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Sleepless

A Novel

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Every day, more and more people have been found to have contracted the illness. It reveals itself gradually, inhibiting sleep, eating away at one's mind, birthing panic and confusion, until the final few months before death known as the suffering. The epidemic has swept the globe, and now infects one in ten people.

Straight-arrow cop Parker T. Haas is working undercover as a dealer in the black-market trade of Dreamer, the only known drug that offers relief for the sleepless. The drug is in small supply and impossibly high demand, and in his darker moments, Park admits to himself that his interest in it goes beyond the professional. His own wife, Rose, has been sleepless for months, and they haven't yet found the courage to find out if their infant daughter is also sick. Though the stress at work and at home are weighing on him, Park presses on, feeling like he's on the cusp of learning something crucial about the disease.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 5, 2009
      In Huston’s impressive, challenging thriller set in a postapocalyptic Los Angeles, a devastating illness renders the afflicted unable to sleep. In about a year, those with SLP (as the sleepless illness is known) deteriorate and die. Amid the city’s rampant violence and lawlessness, LAPD cop Parker “Park” Haas tries to persuade himself that a future exists for his newborn daughter. As the outside world becomes increasingly dangerous, Park pursues an undercover investigation that takes him deep into the milieu of an online game called Chasm Tide, into which many people have retreated. As in the author’s Joe Pitt vampire series (My Dead Body
      , etc.), this book has at its heart a love story: Park’s wife is dying from SLP, and Park begins to fear he may be getting it, too. Can the mysterious mercenary known only as Jasper help? Some fans of Huston’s crime fiction may not be comfortable with a novel that itself resembles a role-playing game, but it will gain him a whole new readership.

    • Library Journal

      May 15, 2010
      Edgar Award nominee Huston's (www.pulpnoir.com) third stand-alone novel follows "The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death" (2009), also available from Blackstone Audio. In it, an epidemic of terminal sleeplessness hits the world, and society slides ominously toward doomsday. Enter undercover police officer Parker T. Haas, tasked with tracking down an illicit drug that will offer relief to the sleepless, as well as aging assassin Jasper, who seeks information on a paramilitary contractor. Though talented actors/narrators Mark Bramhall ("Naked Lunch") and Ray Porter ("Tearing Down the Wall of Sound") do their best to alleviate the confusion caused by the constantly shifting viewpoints, this ambitious endeavor ultimately falls short: the tale is complicated, the characters are shallow, and the many lengthy descriptions detract from its successful telling. Recommended only for those libraries where Huston has a following. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 9/1/09.Ed.]Denise A. Garofalo, Mount Saint Mary Coll. Lib., Newburgh, NY

      Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 29, 2010
      Huston's brilliant mixture of sci-fi and noir crime, in dialogue with and arguably improving on such past dystopian visions as the film Blade Runner
      and William Gibson's Neuromancer
      , features Los Angeles in the throes of a bizarre epidemic that renders the infected sleepless and bound for eventual death, and two narrators: young undercover LAPD cop and family man Parker “Park” Haas and the aging but amazingly resourceful mercenary known as Jasper. The use of dual readers—Mark Bramhall and Ray Porter, as Jasper and Park respectively—helps to identify the points of view. For the cop, a former Stanford professor struggling to care for his family and do his job, Porter employs an intelligent voice tinged by bitterness and anxiety. But it's Bramhall who's given the plum assignment: Jasper is cool, cynical, dryly humorous, and always in control, even when faced with overwhelming odds. He's an actor's dream, and Bramhall's dry, bemused, and at times darkly humorous delivery is stunning. A Ballantine hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 5).

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