January, 2010

Dear Readers:

Happy New Year! I can’t believe it’s already January and another year has flown by. Sigh.

I’m still a crummy website-updater, so I suppose fixing that will be my New Year’s resolution. Again. Consider it a character flaw. I do have some new news to update my website with, however, and that concerns my latest novel, Pretty Little Things.

Pretty Little Things (former working title, “The Portrait Painter”) will be published in the UK, Australia and New Zealand on February 10, 2010. I don’t have an exact date yet, but the US is publishing in June, and Germany will be late spring/early summer. I am not yet sure of the publishing dates in other countries, as it takes some time to translate. As soon as I get exact dates, I will post them.

Let me tell you a little bit about Pretty Little Things, which I am really excited about! It is a stand-alone thriller, set, like my other novels, against the backdrop of South Florida and the oftentimes perverse criminal justice system.  Lainey Emerson, a thirteen year old from a troubled home, goes into an internet chat room, pretends she is 16, and starts an internet relationship with what seems to be the perfect guy. But when she agrees to meet him one night right before Halloween, she finds out that he is anything but what she had imagined.  Initially dismissed as a runaway, the investigation into Lainey’s disappearance takes a dramatic turn when FDLE Special Agent Bobby Dees of the Crimes Against Children squad receives a macabre portrait painted by a twisted cyber-predator who no longer wants to remain anonymous. 

This time around I found inspiration for my story not just from cases I’d prosecuted or those I’d investigated as an attorney with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, but from my own daughters—a tween and a teen, each outfitted with a cell phone and each proficient in both MAC and Windows.  I’d prosecuted my fair share of sick cases as an Assistant State Attorney in Miami, including sex crimes and kidnappings, but the internet at the time was relatively new, and sexual predators and sexual offenders were just starting to figure out how to manipulate the world-wide-web to further their twisted fantasies.  For law enforcement, the dawn of the internet age meant a whole new, virtually un-policed world for sex offenders to explore, a world which offered them unfettered access to millions of potential new victims all from the comfort of their own living rooms. A world where, with just the click of a mouse—or eventually, as cell phone technology caught up, with just the push of the ‘send’ button—a pedophile could readily obtain or exchange child pornography. A world where a predator could interact with millions and still remain completely anonymous.  A world that many parents just didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand.  And, unfortunately, it wasn’t long before sex offenders figured out how to lure their new cyber pals—usually vulnerable or naïve teens—away from their computers and outside the safety of their homes for face-to-face encounters.   

As my own girls got older and more computer-savvy and cell phone dependant, it was impossible to avoid the statistics and heart-breaking tragedies that after a decade in law enforcement I knew all too well.   Namely, that 7 out of every 10 kids are approached by a sexual predator online. Then there was the close call with a classmate of one of my daughters who, in fourth grade, had given out her AIM address to what turned out to be a 43 year old male from North Carolina. That was it—I was officially inspired and terrified enough to write a thriller that for many readers will strike very close to home.  A thriller that is made all the more disturbing and terrifying because it can and does happen every day around the world: Kids, teens—all of us—letting virtual strangers into our homes and our lives through our seemingly innocuous computers, Blackberries and IPhone’s.  My advice? Be careful when you do open that cyber door—just as careful, in fact, as when you open your front door—because you really don’t know who’s out there.   Or just what it is he wants…

All the best,

Jilliane

Click here to download the first two chapters of Pretty Little Things.