Emma Martin isn't your average teenager. A scrawny, impulsive runt of a girl 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, bypassing alarms, smashing windshields and hotwiring ignitions. But the good life comes to an end when she can't resist a black Lexus sedan 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. What They're Saying... "Hot Wire is a hip, funny, serious and suspenseful novel that brings the great tradition of grifter noir into the present day with the excitement and urgency of the activity its title refers to. Emma Martin is the coolest protagonist crime fiction has produced in a long time." - Barry Graham, author of When It All Comes Down To Dust From the author... "Hot Wire is a head-on collision of noir crime and political conspiracy thriller, a high-speed joyride through the west coast underworld of organized car theft, drug smuggling and blacker-than-black covert operations. "It should appeal to the conspiracy nexus and fans of crime fiction in general; and anyone looking for female characters with more teeth than your average Twilight heroine should definitely check out Emma Martin, the impulsive teenage car thief in Hot Wire. "Like my first novel, Phase Four, Hot Wire is an excursion into the paranoid territory of the New World Order where conspiracy theory meets chaos theory with explosive results. This is adrenaline entertainment for the 21st Century."