Synopsis
In Sleep No More, Greg Iles returns to the territory of some of his best-loved works, the steamy and hypnotic small town Mississippi where Iles himself grew up. John Waters is a husband and father happy with his lot in life, though he has not always felt that way. Years earlier he escaped an obsessive love affair, which he feared might consume him. The woman in question disappeared after Waters married, and later he heard that she was killed in New Orleans. But now, Waters has an uneasy feeling that she has resurfaced to trouble him - and entice him - once again. A woman he meets casually stuns him with a smile and a secret only this former lover would know. But when this alluring stranger is suddenly murdered, Waters's quiet life is enveloped in a whirlwind of guilt and suspicion, revealing the shadowy sides of love and friendship, and the terror that can result when passion becomes obsession.
Publishers Weekly
Iles has written some solid, beautifully constructed thrillers (24 Hours; Dead Sleep), so when his latest seems for page after page to have no logical explanation for its central mystery, we hold on, bide our time and wait for the moment of revelation that will make everything fall into place. Unfortunately, that moment never comes. The puzzle of how a woman who has been dead for 10 years can suddenly appear in the body of another woman turns out not to be a mystery at all. It's a whole other genre horror or fantasy or science fiction. Iles fans will certainly enjoy the way he once again brings to piquant life his home turf Natchez and the Mississippi Delta and creates a character with an actual job. John Waters is a petroleum geologist, and the details of his work are carefully rendered. He's a happily married man of 41 with a bright eight-year-old daughter, although his sex life has all but disappeared in the wake of several disastrous pregnancies. So he's ready to be pushed over the edge by the sudden appearance of Eve Sumner, a 32-year-old real estate agent who seems to know every intimate detail of Waters's youthful affair with the late Mallory Candler a mentally fragile beauty queen who was subsequently raped and murdered in New Orleans. The game gets really serious when Eve is also murdered. Possibilities abound: John's weak and financially reckless partner might be behind the whole thing, and even Waters's embittered wife could be a suspect. Readers will probably stick around to see how Iles gets himself off the hook, but it's hard to imagine many of them coming away completely satisfied. (July) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.