Sleep No More
by Greg Iles
Mass Market Paperback: 480 pages
Publisher: Signet
ISBN: 0451208765
$7.99

Soon... that single word contained so much expectation, so much intrigue, so much terror. "Soon." That's what she had mouthed to him across the school soccer pitch.

She is the local estate agent, Eve Sumner: 32, sultry, flirtatious, quite a reputation as a man hunter. He is oil-industry geologist John Waters: 41, husband to Lily, father to 7 year old Annelise.

Soon... it was a code they had used back in the college days. Not John and his wife. John and his old flame Mallory Gray-Candler. Theirs had been a truly turbulent love affair. Mallory was into the more extreme side of sexual experimentation, John her not-always-willing accomplice. Remembering those old, crazy times John would break out in a cold sweat.

But Mallory Gray-Candler had been buried in a local cemetery for last ten years, so why was this estate agent using their special code and flirting with him whenever they happened across one another?

On top of this, John's business partner Cole Smith is up to no good; his back room dealings may yet finish John's company. Cole Smith also knows far too much about Eve Sumner; it's all beginning to look rather sordid, corrupt and incestuous. John calls upon the help of ex-prosecution attorney Penn Cage (Cage is now a novelist attributed with writing The Quiet Game, in actuality another Iles book) to advise him on how he should deal with his partner and ends up revealing much more about his past and the horror that is pursuing him into the present.

Iles's characters (even the supernatural ones) are totally believable and the narrative is as thoroughly plotted as any thriller should be. But it's the writing that sets it apart from the norm, Iles clearly loves his trade and it shows with every well-executed sentence. Sleep No More is an erotically-charged journey through the spinifex-laced landscape of eternal love. It is a self-destructive novel of egotistical insanity and sexual possession. A full-on page turner that gallops towards a throat-ripped, blood-soaked climax.

Hertzan Chimera (http://www.hertzanchimera.com) lives in the quaint English town of Oxford. He is the author of novels SZMONHFU, UNITED STATES, YôROPPA and FREELANCER, collections BROKEN, BFGS, CHIM+HER, CHIM+HIM and CHIMERAWORLD. His book of interviews of horror writers SPIDERED WEB was recommended for a Bram Stoker Award. As an editor, he is bringing out an annual anthology CHIMERAWORLD. He is the new regulator of TERROR TALES (http://www.terrortales.org) ezine. He also speaks French, some Japanese and a little German.