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 ...

Someone is trying to murder Japanese bar hostess Coco Ono. Tokyo's transphobic police won't investigate, so she turns to American private eye August Riordan. Riordan is a complete fish out of water in Japan—doesn't know the language, isn't on speaking terms with sushi, hasn't even traveled outside the US—but Coco has been told Riordan makes things happen.And happen they do: from the minute Riordan's size 12 Florsheims hit the ground in Tokyo, he is fending off attackers. Riordan an...

When Basis Ventures 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...

Bill Bryson meets David Sedaris meets Chelsea Handler...If Mark Coggins's life were a supermarket, the stories from Prom Night and other Man-made Disasters would be the aisle markers. Meander through the nostalgic, riotous, and sometimes cringe-inducing wares Coggins offers up in his version of Whole Fool. Whether he's staking out the house of his two-timing, belly-dancing girlfriend, deep sea diving with equipment fashioned from tire chains, a tr...

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 …A darkly comic sojourn through a town unrecognizable from the Tony Bennett song and the...

Caroline Stockwell has a secret: she and her best friend Monica are "cam girls". Soliciting cash donations and gifts via wish lists from anonymous admirers, the young women have put up a website 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 website is re...

Private investigator August Riordan returns to San Francisco to avenge the death of his friend and one-time partner, Chris Duckworth. Duckworth has taken over Riordan's old business, his old office and even his old apartment, and Riordan suspects Duckworth's death is linked to the missing person case he was working when he died.An alluring young woman named Angelina hired Duckworth to look for her half-sister, but what Riordan finds instead is a murderous polyamorous family intent ...

How much does it cost to fix an election? 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 touc...

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 ...

Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon is more than a mystery: it is a seminal work that defined a genre, a tough, unflinching portrait of a hard-nosed private eye navigating a treacherous landscape, culminating in a shocking cliff-hanger that has left readers dangling for nearly a century.What happened to the falcon?The Poltroon Press edition of this classic detective novel supplies the answer with a new coda comprised of two linked short stories by Mark Coggins. C...

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 ...

Private investigator August Riordan returns to San Francisco to avenge the death of his friend and one-time partner, Chris Duckworth. Duckworth has taken over Riordan’s old business, his old office and even his old apartment, and Riordan suspects Duckworth’s death is linked to the missing person case he was working when he died.An alluring young woman named Angelina hired Duckworth to look for her half-sister, but what Riordan finds instead is a murderous polyamorous family intent o...