The Sleeping Doll by Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver is back with a dark and multilayered psychological thriller about a vicious killer’s escape from a California super-prison and the mysterious and deadly quest he embarks on once he’s free.
Making her first appearance in The Cold Moon (2006), special agent Kathryn Dance—a brilliant interrogator and body language expert—stars in The Sleeping Doll, where she and her partners at the California Bureau of Investigation hunt down escaped killer Daniel Pell, a self-styled Charles Manson.
Deaver’s most frightening villain to date, Pell is a master of control, who mesmerizes, seduces, and exploits people for his own murderous ends. To track down Pell before he destroys more lives, Kathryn Dance must enlist the help of people from the killer’s past: the three women who lived under his sadistic sway in the cult he once headed, as well as the young girl known as The Sleeping Doll, the only survivor of her family’s slaughter at Pell’s hand.
Filled with masterful plot twists: Jeffery Deaver creates plots with so many twists and turns they could “hide behind a spiral staircase” (People), and The Sleeping Doll has Deaver’s trademark twists in spades. It is guaranteed to keep readers guessing right up to the breathless end.
So I’m a huge fan of Jeffery Deaver. Ever since reading ‘The Bone Collector’. His Lincoln Rhyme series is fantastic but I’ve always been less of a fan of the stand alone novels. Kathryn Dance was introduced in the last Rhyme novel ‘The Cold Moon’ and here she gets her own story. All the hallmarks of a Deaver novel are here – a complex villain, action scenes and of course the twists. Yes, the master of the twists gets us every time – and this was no exception.
However, there was something lacking here. Dance, whilst being an interesting enough protaginst is nowhere near as genius a creation as Rhyme. The book was also lacking in supporting characters – for example not a Thom, Amelia or Lon in site and at times it felt rather soapy – far too much time in my opinion was spent on the drama of Dances’ personal life. Also, for the title of the book there was a surprising lack of the ‘Sleeping Doll’ – a character I would have liked to have seen far more of.
Despite all this, an under-par Deaver is still better than some of the dross that gets turned out these days. There’s also the first few chapters of his next novel ‘The Broken Window’ to whet your appetite and it looks like its going to be an absolute stunner!
