Published today, Mark Coggins’ new August Riordan crime novel NO HARD FEELINGS is available as a limited edition hardcover with scene-setting black and white photographs (taken by the author) at the beginning of each chapter. Down & Out Books has printed 225 copies of the LE hardcover, each signed by Mark Coggins, which will be exclusively available through independent booksellers, such as Borderlands Books (San Francisco), Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego), and The Poisoned Pen Bookstore (Scottsdale) as well as the Down & Out Books website. Trade paperback and ebook formats of the book will be available later this year.
About the book …
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.
Praise for Mark Coggins …
“A bang-bang thrill ride. Winnie is a female Jack Reacher.”
— Seth Harwood, author of In Broad Daylight
“Smart, stylish, sexy and amusingly insouciant … a panoramic tour de force.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“Gritty … seamy … very, very funny. [Coggins] has given the form fresh life.”
— National Public Radio
“Dry ice sarcasm … and plenty of nasty chuckles in route.”
— Publishers Weekly (in a starred review of Vulture Capital)
“Coggins hauls on a dark, hip journey.”
— Detroit Free Press
“Coggins writes tight prose with a clean, unadorned style; he is a Hammett for the turn of the 21st century.”
— Loren D. Estleman
“Utterly entertaining”
— Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
Meet the author …
Born in the Four Corners region of New Mexico, Mark Coggins earned two degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa Key from Stanford University. He has worked for a number of Silicon Valley computer and venture capital firms, including Netscape Communications and Hewlett Packard Company.
While at Stanford, he studied creative writing with Tobias Wolff and Ron Hansen and wrote the first story featuring his series character August Riordan in a class taught by Hansen. This story, “There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes,” was later published in The New Black Mask, Vol. 4, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich.
His books have been nominated for the Shamus and the Barry crime fiction awards and have been selected for best of the year lists compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Detroit Free Press and Amazon.com, among others.
Visit Mark Coggins online at MarkCoggins.com