Mixed Blood author Roger Smith is back with a new thriller that’s set to have readers riveted to their seats: Wake Up Dead. Here’s the blurb for the forthcoming US edition (the book will appear this Feb):
On a blowtorch-hot night in Cape Town, 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 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 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.
The author has released an excerpt from the book on his website. Enjoy, but beware: it’s quite a ride.
The night they were hijacked, Roxy Palmer and her husband, Joe, ate dinner with an African cannibal and his Ukrainian whore.
The African, languidly elegant in a hand- tailored silk suit, was blue- black with tribal scars on his cheeks. He spoke beautiful French-accented English, and he could have recited the Cape Town phone book and made it sound poetic. The whore had yellow braids, the dark roots cross- hatching her skull like sutures on a cadaver. She didn’t say much, spent most of the meal hating Roxy for her naturally blonde hair and perfect American teeth.
When the cannibal paused his monologue to eat or drink, Joe Palmer tried to fill in. After the francophone eloquence, South African Joe sounded like a truck driven without a clutch. They were at Blues in Camps Bay, overlooking the ocean, and even though they sat down to eat at nearly nine, the last of the golden light still washed the beach and the slopes of Table Mountain. Cape Town is twinned with Nice on the French Riviera, and on a night like this Roxy could see why.
Praise for the novel
“An intricate Robert Altman–like narrative that, when the pieces finally connect, forms a terrifying portrait of the Cape Flats. [A] searing vision of characters trapped in a fetid purgatory.” — Kirkus Reviews
“[A] stellar thriller. Bad choices, not bad luck, drive human depravity in this brutal fable. One fundamental irony unforgettably lingers: that these characters, trapped in poverty, ignorance, and prejudice, have really had no choice at all.” — Publishers Weekly
Book details
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