Cherry Bomb

Anywhere else, fifteen will get you twenty. Along the turnpike, fifteen will get you dead. When beautiful fifteen-year-old Stacy Kendall disappears, her wealthy parents hire Hartford PI Zach Barnes to find her. Barnes fears that the girl is dead...until a brunette who looks like her shows up in a security video outside a sleazy motel room. Inside that room, a man lies dead. Overnight, Stacy turns from a kidnap victim to a murder suspect-and her parents' worst nightmare. To save the girl, Barnes invades a thriving trade in teen sex-trafficking, blackmail, and murder. Getting in is easy. Now he has to get back out.

Steve Liskow serves as a mentor for the Mystery Writers of America and writes the Grammar Guy column for First Draft, the newsletter for the Guppies, a subgroup of Sisters in Crime. He also conducts fiction workshops throughout the area and contributed to Now Write! Mysteries (Tarcher/Penguin, 2011). He was born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, where he read Hemingway, Lardner, Fitzgerald, and Sherwood Anderson, the local talent that helped shape his voice. He also devoured Sherlock Holmes and The Hardy Boys, writing his first mystery when he was ten. His mother typed it for him; when he saw his name in print for the first time, he knew that he wanted to be a writer. His ninth-grade English teacher was the sister of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke, so there was no going back. At Oakland University, he tempered his English major with moonlighting as a DJ on the campus radio station and playing bass in a band. He started out as a British Invasion fan, but fell in love with blues after seeing the Muddy Waters Band open for Martha and the Vandellas. His family moved to Connecticut while he was in college, and, since there were no teaching jobs in Michigan, he joined them after graduation. He taught English in New Britain and drifted into theater, where he directed, produced, designed, and acted in nearly 90 community theater productions. He also earned an MALS and CAS in literature from Wesleyan University and a Masters plus sixty in literature and theater. He has published several short stories, twice winning Honorable Mention for the Al Blanchard Award. ＂Stranglehold＂ appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine after winning the Black Orchid Novella Award for 2009, and Lee Child selected ＂Hot Sugar Blues＂ for inclusion in Vengeance, an MWA anthology coming in spring of 2012. He lives in central Connecticut with his wife Barbara and two rescued cats.