Mark Coggins is a crime novelist who writes mysteries
because “of [his] admiration for the work of Raymond Chandler.” His novel, The Immortal Game, the first to feature
hardboiled private eye August Riordan, was selected as a top ten crime novel of
the year by both the San Francisco
Chronicle and Detroit Free Press.
There have been five additional August Riordan novels published, and the most
recent, No Hard Feelings, is available
now.
Mr. Coggins writing, and the August Riordan series,
have received critical praise—
“This
third outing for Coggins’s private investigator August Riordan proves him a
worthy successor to the iconic Sam Spade…[A] volume that fits comfortably
alongside those of Hammett and Chandler. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal on Candy from Strangers
“Riordan's
deadly cat-and-mouse game involves surviving both the murderous intentions of
members of Argentina's ruling class and the seductive advances of some beautiful
Latin American women. First-person narrative, first-class yarn.” —Booklist
review on The Big Wake-Up
The August Riordan novels are below—if you click the
title you will be transported to each book’s Amazon page—with the publisher’s
brief description and the first paragraph from each novel.
Publisher’s
description: When the world's most innovative
computer chess software is stolen, wisecracking, jazz bass-playing PI August
Riordan is hired to find it.
Sifting through a San
Francisco peopled with bruising, ex-NFL henchmen, transvestite techno geeks,
and alluring, drug-addicted dominatrices, Riordan has got his work cut out for
him.
But with a smart-ass
attitude like Riordan's, nothing is easy ...
First
paragraph: The left front tire of my battered Ford Galaxie
jolted into a pothole, and the last of my factory hubcaps popped off and went
rolling down the slope behind me. I slowed the car to a stop and watched in the
rear view mirror as the hubcap hit the shoulder of the road and bounced into
the brush below. I had planned to use the hubcap with my silver tea service as
a crumpet tray, but I could see now those plans were kaput.
Publisher’s
description: When venture capitalist Ted Valmont is
belatedly informed that the Chief Scientist of NeuroStimix--a biotech firm in
which he has invested--is missing, it's not just business, it's personal. Not
only is the scientist an old school chum, but his disappearance jeopardizes the
development of NeuroStimix's most important product: a device intended to aid
spinal cord injury victims. Since Valmont's twin brother, Tim, was paralyzed in
a college diving accident, finding the scientist and getting him back into
harness is of the utmost importance to both brothers.
Valmont engages August
Riordan to assist in the search and the men soon discover that the
disappearance is part of a larger conspiracy to use NeuroStimix technology for
perverse applications. And when a beautiful, mysterious young woman comes onto
the scene, it's impossible to say whether the technology will provide the
ultimate means to save them all or be the catalyst for tortuous, self-inflicted
deaths…
First
paragraph: KTVC was the station. Amelia Crenshaw was the
reporter. Her producer, cameraman and the station van were arrayed along the
narrow shoulder of Highway 280 while Amelia, microphone in hand, did a stand-up
with the exit sign for Sand Hill Road looming behind her.
Publisher’s
description: Caroline Stockwell has a secret: she and
her best friend Monica are “cam girls.”
Soliciting cash donations
and gifts via Amazon.com wish lists from anonymous admirers, the young women
have put up a web site featuring still photographs, video and blogs to help pay
their way through art college. But when Caroline goes missing and her mother
Ellen engages jazz bass-playing PI August Riordan to find her, Riordan
discovers her secret and it appears to everyone that someone she met through
the web site is responsible for her disappearance.
Set against the
real-world backdrop of Internet predators using social networking sites like
Facebook to find and ensnare their victims, Candy from Strangers is the first
novel to explore the phenomenon of teenagers and young adults displaying
themselves online in exchange for material favors—often without their parents'
knowledge—which some are calling the newest form of prostitution.
First
paragraph: When Henry Glover wrote It Ain’t the Meat (It’s the Motion) in 1952 for the King Records
R&B group The Swallows, I’m sure he never anticipated the trouble it would
cause. The Swallows had made a modest hit of the song, but the risqué lyrics
and the fact that white kids weren’t buying many records from black groups
limited its play. It took Chris Duckworth belting it half-century later to
really do some damage.
Publisher’s
description: August Riordan—private investigator,
jazz bass player, smart ass with a foolish heart—is going to find out. He's
been hired by Leonora Lee, the all-powerful “Dragon Lady” of San Francisco's Chinatown,
to investigate the results of the city's recent mayoral election. It seems the
Dragon Lady's candidate failed to even carry the Chinese precincts, and she's
convinced that someone must have rigged the outcome by hacking the city's newly
installed touch-screen voting machines.
A runoff between the two
remaining candidates is days away, but it takes Riordan mere hours to find the
Director of Elections dead in his office. A visit to the offices of Columbia
Voting Systems—the suppliers of the city's touch-screen machines—results in
another corpse. A wide range of political interests share a stake in the
election, so Riordan's got plenty of suspects.
First
paragraph: I shouldn’t have been surprised when the backhoe
materialized out of the Chinatown fog, ran onto the sidewalk and took out a
column supporting the pagoda roof of the Bank of Canton. But I was.
Publisher’s
description: The odyssey of María Eva Duarte de Perón—the
Argentine first lady made famous in the play and the movie Evita—was as
remarkable in death as it was in life. A few years after she succumbed to
cervical cancer, her specially preserved body was taken by the military
dictatorship that succeeded her deposed husband Juan. Hidden for sixteen years
in Italy in a crypt under a false name, she was eventually exhumed and returned
to Buenos Aires to be buried in an underground tomb said to be secure enough to
withstand a nuclear attack.
Or was she?
When San Francisco
private eye August Riordan engages in a flirtation with a beautiful university
student from Buenos Aires, he witnesses her death in a tragic shooting and is
drawn into mad hunt for Evita's remains. He needs all of his wits, his network
of friends and associates, and an unexpected legacy from the dead father he has
never known to help him survive the deadly intrigue between powerful Argentine
movers and shakers, ex-military men, and a mysterious woman named Isis who is
expert in ancient techniques of mummification.
First
paragraph: ‘Are you hoping for a souvenir or checking to see if
they’re your size?’
Publisher’s
description: Winnie
doesn’t remember the last time she felt anything below her neck. Her spine is
severed at the seventh vertebrae, but thanks to implants from a sabotaged
biomedical start-up, she has regained mobility. She is a prototype: a living,
breathing—walking—demonstration of revolutionary technology that never made it
to market.
Her disability has become
her armor. Because she doesn’t register fatigue, she has trained relentlessly.
Her hand, arm, and leg strength are off the scales for a woman, and she has
honed self-defense techniques to channel that strength. She’s a modern-day
Amazon who feels no pain.
When the sociopath who
torpedoed the start-up sends killers to harvest the implants from her body,
Winnie must team up with broken-down private investigator August Riordan to
save both their lives—and derail sinister plans for perverse military
applications of the technology.
First
paragraph: When she got to San Francisco and found that August
Riordan wasn’t there, she decided to kill herself. She took a cab from downtown
to the Presidio and walked out on the Golden Gate Bridge. She went past the
historical marker placed by the Native Sons of the Golden West, past the
section of the walkway bordered by a chain-link fence, and onto the part where
the only barrier between pedestrians and a two-hundred-fifty-foot drop was a
chest-high railing.
2 comments:
Thanks for the introduction to Coggins. I had not heard of him, but am intrigued. I like your format here, pairing the publisher's pitch with the first paragraph of each novel.
Matt, thank you for the kind words. It seemed, to me at least, that nearly everything I was writing for Gravetapping was for older, mostly out-of-print books, and I wanted to try and get some newer titles online. So I came up with the Publicity Push post, and so far it has really been fairly successful.
As for Coggins, his work has really received some very nice reviews from the trade magazines--PW, Booklist, etc.
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