Sleep No More

by Greg Iles

(2001)

Publisher: Putnam

John Waters is a successful businessman and a happy family man–but his life comes crashing down around him with one word from a beautiful stranger: “Soon.” Suddenly, he is face to face with a memory from his past–of an obsession that he thought he had escaped. One that now plunges him into the darkest side of love and passion…

In Sleep No More, Greg Iles returns to the territory of some of his best-loved works, the steamy and hypnotic small-town Mississippi where Iles himself grew up. In this new novel, John Waters is a husband and father happy with his lot in life, though he has not always felt that way. Years earlier he escaped an obsessive love affair, which he feared might consume him. The woman in question disappeared after Waters married, and later he heard that she was killed in New Orleans. But now, Waters has the uneasy feeling that she has resurfaced to trouble him-and entice him-once again.

A woman whom he meets casually stuns him with a smile, and a secret only this former lover would know. But when this alluring stranger is suddenly murdered, Waters’s quiet life is enveloped in a whirlwind of guilt and suspicion, revealing the shadow sides of love and friendship-and the terror that can result when passion becomes obsession.