Hot Wire

Emma Martin, aka "Little Bo Peep," isn't your average teenage girl. A scrawny runt with glasses and a ponytail, she steals cars for the Deacon-Gonzalez Organization, an uneasy alliance of Bay Area rednecks and Mexican drug dealers who smuggle heroin and hot cars through the Port of Oakland. Night after night, Emma cruises the streets with her hillbilly boyfriend, Arnold Willis, looking for cars on their target list, but the good life comes to an end one night when she spots a black Lexus sedan driving through the Oakland bottoms and decides to go into business for herself. Now she's on the run from the cops, a Customs task force, two thugs who claim to be FBI agents, a spooky fed who wants to use her as bait and a gang of vicious locos who work for her own employers. A pawn in a game she doesn't understand, her only ally is a seedy reporter who thinks the car she stole holds the key to an explosive conspiracy that dates back to the fall of the Soviet Union. Hot Wire is a full-throttle suspense thriller by Gary Carson, the author of Phase Four.