Wake Up Dead by Roger Smith

Continuing on with West Coast Don's recent novels by foreign authors, this one comes from South Africa.

Roxy Palmer, South Florida native and former high fashion model, is the unhappy trophy wife of Joe Palmer, a gangster in Cape Town who deals in weapons and mercenaries. They are having dinner with a tribal cannibal and his Ukrainian whore who has just handed over a bucketload of money to buy arms. On their way home, a couple of junkies follow them home to hijack their car and sell it off. The hijack goes bad, a little, and Joe gets shot in the leg. On an impulse, Roxy picks up the discarded gun and puts one through Joe's forehead. And, boy does her life change, mostly for the worse.

Billy Afrika is one of Joe's mercenaries back from Iraq and needing back salary that Joe owes him. With Joe gone and most of this assets frozen, Billy moves in with Roxy to protect his investment. Billy has a history. As a teenager, he lived in some of the harshest of slums run by various gang fractions. One up and comer, Piper, beats Billy, sets him on fire and tosses him in a shallow grave.

But Billy survives, saved by a cop who becomes his partner when Billy grows up and joins the police force. Unfortunately, his partner is gutted right there on his home sidewalk in full view of his family. Billy could've killed the perp right there, but doesn't and the guy goes to prison. The guy becomes a war lord in prison . . . Piper. And Billy promises to watch over the family of his partner. He needs what is owed to him, he needs the salary Joe owes him for his partner's family who is being extorted by another scum of the slum.

In prison, Piper takes a wife, a pretty boy who goes by Disco. Now Disco is not all that enthralled at being Piper's bitch. Once Disco is released, Piper makes him promise to get arrested again so they can be together, but Disco isn't in any rush to go back. But he needs drugs and money, so he and a bud decide to hijack the car of a rich man . . . a hijacking that goes bad, a little.

Piper is pissed. He arranges to escape and starts to track down Disco. This starts a trail of blood and death unlike anything I've ever read. Cops, gang members, innocent bystanders, homeless people, children, all suffer at the will of Piper's knife. Piper likes the up close and personal nature of killing with a knife, stabbing people in their groin and ripping flesh up to the victim's sternum, spilling viscera and blood everywhere allowing the victim to watch their life flow into the dirt.

I can't remember a grittier story full of unsympathetic characters. Relentlessly violent, Smith pits various factions of the Cape Town slums (even that is too gracious a term) against each other. The nightly gunfire, the drugs, the deceit, the crooked cops, beheadings, and plot twists in the suffocating heat of Cape Town far too numerous to describe are painted by Smith using a brush heavily tinged in blood red. People say Hannibal Lector was a most evil character, but Piper makes Hannibal look like a guest at high tea by comparison. Billy is a flawed hero, Disco is a loser whose decisions have put him right where he is, and Roxy has ridden her beauty to her own hilltop prison that in an instant, she tried to break free from and suffers unspeakable consequences.

Make no mistake, this is a brutal book, probably one of the most brutal I've ever read. Told largely in flashbacks, Smith keeps dozens of balls in the without losing the reader in the detail of the Cape Town gangs, ghettos, and a disgusting array of vicious creeps there by the bad luck of genetics.

If you pick this up, you best be prepared.

East Coast Don