News of a possible new direction in that hard-worked genre comes from agent Joe Veltre at Carlisle & Company, who has just taken a preemptive offer for two books by Lauren Willig, a young woman just finishing her Harvard Ph.D. The world English sale was made to Dutton's Laurie Chittenden for The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, the story of a young American grad student off to England to write her dissertation on the celebrated spy the Scarlet Pimpernel, and who uncovers a much richer historical mystery that has been overlooked—in the process, of course, of searching for Mr. Right.