July, 2010

Dear Readers:

I am very excited to announce the upcoming publication of my latest novel,
Pretty Little Things. Inspired by both my experience as a felony prosecutor in Miami and my worst fears as a mother to two young teenage daughters, it is the most personal, frightening thriller I’ve ever written.

My oldest daughter was only eleven when a classmate of hers started a texting relationship via cell phone with a boy she’d met on the internet. Pretending to be sixteen, this little girl then passed the telephone numbers and email addresses of her fourth grade friends along to her new pal. My daughter told me—mind you, while I was driving—what had been happening after the boy had asked one of the girls to send pictures of herself to him.  That was also when my daughter told me that the boy’s AIM screen name was “rooster69”, the obvious sexual meaning of which was lost on a bunch of eleven year old children. After the tow truck finally unwrapped my car from the light-pole I had then run into (I’m kidding about that part), I contacted the parents of the children involved along with Crimes Against Children squad of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.   It was no surprise to subsequently find out that this “boy” was a 43 year old man from North Carolina, and the pictures he had asked this child to send him were to be taken without clothes on.

I was not prepared to encounter these internet problems with my kids at such a young age. But I should have been. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, one in every seven children is approached by a sexual predator on the internet. A recent sweep by the Attorney General in New York found more than 3500 convicted sexual offenders on Facebook and MySpace. That’s just New York sex offenders. And those are the ones who used their real names on the social networking sites. And those are just the sex offenders who have been caught and actually convicted.

That’s when I first got the idea for Pretty Little Things. The ever-changing World Wide Web has spawned new hunting grounds for sexual predators. Social networking sites and chat rooms allow kids to converse with millions of strangers from all over the globe. But of course, not everyone is who they say they are. Behind the black screen of a computer, a predator can be anyone: a ten-year-old boy, a sixteen-year-old girl, Beyonce’s best friend, a Hollywood agent. I wanted to write a thriller that would expose the dark side of the internet and show just how easily a kid can be fooled and manipulated by an online stranger, and just how quickly a relationship spawned over a simple chat on a computer can spin into a deadly encounter with a psychopath.

All the best,

Jilliane

Upcoming Appearances:

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