Mixed Blood (33 page)
Shut up in time to hear the bang an instant before he felt the Ford veer wildly to the left. He fought the steering, trying to keep the car on the road. But the tires found the gravel on the shoulder, and the car was flying away from him, flipping, cartwheeling, in a dance of torn metal and glass and bloodred sand.
The last thing Jack Burn saw was the sun in his eyes.
Then nothing.
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my editor, Sarah Knight, and my agent, Alice Fried Martell.
O
THER
S
ERPENT’S
T
AIL TITLES BY
Rsmall>OGER S
MITH
W
AKE UP
D
EAD
A split-second decision with no second chance. Get it wrong and you
Wake Up Dead
On a blowtorch-hot night in Cape Town, 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 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 hunting them all is Piper, a love-crazed psychopath determined to renew his vows with his jailhouse “wife”, Disco.
As these desperate lives collide, Roxy is caught in a wave of escalating violence in the beautiful and brutal African seaport.
“A stellar thriller”
Publishers Weekly
“An intricate Robert Altman-like narrative that, when the pieces finally connect, forms a terrifying portrait of the Cape Flats”
Kirkus Reviews
O
THER
S
ERPENT’S
T
AIL TITLES BY
R
OGER
S
MITH
D
UST
D
EVILS
An unflinching portrayal of the dark side of the new South Africa
Framed for murdering his family, Robert Dell’s only ally is his oldest enemy: his father. Bobby Goodbread, ex-CIA hitman, joins his son on a bloody road trip, bringing with him his hunger for revenge. From Cape Town to a Zulu tribal valley where AIDS, savage feuds and poverty have left the population decimated, they hunt assassin Inja Mazibuko, uncovering a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of the state.
Disaster Zondi is also on a desperate mission, returning to the place he fled as a youth to rescue a teenage girl – who may or may not be his daughter – sold into marriage to Mazibuko. These men are thrown together in a spiral of violence and retribution in a country where anarchy has replaced tyranny and human life has never been cheaper.
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