A Bright New Talent

It’s always a pleasure to welcome a new author with talent to spare, and this month we have a first opportunity to make the acquaintance of Fort Lauderdale’s Jilliane Hoffman, whose debut, Retribution (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, $24.95), is one of the first novels to be published in 2004. Hoffman is a former Florida assistant state attorney who specialized in domestic violence cases and a legal adviser to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, where she rewrote our state’s sexual predator laws. She draws on these real-life experiences to tell the story of Chloe Larson, an attractive young attorney who is about to take the New York bar exam when she is viciously raped and left for dead.  After a lengthy recovery, with her life in shambles – physically scarred, she has been abandoned by her fiance – Chloe starts a new life under a new name in Florida, where in time she becomes an assistant prosecutor in the State Attorney’s Office in Miami.

Memories of her horrific experience unexpectedly reenter her life when she is assigned to prosecute “Cupid,” a serial murderer who has preyed on beautiful young women, and recognizes him as the man who raped and nearly killed her years earlier. With the memory of her ordeal rushing back to haunt her, Chloe vows she will send Cupid to Death Row. But is she bent on justice or retribution? And how can she conduct a cool, logical case for the prosecution when she is consumed with hate?

The skill with which Hoffman tells her tale has led to extraordinary success for a new writer. Putnam’s is printing a first run of 250,000 copies and has assigned a $300,000 marketing budget. Before the book even reached the stores, the movie rights were sold for more than $1 million, and foreign translations are already underway in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan and Spain.

Read the entire article in the January 2004 issue