Join us Thurs., April 9 at 5:30 PM for an evening with authors Lee Kelly and Jennifer Thorne to celebrate the release of The Midnight Show (Crown Publishing Group, $29).
About the book:
In the 1980s, women were not supposed to be funny. But when a group of college improv comedians gets the chance to join a new late-night show, it’s Lillian Martin who stands out. The new show was called The Midnight Show and it would air every Friday night, live from New York, and change the landscape of TV and comedy forever.
But first it would change Lillian’s and her friends’ lives. When the show becomes a runaway hit, the cast is thrown into the spotlight. Suddenly, they’re skipping the line at the city’s hottest clubs and posing on the cover of Rolling Stone. Lillian, in particular, seems destined for bigger things—until one winter night in Lower Manhattan, she vanishes, leaving nothing behind but questions. Was Lillian a victim of her own excesses? Was it a mugging gone wrong? Or could she have been killed by someone in her own inner circle?
Forty years later, Lillian’s disappearance has still never been solved. But when a budding journalist looking to examine Lillian’s story from a modern lens begins asking questions, she stirs up decades-old drama—as well as tightly-held secrets some comedy legends would much rather stay buried.
A propulsive story of fame and friendship told through a variety of media—compiled interviews, articles, transcripts—The Midnight Show takes readers behind the scenes of the cutthroat world of comedy in 1980s New York and asks if the rush of getting a laugh is all it’s cracked up to be.
About the Authors:
Lee Kelly is the author of City of Savages, a Publishers Weekly “Best of Spring 2015” pick and a VOYA Magazine “Perfect Ten” selection, A Criminal Magic, which was optioned and developed for a television series by Warner Bros., With Regrets. With Jennifer Thorne, she has co-authored The Antiquity Affair, The Starlets, My Fair Frauds (forthcoming December 2025), and The Midnight Show (forthcoming April 2026).
Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Gingerbread House, Orca, and Tor.com, among other publications, and she holds her MFA degree from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. An entertainment lawyer by trade, Lee has practiced law in Los Angeles and New York. She currently lives with her husband and two children in New Jersey, where you’ll find them engaged in one adventure or another.
Jennifer Thorne is the USA Today bestselling author of Diavola, Lute, and Newbourne Park (2026), as well as several books for younger readers under the name Jenn Marie Thorne. With Lee Kelly, she is the co-writer of historical fiction novels The Starlets, The Antiquity Affair, and the forthcoming My Fair Frauds (2025) and The Midnight Show (2026).
Born in a small town in Tennessee, Jenn grew up bouncing between her parents’ homes in various US states, with books as her constant companions. While majoring in drama at NYU-Tisch, she took as many dramatic writing classes as she could, and veered sensibly from the challenging career path of an actor to the every-bit-as-difficult life of a writer.
Jennifer’s publishing debut came in 2015: The Wrong Side of Right, an acclaimed YA contemporary rom-com set in the world of presidential politics. Two other YA novels followed, advocacy comedy The Inside of Out, and classical musician romance Night Music, as well as picture book Construction Zoo. Upon a move with her family to rural England, Jenn turned her sights on adult horror stories, beginning with 2022’s Lute and the USA Today bestseller Diavola (2024). She also began a fruitful collaboration with long-time friend Lee Kelly, resulting in the historical fiction novels The Antiquity Affair (2023), The Starlets (2024) and My Fair Frauds (2025), as well as upcoming thriller The Midnight Show (2026).
Today, Jenn lives with her two sons, husband, and beloved dog in a cottage in the Cotswolds. In her free time, she performs locally as a light lyric soprano, including with a baroque chamber choir, cooks meals that are frequently a little beyond her, and plays video games on the easiest possible setting.
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