Sleepless: A Novel - Hardcover

Huston, Charlie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345501136 ISBN 13: 9780345501134

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2010

Synopsis

From bestselling author Charlie Huston comes a novel about the fears that find us all during dark times and the courage and sacrifice that can save us in the face of unimaginable odds. Gripping, unnerving, exhilarating, and haunting, Sleepless is well worth staying up for.

What former philosophy student Parker Hass wanted was a better world. A world both just and safe for his wife and infant daughter. So he joined the LAPD and tried to make it that way. But the world changed. Struck by waves of chaos carried in on a tide of insomnia. A plague of sleeplessness.

Park can sleep, but he is wide awake. And as much as he wishes he was dreaming, his eyes are open. He has no choice but to see it all. That's his job. Working undercover as a drug dealer in a Los Angeles ruled in equal parts by martial law and insurgency, he's tasked with cutting off illegal trade in Dreamer, the only drug that can give the infected what they most crave: sleep.

After a year of lost leads and false trails, Park stumbles into the perilous shadows cast by the pharmaceuticals giant behind Dreamer. Somewhere in those shadows, at the nexus of disease and drugs and money, a secret is hiding. Drawn into the inner circle of a tech guru with a warped agenda and a special use for the sleepless themselves, Park thinks he knows what that secret might be.
 
To know for certain, he will have to go deeper into the restless world. His wife has become sleepless, and their daughter may soon share the same fate. For them, he will risk what they need most from him: his belief that justice
must be served. Unknown to him, his choice ties all of their futures to the singularly deadly nature of an aging mercenary who stalks Park.

The deeper Park stumbles through the dark, the more he is convinced that it is obscuring the real world. Bring enough light and the shadows will retreat. Bring enough light and everyone will see themselves again. Bring enough light and he will find his way to the safe corner, the harbor he's promised his family. Whatever the cost to himself.

It is July 2010.

The future is coming.

Open your eyes.

About this title

Review:

Amazon Exclusive: Barry Eisler Reviews Sleepless

Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, then worked as a technology lawyer and startup executive in Silicon Valley and Japan. Eisler’s bestselling thrillers have won the Barry Award and the Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller of the Year, have been included in numerous "Best of" lists, and have been translated into nearly 20 languages. The first book in Eisler’s John Rain series, Rain Fall, has been made into a movie starring Gary Oldman. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Sleepless:

One of the great things about Charlie Huston is the way he sneaks up on you. You think The Shotgun Rule is about teen gangs and the consequences of crime--and gradually realize that on a deeper level it's about fathers and sons and reconciliation with the past. You think The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death is about the quirky crews who clean blood and brain matter from the furniture and rugs when someone prematurely shuffles off this mortal coil--and you start to see it's really about healing the wounds within. And you think Sleepless is about zombies, and a dystopian Los Angeles that's as real as tomorrow, and horribly believable government/corporate conspiracies, and a stylish and awesomely capable assassin--and you realize when you finish (tears in your eyes, in my case), that it's really about the unlikely human bonds that transcend shock and horror and trauma.

There are so many things I loved about this book. That sly Huston humor, lurking just beneath the tilted and terrifying zombified world he depicts, is one:

"Movies themselves had not stopped shooting. Certainly production had been scaled back, and more than one studio had gone under or, more accurately, been consumed whole by somewhat heartier competitors, but even as energy costs spiked, even as all cities, most suburbs, and many rural areas, experienced outbreaks of organized violence, even as the standing army was deployed with obvious permanence to the oil fields in Alaska, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Brazil, even as the draft was reinstated and the gears of the economy audibly snapped their teeth and ground to a squealing halt, even as the drought extended and crops withered, even as the ice caps melted and coastal waters rose, people still liked a good picture."

And Charlie isn't only skilled with the broad brush. His grace notes, the little asides that animate the larger images and characters and themes, are legion. It felt so right that sufferers from the sleepless disease call the non-afflicted "snorers"... and there's Vinnie the Fish, the ex-criminal and current open-air seafood restauranteur who believes the height of dining elegance is a meal served with a real fork, not a spork... and the lethally poised Lady Chizu's carefully arranged collection of typewriters "upon which suicide notes were written. And not another word, after."

Some of what's in the book felt so real I had to Google it to know more. A role-playing game called Chasm Tide. The etiology of Fatal Familial Insomnia and the sleepless prion. I won't tell you what I found, but I was all the more impressed.

I could go on, but I'm running out of room. So let me just note again the aforementioned assassin, Jasper. If you've read my Rain books, you know I like assassins possessed of style, exceptional lethality, and unusual self-awareness. Jasper has all that, and more. He's the best fictional assassin I've come across in a long time: believable, fascinating, ruthless. A joy to spend time with, as is the book itself.

The characters, the vision, the atmosphere... long after the final page surrenders the last of the story's surprising and utterly satisfying secrets, Sleepless will stay with you. It's Charlie's best yet--his most ambitious, his most engrossing, his most affecting. A strong statement, you'll agree, if you've read his other terrific stories. But see for yourself--and prepare to be wowed. --Barry Eisler

About the Author:

Charlie Huston is the author of the bestsellers The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death and The Shotgun Rule, as well as the Henry Thompson trilogy, the Joe Pitt casebooks, and several titles for Marvel Comics. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0345501136
• ISBN 13: 9780345501134
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368