Carter will bid goodbye to the Gallagher Girls with a multicity tour this month, which wraps up, appropriately, at Washington D.C.’s International Spy Museum on September 29. On September 17, the sixth and final Gallagher Girls installment, United We Spy, arrives on bookshelves. Between the Gallagher Girls and Heist Society books, Carter has sold more than two million copies, and both of her series have been optioned for film. In addition to the five already published Gallagher Girl book (Bray edited the first three), she has written three installments of the Heist Society, a series about a girl from a family of thieves who gets embroiled in her own high-risk jobs. Since Ally Carter made her YA debut with Hyperion in 2006, she has become the queen of the “clean” teen series, writing books without much in the way of sexual content or strong language.

I thought the concept was brilliant and smart.” She made an offer right away, signing the author to a three-book deal. “I still loved it,” she said, recalling reading the tiny type in a hotel room at 11 p.m.

To save on fax charges at the hotel where she was staying, Bray had her assistant resize the 60-page document into 25 pages of single-spaced 10-point type. It was 2005 and Bray, then working as an executive editor at Hyperion Books (now co-publisher of the Balzer + Bray imprint at HarperCollins), was at a conference when her assistant called to tell her about the first pages of an exciting project that just arrived. Editor Donna Bray remembers exactly how she heard about I’d Tell You I Love You, but Then I’d Have to Kill You, first in a series of books about a group of girls attending the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, an elite school for training spies.

Embassy row series