Bad guys you want to spend time with
Robert Ferrigno's new book is due to hit the
shelves
soon...Praise
For The Wake-Up...
A mysterious
Specials Ops fixer makes the mistake of taking his job too
personally.
Frank Thorpe, an army vet who was booted from Delta Force for starting a civil
war in South America, knows how to get things done and doesn't mind bending the
rules. After Delta, Frank went to work for a "shop," a shadowy private task
force that did jobs the government couldn't afford to take on itself. The shops
don't exactly play by Marquess of Queensbury rules, but Frank was a loose cannon
even by their standards, and one of them let him go after he botched a
technology-smuggling sting and got one of his comrades killed. Shell-shocked and
unemployed, he wanders aimlessly about LA until one day he sees a Mexican
peddler manhandled at the airport by a pompous businessman.
Outraged,
he calls on his undercover contacts to track down the bully, who turns out to be
a Newport Beach art dealer named Doug Meachum. Frank then poses as a State
Department art-smuggling rep and tells one of Meachum's customers that the
priceless Mayan artifact Meachum sold her is a fake. The customer, a
social-climbing drug dealer named Missy Riddenhauser, goes ballistic and sends
her sociopathic brother Cecil off to whack the bitchy gossip columnist who
exposes the "fraud" in a local paper, and the whole affair kind of snowballs
from there. Frank, meanwhile, is still trying to track down the engineer who
blew his IT sting and killed his partner. All his friends in the shops tell him
the same thing: Revenge is bad for business, a waste of time, and too dangerous
for a smart guy to bother with. They're right. But Frank, who believes in
loyalty and justice, has some serious gaps in his
education.
Sharp, fast, and slick. Ferrigno can read like Raymond Chandler on speed, with
pages turning and adrenaline pretty high throughout.
--Kirkus
Reviews, July 2004
More info
on my friend Robert's book at his website
Posted: Wed - July 28, 2004 at 12:49 AM