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.

Garden of Beasts by Jeffery Deaver

Let’s say you work for the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1936. If you can’t convince anyone in the political hierarchy that Hitler really is rearming, what do you do? You find a maverick financier to fund an assassination, not of Hitler, but of the man overseeing the military buildup.

Now, you need the shooter, so instead of a sniper, you find a mob hit man who is fluent in German, catch him in the act, and make him an offer he can’t refuse: kill this guy or get put on the fast track for the chair at Sing Sing. Tough choice.

So, Paul Schumann gets put on a boat with the Olympic Team to make his way to Berlin. He has a contact, a place to stay, meets a local ‘businessman’ who deals anyway he can, cases the hit, sets up his escape (with his landlady who he, uhmm, lands), learns that the mark is also testing the mindset of some young Aryans by having them commit murder under different situations . . . all of this while he is being doggedly tracked by a local cop because Paul’s contact killed a Stormtrooper who was following Paul. And that’s just the first 48 hours.

Is my cynicism showing? I struggled with this book. Just never could get going. The setup dragged for me. 300 pages describing about 48-72 hours. Having said that, the last 100ish pages were more of what I was expecting and that section just flew. But it wasn’t enough to redeem the first 300 pages. For me, the best parts of the book were the descriptions of everyday life in Berlin as they move towards war. I know Deaver is an author who is constantly on the best seller list, but I'm not sure I'll be back anytime soon.

East Coast Don

The Empty Chair by Jeffrey Deaver

It’s been too long between reading the book and posting this review, so I’ll be brief – this was a good book. Deaver, with this book, lived up to his prior efforts. This is a story about the Insect Boy, Garrett Hanlon. Once again, we have Lincoln Rhymes, the quadriplegic criminologist from “The Bone Collector” and “The Coffin Dancer.” Along with Lincoln comes his aide, Amelia Sachs. The book takes place in the backwaters of North Carolina, along the Paquenoke River, which is near the Great Dismal Swamp. The entire setting is creepy and Deaver does a great job conveying the eeriness of it. No one knowingly goes north of the Paqo because it has the dangers of the swamp and has been inhabited by druggies who protect their territory at all costs. But, murders have taken place and it seems to be the place that the lost settlers, the Lost Colonists of Roanoke, might have retreated before they disappeared altogether. So, not only does Deaver mix in the science needed to unravel the strange clues, the mystery of unsolved murders which have been mistakenly blamed on Insect Boy, kidnappings, and probable new deaths, but also one of the important unsolved mysteries of history. Remember Virginia Dare, the first baby born in the colonies? That’s also a part of the story. So, sorry for the short review, but it was a good book, and I continue to be a Deaver fan.