"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 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. But when the Dragon Lady’s beautiful daughter is attacked after giving Riordan a goodnight kiss, it starts to get personal. Soon, Riordan is in a race not only against the runoff deadline, but against powerful political movers and shakers, Chinatown gang members, and crazed anarchists, with only his techno-savvy, cross-dressing friend Chris to help. The cost of fixing an election runs to as many lives as it does dollars, and if Riordan isn't careful, the price for un-fixing it may be more than he can afford …
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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.
