. We study everything from ultra-miniature electronics to tiny mechanical devices than can feel the force of a single molecule. For example, my graduate students made a working transistor just a few atoms across, and we recently built a working drum the size of a bacterium (with a drumhead only one atom thick). Why? We’re primarily driven by curiosity, but we’re also pushing the reach of technology, creating faster electronics and improved medical diagnostics.

I started my debut scientific thriller while on a sabbatical seven years ago. I was convinced I would finish it inside of a year, but I wasn’t even close. The book went through at least a dozen major revisions before I sold it and quite a few more revisions after. As to why a (very busy) scientist would write a novel—I was looking for a new challenge. I’ve always loved thrillers, stretching back to when a teacher slipped me Marathon Man in junior high. I was hooked, devouring everything from The Andromeda Strain to Cat’s Cradle. I wrote a little fiction in college, but that stopped once I became a full-time scientist, and for the next 20 years I penned nothing but scientific papers. Now I sneak in my creative writing during the mornings, on weekends, and on vacations. I find it a great complement to my professional life—a chance to use my scientific curiosity and knowledge in an entirely different way.

Novel writing also gives me carte blanche to explore topics outside my scientific specialty. For Spiral, I delved into one of the darkest chapters of World War II, the horrific atrocities committed by Japan’s Unit 731. General Shiro Ishii and his butchers killed thousands of innocent civilians in biological weapons experiments, acts later covered by the U.S. government. The leaders of Unit 731 went on to become major figures in postwar Japan, and the main antagonist of Spiral is a fictionalized member of this clique.

On a slightly less gruesome note, I also learned a bunch of cool facts about fungi. (A major character in the book is a fungal biologist.) My favourite fungus is now Entomophthora muscae. It infects the nervous system of the common housefly, commanding it (no one knows how) to go to the highest place around and die with its tail pointed upward. After consuming the fly’s innards, E. Muscae uses the fly’s husk as a launching pad to fire billions of spores skyward.

I live for this kind of stuff."

TAYLOR STEVENS

Stevens's The Informationist (Crown) has already found a place on the New York Times best-sellers list. Born in New York state, the author was raised in communes across the globe. See LJ's review.

"My background is, perhaps, a little unusual for a novelist. I was born into and raised in the Children of God, an apocalyptic religious cult that believed education beyond the sixth grade was a waste of time and didn’t allow access to television or books from the outside. Whereas many writers spend years reading voraciously before setting out to hone their craft, I grew up in a popular culture void: a worker bee—child labor, if you will. In place of schooling, the majority of my adolescence was spent begging on city streets at the behest of cult leaders, caring for the many younger commune children, washing laundry, and cooking meals for hundreds at a time. By the time I was 14, I’d lived in nearly a dozen countries on three continents.

The transition from that life into the life of a thriller writer certainly wasn’t a planned one. My first attempts at writing fiction were at ages 14 and 15, and these ended rather badly. For many years, imagination had been a survival mechanism, but I’d made the mistake of turning daydreams into story lines, which I put down on paper. When the cult leadership found out, the notebooks with the handwritten stories were confiscated and burned, and the 'devils' in me were exorcised. I was punished and then ordered to never write fiction again.

When I was finally free of the cult and able to read whatever I wanted, I discovered Robert Ludlum. His stories ignited the long dormant desire to create, and it was while reading the Bourne series that I made the decision to write—a rather spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment flash of 'I want to do this. Wait. I can do this.' My punctuation sucked (still does), my spelling was poor (still is), and I’d never finished sixth-grade English, much less taken a creative writing course (still haven’t). I might not have had an education, or a background in books, or much of a clue, but the nomadic nature of the cult had taken me through locales as exotic as anything Ludlum had brought to life, and I was determined to write about them. That’s how The Informationist began. A couple of used writing guides became my bible, and an old laptop that was now seeing its third continent became my everyday companion.

There was no way I could have known at the time, at home with two babies, still relatively new to this thing called 'real life,' with limited education and struggling to find a place in the world, that because of this decision and the determination to follow through, that what started out as nothing more than a way to take back stolen childhood dreams would eventually grow into a three-book deal with Crown Publishing and a debut novel on the New York Times best-sellers list.

People ask me what compels me to write, and although the reasons are complex and many, ultimately it boils down to this: I write because I have no plan B."

This article originally appeared in the newsletter BookSmack! Click here to subscribe.

Karen Dionne is the internationally published author of two environmental thrillers. She serves on the International Thriller Writers board of directors as Vice President, Technology. Visit her website at www.karendionne.net