Once a communications and marketing manager for Minneapolis law firm Faegre & Benson, Brian Freeman made a career change in 2005 with the publication of his thriller Immoral. Four years and four titles later, with sales of well over half a million books in 46 countries, Freeman is still writing his Duluth-based suspense novels about detectives Jonathan Stride and Serena Dial (the fourth, In the Dark, is out this month). But he’s also just published The Agency—created with his London-based literary agent Ali Gunn—under the pen name Ally O’Brien.
“Publishing is a little like a TV family, with all of the gossip, infighting, backstabbing, and drinking,” Freeman says, so it was easy to turn his agent’s experiences into a soap opera in book form. It was also like a vacation for him to write something that would make people laugh out loud, he says. His thrillers, dark and intense, put him “through the emotional wringer.”
