Wake the Undertaker is a ir thriller set in an alternative, darker Bay Area city. At nineteen, Colin Specter is an up-and-coming singer at The Lone Palm, a nightclub owned by the Christos' crime family, headed by Cephalus the Old Man Christos and his ne'er-do-well son, Gabriel. When Colin falls for Gabriel's girl, a stripper named Zoey, Gabriel orders the singer's vocal cords cut and has him take the fall for a crime he didn't commit. After seven years in prison, Colin is manipulated into working for his former tormentors. Gabriel is w estranged from the Old Man, who has branched into the legitimate, lucrative game of pharmaceuticals and politics, and a war between father and son is spilling onto the streets of Bay City. With the aid of a disgraced former newspaperman, Colin investigates the Old Man and delves into the whereabouts of his former love, only to discover that thing is what it seems in a rain-drenched underworld. PRAISE The Lone Palm is t only my kind of bar...Wake the Undertaker is my type of book. Joe Clifford writes with the intensity of a house on fire, and I'd read his grocery list if he published it. -- Todd Robinson, The Hard Bounce