Wake Up Dead

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.

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.