San Francisco PI August Riordan is minding his own business doing his laundry--okay, so he is also flirting with the attractive woman in the laundromat. Minutes later, outside on the sidewalk, she is shot to death by a heavily armed man who has hijacked the cable car she was waiting for. Riordan jumps into action and stops the killer by derailing the cable car with his 1968 Ford Galaxy 500.

His heroic actions draw praise from the local press, cause the near total destruction of his car, and attract the attention of people involved in Argentinean politics. The young woman who was murdered was the stepdaughter of a Peronist politician, and he tells Riordan a crazy story about his sister's death and burial and hires the PI to help locate her grave. But the search takes on a much wider scope when the lost corpse turns out to actually be Eva Peron's, and Riordan discovers that there are lots of people interested in finding her body--and most of them are very dangerous.

This is the fifth in the August Riordan series, and for those who are unfamiliar with it, Riordan is something of a retro-detective--a tough, wisecracking, chip off the old Philip Marlowe block. Mark Coggins writes a fast-paced, and at times very funny crime novel. The Big Wake-Up, a play on The Big Sleep, is an updated version of a traditional private-eye novel and a good one at that.