The Little Sleep

If you plan to invent a wisecracking private investigator with an interesting handicap, some advice: do not give him narcolepsy. For one thing, his choice of profession will defy belief. And, his symptoms, which include sudden, inconvenient, involuntary naps and waking hallucinations, will render the narrator so unreliable as to take all the fun out of any puzzle you create for him. (Did the corrupt DA's spoiled daughter, Jennifer, beg dream-addled PI Mark Genevich to find her missing fingers? And is she being blackmailed? Not really.) Add the fact that Tremblay's plot is full of holes, and you've got a really big challenge for narrator Stephen Thorne. That Thorne makes Mark borderline charming is a miracle. That it doesn't matter is not his fault. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

January 12, 2009
South Boston PI Mark Genevich struggles to lead a seminormal life despite his narcolepsy, whose symptoms include falling asleep mid-conversation and hallucinations, in this uninspired noir from Stoker-finalist Tremblay (City Pier
). When Jennifer Times, the daughter of prominent DA William “Billy” Times, comes to Mark's office with racy photographs of herself she received anonymously, Mark agrees to take her case. But after trying to contact both Jennifer—who's a contestant on an American Idol
–like TV show—and her father, Mark realizes that Jennifer's visit was a hallucination. The photographs are his only tether to reality, one that becomes even more tenuous when he discovers not only that the subject isn't Jennifer, but that her father and his goons will do anything to get the mysterious photos back. Despite a promisingly quirky hero, Tremblay's plot is so full of holes that readers may wonder if they've suffered from one of Mark's frequent blackouts.

With perfectly executed sardonic wit, narrator Pete Simonelli inhabits world-weary Mark Genevich, a South Boston private eye whose nightmarish new case may be the end of him. Genevich suffers from a severe form of narcolepsy that results in hallucinations and seizures. Simonelli communicates Genevich's panicked confusion when he wakes from a dream to discover that a new case has literally been dropped in his lap. With humor and spot-on pacing, Simonelli takes listeners through the twists and turns of the investigation, which is jam-packed with red herrings, missing fingers, and menacing goons. The case will keep listeners guessing, but it is Simonelli's nuanced portrayal of this street-smart and single-minded detective that leaves a lasting impression. S.A.H. � AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine