Two days after Western Christmas, Nick Jeffery revealed here that Amazon had posted the release date for The Hallmarked Man as September 9, 2025, for the hardcover, large print, Kindle, and Audible editions. There has been no confirmation from Team Rowling or Mulholland Books that this is the date and we still do not have a cover.
So what?
It was announced today that Dan Brown’s new novel, The Secret of Secrets, will be published on September 9th this year and the global fandom of the Robert Langdon series was treated to a that book’s cover. Read the People magazine story, ‘Dan Brown Announces New Book, The Secret of Secrets: ‘Most Ambitious Novel to Date,’ if you’re one of those fans. If you’re curious about that author’s ‘Lake and Shed’ equivalents, read the ‘secret of secrets’ behind Dan Brown’s success writing blockbuster novels at Godspy’s ‘My Lunch with an Old Friend of Dan Brown Proves Revealing About The DaVinci Code.’ Secret of Secrets is the sixth Robert Langdon novel, with The Da Vinci Code ranked #11 on the list of all-time best-selling novels and the first five books tied at #9 for best-selling series with more than 200 million copies sold.
Harry Potter is #1 on that list — but the Strike-Ellacott mysteries are not on the list at all and it stretches down to series that have only sold 15 million copies (in case you’re curious, there 127 series listed). I suspect this may just be a function of the publisher or the author not wanting sales to be public knowledge, but, still, a novel from Dan Brown and Robert Galbraith on the same day?
I do look forward to Hallmarked Man but I confess I’m more excited now about Suzanne Collins’ latest Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping. (Again, for the curious, the Hunger Games series’ four books have sold over 100 million copies and are #30 on the Wikipedia all-time list.) It will feature the Second Quarter Quell, the Games in which Haymitch features as the ‘winning’ District 12 tribute. I have argued since the run-up to Mockingjay’s publication in 2010 that Haymitch and the Donner sisters are the ‘Hidden Key’ to the original series, a story that couldn’t be told inside the Katniss Everdeen trilogy.
We’ll be talking about that theory from fifteen years ago in the weeks before the publication of Sunrise on the Reaping on March 18th, as well as the remarkable quotation from philosopher David Hume that Collins says was her inspiration for this story. It will be the perfect ‘Real or Not Real?’ warm-up for Rowling-Galbraith’s latest given her focus with Collins on the ‘real’ versus ‘what’s in my head.’
