Dead Sleep

Starred review from June 11, 2001
Iles continues to amaze with his incredible range, this time around crafting a complex serial killer novel with the intimacy of a smalltown cozy and the punch of a techno-thriller. As different from Spandau Phoenix
and 24 Hours
as possible, it scores with surefooted plotting, a diverse cast of characters and perfectly calibrated suspense. An anonymous painter's series of candidly posed nudes called The Sleeping Woman
bursts on the art scene, each painting selling in the million-dollar range overnight amid rumors that the models are not sleeping but dead. Beautiful, burned-out war photographer Jordan Glass chances into a show and recognizes the subject of a painting as her identical twin, Jane, who was kidnapped near her New Orleans home and never found. Jordan contacts the FBI agent who handled her sister's case, thereby setting in motion a hunt that ties the paintings to the disappearance of at least 11 New Orleans women. Persuading the FBI task force to add her to the team, Jordan tags along to Tulane University, where evidence points to art department head Roger Wheaton, who has a peculiar terminal illness, and his brilliant but disturbed graduate students. Meanwhile, Jordan falls for damaged FBI agent John Kaiser, and together they link her sister's case to a French expat art collector from Vietnam who knew Jordan's war photographer father who disappeared in Cambodia. Are all the women really dead? Is Jordan's father alive and involved? Is there more than one killer? Iles keeps the reader guessing right up to the double surprise ending, delivering the perfect final payoff his readers expect.

There is nothing dead about the writing or reading of Iles's latest--both are imaginative and exciting from beginning to end. Award-winning Mississippi journalist Jordan Glass, whose twin sister disappeared 18 months earlier, comes upon a portrait of her reposing in death for sale to art connoisseurs. Thus begins the intense search for a serial killer who has abducted and painted dozens of beautiful women. As the plot twists and turns, Breck captures Jordan's Southern accent, a male FBI agent's staccato pronouncements, and an art professor's courtly manner. Susie Breck is at her best when portraying a steamy alliance between heroine and agent and in the tense moments leading to the breathless conclusion. A.L.H. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine