Candy from Strangers

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.

Mark Coggins studied creative writing with Tobias Wolff and Ron Hansen at Stanford University 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, a revival of Black Mask, the famous pulp magazine that thrived in the 30s and 40s. 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. Two of his novels have been translated for foreign markets. RUNOFF won the Next Generation Indie Book Award in the Mystery/Suspense category, THE BIG WAKE-UP won the Independent Publisher Book Award in the Mystery/Suspense/Thriller category and THE IMMORTAL GAME was optioned for a film. His work has been collected for the California History Room by the California State Library and the San Francisco History Center by the San Francisco Public Library. Mark lives in San Francisco with his wife Linda and their cat Taki.