Do you ever think about chapters? What functions do they serve? They can be used to
heighten suspense, to give the reader a break in the action, to give the reader a place to
stop.
Greg Iles, like most authors, wrote DEAD SLEEP in chapter form. I don't know why, though.
I was only a page or two into the bad boy when I realized that nothing else was going to
happen until I finished this book. I was running over chapters, paragraphs, and pages as
if I had the steering wheel of a steamroller in my hands and a road full of spiders in
front of me.
Iles doesn't yet have much of a bibliography behind him --- six novels now --- but no
matter. He writes with the strong, confident voice of an author who has been plugging away
in the trenches for a couple of decades. At the same time, there is no world-weariness in
his voice. And if you've read any of Iles's other novels, whether BLACK CROSS or 24 HOURS
or any other --- you already know that those novels won't prepare you for DEAD SLEEP. Iles
doesn't repeat himself, doesn't phone in his work, doesn't work from a formula. He just
writes tightly woven novels that suck the reader in, novels that compel the act of
reading.
With DEAD SLEEP the compulsion begins with the opening sentence. The second sentence seems
at odds with the first, the third heightens the contradiction, and by the fourth the
reader is simply lost in the wonder of reading this tale of a complicated, often difficult
woman on a single-minded quest. Jordan Glass is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist,
the daughter of a legendary photographer lost in the jungles of Cambodia during the
Vietnam war. Glass, in Hong Kong while working on a photo collection, wanders into the
Hong Kong Museum of Art to look at some watercolors. She notices that some of the men in
the museum react oddly to her. While wandering through the museum, she finds an exhibit of
paintings titled "The Sleeping Women." Jordan realizes two things almost
immediately: the portraits are of women who are sleeping the sleep of the dead; and one
portrait, which appears to be a painting of her, is actually a portrait of her twin
sister, missing from her New Orleans' Garden District home for more than a year.
Glass, already obsessed with the search for her sister, begins a nonstop quest to uncover
the trail of the origin of the portraits. Sometimes aided, sometimes hindered by the FBI,
Glass's search takes her to New York, the Cayman Islands, and ultimately to New Orleans,
where a forensics study links the paintings to four suspects. Each of the suspects is
improbable in their own way; and Glass herself is the target of terrible danger from a
deranged genius who has decided that one-half of a twin is not enough.
DEAD SLEEP could well be the suspense novel of the summer. This is not to denigrate the
other fine novels of the genre that this year has produced; it is simply that DEAD SLEEP
is one of those books that is of a quality that stands apart from its peers.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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