The Big Wake-Up

A Maltese Falcon-style Treasure Hunt with a Most Intriguing MacGuffin "Outstanding… Coggins pulls no punches," says Publishers Weekly in a starred review... "Mark Coggins’s superb new August Riordan novel, The Big Wake Up, is what you hope every PI novel will be," says award-winning author Megan Abbott... "Begins with a stunning action scene of murder by cable car and proceeds to unveil a[n] … utterly entertaining pulp-magazine plot, including a sinister female villain known as Isis," says Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine... The odyssey of María Eva Duarte de Perón--the Argentine first lady made famous in the play and the movie Evita--was as remarkable in death as it was in life. A few years after she succumbed to cervical cancer, her specially preserved body was taken by the military dictatorship that succeeded her deposed husband Juan. Hidden for sixteen years in Italy in a crypt under a false name, she was eventually exhumed and returned to Buenos Aires to be buried in an underground tomb said to be secure enough to withstand a nuclear attack. Or was she? When San Francisco private eye August Riordan engages in a flirtation with a beautiful university student from Buenos Aires, he witnesses her death in a tragic shooting and is drawn into mad hunt for Evita’s remains. He needs all of his wits, his network of friends and associates, and an unexpected legacy from the dead father he has never known to help him survive the deadly intrigue between powerful Argentine movers and shakers, ex-military men, and a mysterious woman named Isis who is expert in ancient techniques of mummification. The fifth novel in the August Riordan series, The Big Wake-Up plunges everyman PI Riordan and his sidekick Chris Duckworth into their most terrifying and anguishing case ever.