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Published Feb 2010
304 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
A split-second decision with no second chance: get it wrong and you wake up dead.
On a blowtorch-hot night in Cape Town, American ex-model Roxy Palmer and her gunrunner husband, Joe, are carjacked, leaving Joe lying in a pool of blood. As the carjackers make their getaway, Roxy makes a fateful choice that changes her life forever.
Disco and Godwynn, the ghetto gangbangers who sped away in Joe’s convertible, will stop at nothing to track her down. Billy Afrika, a mixed-race ex-cop turned mercenary, won’t let her out of his sight because Joe owed him a chunk of money. And remorselessly hunting them all is Piper, a love-crazed psychopath determined to renew his vows with his jailhouse “wife,” Disco.
As these desperate lives collide and old debts are settled in blood, Roxy is caught in a wave of escalating violence in the beautiful and brutal African seaport. With savage plotting and breakneck suspense that ends in a shattering cataclysm of violence, Wake Up Dead confirms Roger Smith as one of the world’s best new thriller writers.
"Starred Review. From the terrific first sentence, the reader is firmly hooked...Highly recommended for those wanting their noir as hard-boiled as it gets." - Library Journal
"Only a slightly sentimental ending relieves his searing vision of characters trapped in a fetid purgatory." - Kirkus Reviews
"Starred Review. Bad choices, not bad luck, drive human depravity in this brutal fable, where the human ideals of beauty and goodness and truth can't save their possessors and even fatally attract the soulless." - Publishers Weekly
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Roger Smith, an accomplished screenwriter, director, and producer, was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and now lives in Cape Town. He is also the author of the thriller Mixed Blood.
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