The Wake-Up: A Novel Hardcover - 2004

From the publisher

Frank Thorpe is set to board a plane at LAX for a much-needed vacation when he sees an obviously poor young boy knocked out of the way and senseless by an arrogant businessman rushing to a waiting Porsche.
Frank really needs some R & R. He' s just been fired-- over a fatal screw up-- from the covert operations " shop" he' s worked at for years. But Douglas Meachum-- a hard-charging art dealer-- needs to be made to feel something more than entitlement: nothing extreme, just a little wake-up call. Given Frank' s background and his expertise in good guy/bad guy tactics, it' s easy for him to set up a scam involving some embarrassing revelations about a faked Mayan sculpture that Meachum sells to one of his clients. But the client isn' t someone who takes kindly to mistakes. She' s a ruthless social-climbing psychopath who, with her surfer-dude husband (the Thomas Alva Edison of designer pharmaceuticals), runs a huge drug operation. And she' s got an invincible thug duo-- Vlad and Arturo-- to carry out her notions of payback, which make Frank' s wake-up scheme seem positively genteel. What started out as a good (if slightly underhanded) deed quickly veers out of control. How Frank handles the chaos--
and what he himself hears in the wake-up call-- is the fuel that drives this full-throttle, terrifically entertaining novel.