WITHOUT CONSENT Is Available For Pre-Order!
Dear TCL Readers,
At long last, my new book, Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle To Make Spousal Rape a Crime, which will be published by Ecco on November 11, 2025, is available for pre-order wherever books are sold!
Bookshop.org (all formats)
Barnes & Noble (hardcover; ebook & audiobook)
Amazon (all formats)
Apple (ebook)
This is my third nonfiction book, one that challenged and pushed me in new reporting and writing directions even more than my earlier books. I couldn’t get over how few people knew of Oregon v. Rideout, the first criminal rape trial involving a wife and the husband she was still living with, and the first “issues-oriented” trial to capture press attention.
December 1978 is long ago and yet so recent, a time when spousal rape was only a crime in four states — four years earlier it wasn’t a crime anywhere in the United States and Canada, and many other countries, too — and a foreign concept to most. That would change over the next fifteen years, but as the book details, the work is far, far from finished, and could become undone at any moment in this current climate.
I could not be prouder to publish this book with Ecco, and to continue to work with this amazing team going back almost a decade. I must specifically shout out the work of my editor, Deborah Ghim, and my fact-checker, Mara Cavallaro, who got me to the finish line of edits after months of painstaking and necessary work, and Allison Saltzman, responsible for the stunning cover. There is lots more ahead, and I’ll keep you posted on major developments as publication approaches.
Every time I publish a book — this is my seventh, including anthologies, in twelve years — the industry landscape shifts considerably. What hasn’t changed is the importance of pre-orders: they signal to booksellers, librarians, and other accounts about the level of interest in the book, which determines the initial print run. They indicate the likelihood that bookstores and other venues might want to schedule events — already plans are afoot on the event front, but it never hurts to have that extra nudge, if you’d like me to speak in your town at your favorite venue.
And they signal that my existing and new readership, which launched The Real Lolita and Scoundrel and the anthologies, will take a flyer on my most ambitious book yet, which in turn increases the probability I’ll be writing even more books in the future.
Thank you, as always, for your support of my work, and for reading.
Until next time, I remain,
The Crime Lady