Awards

• Commended for Listen Up (Fiction) 2010

Overview

Every day, more and more people have been found to have contracted the illness. It reveals itself gradually, inhibiting sleep, eating away at one's mind, birthing panic and confusion, until the final few months before death known as the suffering. The epidemic has swept the globe, and now infects one in ten people. Straight-arrow cop Parker T. Haas is working undercover as a dealer in the black-market trade of Dreamer, the only known drug that offers relief for the sleepless. The drug is in small supply and impossibly high demand, and in his darker moments, Park admits to himself that his interest in it goes beyond the professional. His own wife, Rose, has been sleepless for months, and they haven't yet found the courage to find out if their infant daughter is also sick. Though the stress at work and at home are weighing on him, Park presses on, feeling like he's on the cusp of learning something crucial about the disease.

Full Product Details

9781441726339

Table of Contents

Reviews

A writer as skilled as Huston can make an apocalyptic story terrifyingly plausible. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) I like assassins possessed of style, exceptional lethality, and unusual self-awareness. Jasper has all that, and more. He's the best fictional assassin I've come across in a long time: believable, fascinating, ruthless. A joy to spend time with, as is the book itself. The characters, the vision, the atmosphere...long after the final page surrenders the last of the story's surprising and utterly satisfying secrets, Sleepless will stay with you. It's Charlie's best yet--his most ambitious, his most engrossing, his most affecting. -- Amazon.com, editorial review Huston's impressive, challenging thriller...will gain him a whole new readership. -- Publishers Weekly Huston's brilliant mixture of sci-fi and noir crime, in dialogue with and arguably improving on such past dystopian visions as the film Blade Runner and William Gibson's Neuromancer, features Los Angeles in the throes of a bizarre epidemic that renders the infected sleepless and bound for eventual death, and two narrators: young undercover LAPD cop and family man Parker 'Park' Haas and the aging but amazingly resourceful mercenary known as Jasper. The use of dual readers--Mark Bramhall and Ray Porter, as Jasper and Park respectively--helps to identify the points of view. For the cop, a former Stanford professor struggling to care for his family and do his job, Porter employs an intelligent voice tinged by bitterness and anxiety. But it's Bramhall who's given the plum assignment: Jasper is cool, cynical, dryly humorous, and always in control, even when faced with overwhelming odds. He's an actor's dream, and Bramhall's dry, bemused, and at times darkly humorous delivery is stunning. -- Publishers Weekly (audio review) Why stop at adapting genre conventions when you can re-invent the whole genre? That seems to be Charlie Huston's modus operandi in Sleepless, a traditional police procedural neatly tucked into a stunningly original work of speculative fiction. -- New York Times One of the most remarkable prose stylists to emerge from the noir tradition in this century. -- Stephen King

One of the most remarkable prose stylists to emerge from the noir tradition in this century. -- Stephen King Why stop at adapting genre conventions when you can re-invent the whole genre? That seems to be Charlie Huston's modus operandi in Sleepless, a traditional police procedural neatly tucked into a stunningly original work of speculative fiction. -- New York Times Huston's brilliant mixture of sci-fi and noir crime, in dialogue with and arguably improving on such past dystopian visions as the film Blade Runner and William Gibson's Neuromancer, features Los Angeles in the throes of a bizarre epidemic that renders the infected sleepless and bound for eventual death, and two narrators: young undercover LAPD cop and family man Parker 'Park' Haas and the aging but amazingly resourceful mercenary known as Jasper. The use of dual readers--Mark Bramhall and Ray Porter, as Jasper and Park respectively--helps to identify the points of view. For the cop, a former Stanford professor struggling to care for his family and do his job, Porter employs an intelligent voice tinged by bitterness and anxiety. But it's Bramhall who's given the plum assignment: Jasper is cool, cynical, dryly humorous, and always in control, even when faced with overwhelming odds. He's an actor's dream, and Bramhall's dry, bemused, and at times darkly humorous delivery is stunning. -- Publishers Weekly (audio review) Huston's impressive, challenging thriller...will gain him a whole new readership. -- Publishers Weekly I like assassins possessed of style, exceptional lethality, and unusual self-awareness. Jasper has all that, and more. He's the best fictional assassin I've come across in a long time: believable, fascinating, ruthless. A joy to spend time with, as is the book itself. The characters, the vision, the atmosphere...long after the final page surrenders the last of the story's surprising and utterly satisfying secrets, Sleepless will stay with you. It's Charlie's best yet--his most ambitious, his most engrossing, his most affecting. -- Amazon.com, editorial review A writer as skilled as Huston can make an apocalyptic story terrifyingly plausible. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A writer as skilled as Huston can make an apocalyptic story terrifyingly plausible. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Huston's brilliant mixture of sci-fi and noir crime, in dialogue with and arguably improving on such past dystopian visions as the film Blade Runner and William Gibson's Neuromancer, features Los Angeles in the throes of a bizarre epidemic that renders the infected sleepless and bound for eventual death, and two narrators: young undercover LAPD cop and family man Parker 'Park' Haas and the aging but amazingly resourceful mercenary known as Jasper. The use of dual readers--Mark Bramhall and Ray Porter, as Jasper and Park respectively--helps to identify the points of view. For the cop, a former Stanford professor struggling to care for his family and do his job, Porter employs an intelligent voice tinged by bitterness and anxiety. But it's Bramhall who's given the plum assignment: Jasper is cool, cynical, dryly humorous, and always in control, even when faced with overwhelming odds. He's an actor's dream, and Bramhall's dry, bemused, and at times darkly humorous delivery is stunning. -- Publishers Weekly (audio review) Huston's impressive, challenging thriller...will gain him a whole new readership. -- Publishers Weekly I like assassins possessed of style, exceptional lethality, and unusual self-awareness. Jasper has all that, and more. He's the best fictional assassin I've come across in a long time: believable, fascinating, ruthless. A joy to spend time with, as is the book itself. The characters, the vision, the atmosphere...long after the final page surrenders the last of the story's surprising and utterly satisfying secrets, Sleepless will stay with you. It's Charlie's best yet--his most ambitious, his most engrossing, his most affecting. -- Amazon.com, editorial review One of the most remarkable prose stylists to emerge from the noir tradition in this century. -- Stephen King Why stop at adapting genre conventions when you can re-invent the whole genre? That seems to be Charlie Huston's modus operandi in Sleepless, a traditional police procedural neatly tucked into a stunningly original work of speculative fiction. -- New York Times

Author Information

Charlie Huston is the bestselling author of The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death; The Shotgun Rule; the Henry Thompson trilogy, which includes the Edgar Award-nominated Six Bad Things; and the Joe Pitt Casebooks. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the actress Virginia Louise Smith. Ray Porter is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator and fifteen-year veteran of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He has appeared in numerous films and television shows, including Almost Famous, ER, and Frasier. Mark Bramhall has won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration, more than thirty AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has repeatedly been named by AudioFile magazine and Publishers Weekly among their Best Voices of the Year. He is also an award-winning actor whose acting credits include off-Broadway, regional, and many Los Angeles venues as well as television, animation, and feature films. He has taught and directed at the American Academy of Dramatic Art.

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