Wake Up Dead

A Thriller

By: Roger Smith

Narrated by: Justine Eyre

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.

©2010 Roger Smith (P)2010 Tantor

Critic reviews

“[A] stellar thriller.... Bad choices, not bad luck, drive human depravity in this brutal fable.” ( Publishers Weekly)

overheated nonsense

No characters of any depth, ugly violence unending: Everybody's either a victim, an evil thug or both. Good reader but so much violence becomes numbing without ever being memorable. It all runs together. It's a story for enraged rats to read.

really appreciate this type of storytelling

I like the story yes and the sets of characters also I like mixed blood you may want to check that out too