1541. The Sleeping Doll by Jeffery Deaver

The Sleeping Doll is a 2007 novel by Jeffery Deaver. Although he’s a prolific author of bestselling and award winning murder novels, I only found three such reviews in this blog. Perhaps he’s best known for The Bone Collector which was published in 1997 and subsequently became a 1999 movie with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. He’s probably underrepresented in the blog.

 

However, while I finished The Sleeping Doll, I was not enthused about the characters or the plot, at least not as much as I was in his other novels. This book is the first in a series with Katherine Dance as the protagonist. She is an investigator who is a very compelling character. In this novel, Daniel Pell, who is compared to Charles Manson, is a serial killer who escapes from prison, but he’s not the only psychopath that is involved in the story. The question becomes which psychopath is dominating the other. The title comes from Pell’s murder of four of five family members, leaving a young girl who slept through the ordeal. Pell did not find her in the house because the sleeping child was buried under the covers of her bed and stacks of stuffed animals. Much like Manson, he had a “family” of followers who were involved in the escape. I just found the character development and plot to be too unbelievable, too unrealistic. For those of us who are fans of this genre, we do have to suspend reality testing to a certain extent, but in this case, the author just expects too much for this reader to be enthused about the story. Too many times, I found myself thinking, “Oh, come on, give me a break.”

 

I give this novel a 3/5 rating, and it does not get my recommendation. It is far from being Deaver’s best work.