*****Silver Falchion Award Finalist for Suspense***** When Cyco Lokos gang member Magdaleno (Mags) Argueta comes home to Los Angeles after serving prison time for a robbery, he wants nothing more than to start a new life. However, there's one obstacle he has to overcome first...his old life. Mags tries to let go of his bitterness-he was framed by Rico, the new leader of the Cyco Lokos-and stay out of gang life for the sake of his Salvadoran immigrant family and his girlfriend Paloma, but trying to integrate into society after a stint in prison doesn't come easily. Faced with low job prospects and Rico's demands to help the Cyco Lokos make money, a broke and disillusioned Mags makes the only choice he can. However, Mags soon discovers that loyalties have shifted, including his, and being a part of the Cyco Lokos with Rico in charge is far more dangerous and uncertain that it used to be. With his sister pregnant by a rival gang member and his own relationship with Paloma, his best friend's sister, a violation of gang code, Mags becomes caught in a web of secrets, revenge, lies, and murder that might ultimately cost him everything. Drawn from interviews with street gang members in Los Angeles and San Salvador, this noir crime novel explores a poor immigrant family’s struggle to survive in a gritty world where gangs appear to offer a way out but instead lead to a dead-end.
Author
Christina Hoag was a former journalist for the Miami Herald and the Associated Press who's had her laptop searched by Colombian guerrillas and phone tapped in Venezuela, suspected of drug trafficking in Guyana, hid under a car to evade Guatemalan soldiers, an d posed as a nun to get inside a Caracas jail. She's interviewed gang members, bank robbers, gunmen, thieves and thugs in prisons, shantytowns and slums, not to forget billionaires and presidents, some of whom fall into the previous categories. Now she writes about such characters in her fiction. Her debut novel "Skin of Tattoos," a noir crime novel, was a finalist for the 2017 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for Suspense. Her YA thriller "Girl on the Brink" was named Suspense Magazine’s Best of 2016 YA. She also writes nonfiction, co-authoring Peace in the Hood: Working with Gang Members to End the Violence (Turner Publishing, 2014), a groundbreaking book on violence intervention used in several universities. She has had numerous short stories, creative nonfiction essays and poems published in literary journals including Shooter (UK), San Antonio Review, Round Table Literary Journal, Santa Barbara Literary Journal and Lunch Ticket, and won Honorable Mentions for essay and short story in the International Human Rights Arts Festival’s Literary Justice 2020 contest and for essay and novel excerpt in the Soul-Making Keats Writing Competition 2020. Fluent in Spanish and French, Christina grew up as an expat around the world. She lives in Los Angeles where she has taught creative writing at a maximum-security prison and to at-risk teen girls in South and East Los Angeles. She A regular speaker at writing conferences and groups, bookstores and libraries, she volunteers as a trained domestic violence support group facilitator and is a public speaker about DV.
