Blog Tour Info and First Chapter Excerpt DEATH NEVER SLEEPS
By E.J. Simon
Do the Dead Have Smartphones?
It’s
Halloween night in Queens, N.Y. Alex Nicholas, flamboyant bookie and
loan shark, is enjoying his favorite meal at his favorite restaurant
with his favorite woman who is not his wife. Sated with veal parmigiana
and Chivas Regal, he dials his brother Michael’s number. He has a very
important secret to tell him. Then he sees the skinny kid with the gun.
In his last seconds before a bullet ends
his life, Alex tells himself: Michael was smart; he would figure it all
out.
Alex
and Michael were as different as two brothers could be. Alex, once on
track to become a star baseball player, instead became very successful
in a collection of illegal businesses. He’d married three gorgeous
women, divorced two, kept multiple mistresses, and had friends who
carried guns. His brother Michael was living the high end of The
American Dream. He was a straight-arrow, squeaky-clean CEO
of a financial management company, with one beautiful wife, a daughter
in college and a million-dollar Colonial in Connecticut.
As
Michael sits in the crowded church at his brother’s funeral, the pews
fill with family, shady business associates and beautiful women.
Suddenly,
Michael is distracted by a mysterious message in his Blackberry’s
inbox: It’s a photo of Alex sitting behind his desk, and the words,
“Life is a dream, and death is waking up.”
At
Alex’s wake, Michael is shocked to learn that his own family is in
danger. Alex died owing big money to cold-blooded mobsters who will stop
at nothing to collect their debts. Their idea of negotiating was a gun
below a table, aimed below the belt. Within hours, Michael is drawn into
the search for the millions of dollars Alex’s widow is sure Alex had
stashed away.
Michael
gets another message while he’s standing by Alex’s grave: “What are you
doing here?” The pieces start to come together when Skinny Lester,
Alex’s right-hand man, tells Michael that just before his death, Alex
had installed some very specialized software on his hidden laptop: a
program that would allow him to live forever.
Things
are never quite what they seem in this page-turning romp through
exclusive hotels and expensive restaurants with beautiful, desperate
women, tough-guy thugs, cynical cops and devious wiseguys. As Michael
crosses the globe to find the people behind his brother’s murder, the
bodies start to fall, and the lines between life, death, the spirit, and
the Internet blur.
How can Michael avoid his brother’s fate? Just how far beyond death can Alex reach out to help him?
________________________________________________________________
E.J. SIMON was CEO of GMAC Global Relocation Services and the Managing Director of Douglas Elliman, the largest real estate company in New York. He is a consultant to many leading private equity firms and has held senior level positions at prominent financial services companies. He is a world traveler, food enthusiast and lives in Connecticut. DEATH NEVER SLEEPS is his first novel.
E.J. SIMON was CEO of GMAC Global Relocation Services and the Managing Director of Douglas Elliman, the largest real estate company in New York. He is a consultant to many leading private equity firms and has held senior level positions at prominent financial services companies. He is a world traveler, food enthusiast and lives in Connecticut. DEATH NEVER SLEEPS is his first novel.
DEATH NEVER SLEEPS
By E.J. Simon
iUniverse: September 1, 2013
$21.95 Print: $3.99 E-book: 377 pages
