Iles, Greg: Sleep No More

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Petroleum geologist John Waters' life is far from perfect at the outset of Greg Iles' thriller Sleep No More. Waters' wife has been depressed for several years, following two miscarriages, and his otherwise successful oil-drilling business is under investigation by the EPA and is threatened besides by the irresponsible personal behavior of his business partner and life-long friend Cole Smith. Potentially devastating though these difficulties are, however, they will seem insignificant to Waters two weeks later, after he has been tempted into the first affair of his marriage by an aggressive seductress, real estate agent Eve Sumner. Sumner, as it turns out, is not your average cleavage-baring predator. She is willing to do anything necessary to wrest Waters from his wife, and she is armed with a peculiarly effective bait: intimate knowledge of Waters' relationship with his college sweetheart, the sexually aggressive, frighteningly possessive--and verifiably deceased--Mallory Candler. Waters' descent into infidelity leads him to question his sense of reality. Is he mad to consider transmigration of the soul as an explanation for Eve's uncanny likeness to and knowledge of Mallory?  Or is Sumner part of a convoluted plot designed to unhinge our hero?

The characters of Iles' Sleep No More inhabit the same world the author described in his novel The Quiet Game (see my review)--Natchez, Mississippi, which Iles, a real-life inhabitant of the town, describes eloquently. And it is peopled by some of the same characters: Penn Cage, the protagonist of Iles' earlier novel, takes on a supporting role here. One need not be familiar with The Quiet Game, however, to enjoy the author's more recent effort. But enjoy it you will. After a relatively unhurried introduction, readers will find themselves, perhaps a third of the way through the book, willing the likeable Waters to somehow extricate himself from a relationship that threatens to destroy him. But saving himself and his family, we understand, cannot be a simple business. While Iles' novel ends perhaps a bit too conveniently, it is otherwise well-written, and it is genuinely gripping. Sleep No More is just the thing to keep readers from resting in peace themselves.