About the Author

Mark's Biography.

Born in New Mexico in 1957, Mark Coggins earned two degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa Key from Stanford University. He has worked for a number of Silicon Valley computer and venture capital firms, including Netscape Communications, VeriSign, Hewlett Packard Company and three (other) software start-ups.

While at Stanford, he studied creative writing with Tobias Wolff and Ron Hansen 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, vol. 4, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich.

His books have been nominated for the Shamus, the Barry and the IPPY 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. His novel Runoff won the Next Generation Indie Book Award in the Mystery/Suspense category and The Immortal Game was optioned for a film.

Coggins has published other short fiction in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and the chess fiction anthology Masters of Technique, and is the author of several nonfiction articles, including a profile of photographer Mark Citret in View Camera magazine.

He's been the keynote speaker at computer software conferences and an invited instructor at writers’ conferences, including The Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference. He's appeared on television and radio to discuss his work as well as the real world events and issues that inform it, such as Silicon Valley culture and venture capital.

He lives in San Francisco with his wife Linda and their cat Taki.