Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.
Title details for Wake Up Dead by Roger Smith - Available

Wake Up Dead

A Thriller

by Roger Smith
Justine Eyre
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 8, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400196296
      • File size: 238140 KB
      • Duration: 08:16:07

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 31, 2010
      This excellent noir thriller, set in South Africa, is not for the squeamish. When meth addicts Godwyn MacIntosh and Disco De Lilly carjack arms dealer Joe Palmer and his wife, ex-runway model Roxy, they unwittingly set off a series of violent and bloody events that showcase the depravity and lawlessness of Cape Town's most brutal ghettos. Smith weaves his disparate cast of characters into a gritty tale of greed, bloodlust and revenge, and Justine Eyre chooses a cool matter-offact delivery that enhances the horror, and with a subtle shift of inflection she illuminates the softer moments, rare as they may be, to great emotional effect. A Holt hardcover.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from November 30, 2009
      At the start of this stellar thriller from South African author Smith (Mixed Blood
      ), Cape Town meth heads Godwynn MacIntosh and Disco De Lilly hijack wheeler-dealer Joe Palmer's Mercedes. When the two black men shoot Joe in the leg, the reaction of Joe's gold-digging American wife, a former model, is to say the least, unexpected. While honest cop Ernie Maggott tracks the carjackers, and sociopathic killer Piper pursues Disco, once his jailhouse “wife,” half-white Billy Afrika, a former police detective and now a mercenary to whom Joe owed a ton of cash, is bent on revenge for Piper's savage two decades-old murder of Billy's mentor. 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. One fundamental irony unforgettably lingers: that these characters, trapped in poverty, ignorance, and prejudice, have really had no choice at all.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Loading