The Wake-Up

From Publishers Weekly

A minor matter of airport rudeness sets off a major killing spree in Ferrigno's seventh novel, an overplotted affair that features a battle between a former espionage agent, a figure from his spooky past and two L.A. drug dealers. When Frank Thorpe sees a hard-charging businessman humiliate a young Latino peddler at LAX airport, he decides to teach the jerk a lesson. And after using his spy skills to find out that the man is an art dealer, Thorpe sets up a forgery scam that gets the dealer accused of selling phony Mayan art to an ambitious, nouveau riche L.A. couple. Unfortunately for Thorpe, the female half of the couple, the delightfully bitchy Missy Riddenhauser, becomes furious after a local gossip columnist embarrasses her by exposing the incident, and she quickly talks her husband, Clark, a former surfer turned designer drug dealer, into going after Thorpe. The plotting and character writing remains sharp and clever through the first half, and the art angle makes the novel read like a cross between a Ludlum thriller and one of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels. But the plotting careens off track when Thorpe needlessly gets involved with the cartoonish thugs who handle the violent end of Clark's drug business, and those scenes dull the impact of Thorpe's final showdown with a mysterious, dangerous figure from the agent's past known as the Engineer.
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From

Here's another hugely entertaining thriller from the underappreciated Ferrigno. Although the plot, at times, is overly convoluted, making it difficult to keep track of who is double-crossing whom, the novel offers outsize villains; supersmart, rapid-fire dialogue; and a streak of the downright bizarre. Special-ops agent Frank Thorpe has just been let go from the independent shop he has worked at for years. A planned sting backfired, leaving several agents dead. Set to board a plane at LAX for a much-needed vacation, he spots a hard-charging executive backhand a 10-year-old Mexican vendor, which triggers Frank's always seething sense of moral outrage. He decides to give the guy a "wake-up . . . to show him how quickly the storm clouds could roll in on his sunny world." Inevitably, the wake-up proves far more complicated and dangerous than even the canny Frank anticipated. He is soon rubbing elbows with a calculating, drug-dealing social climber; her brainy chemist husband; and their ruthless bodyguards, including a childlike victim of Romanian medical experiments. Another riveting, intense read from the always reliable Ferrigno. Joanne Wilkinson
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