The Sleepless

Novel by Graham Masterton (Scotland) 1993.

On his way to be enrolled as a Supreme Court Justice, John O'Brien is trapped with his family when their helicopter crashes. But amazingly someone is on the spot waiting for them, all but his daughter are gruesomely murdered and the helicopter blown up. In a scene reminiscent of the beginning of Red Dragon, retired insurance investigator Michael Reardon is persuaded back for one last job: to find out whether O'Brien died accidentally or whether he was murdered, in which case his multi-million dollar life insurance would not have to be paid.

Intensely gripping: even at 420 plus pages it's a one session read. Mixing torture and sadism with hypnotherapy and massive conspiracy, it is set against a background of urban race war where sections of Boston are in anarchy, making this a follow up in some ways to the exploration of racial issues that the author worked at so much in Burial. One of Masterton's most fascinating and genuinely innovative novels, it loses out on a maximum mark because of the terrible editing job inflicted upon it. Apart from numerous continuity flaws (the amount of O'Brien's life insurance policy, which floor Patrice Latomba's apartment is on, etc), there are two passages - the first on pages 169-170, the other on pages 326-327 - which are identical, even down to the identical dialogue. Such slipshod proof-reading is annoying and inexcusable, and if a future edition corrects the errors, this would become another Masterton novel worth a maximum ten.