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The Sleeping Doll (2007)
Jeffery Deaver is back with a dark and multilayered psychological thriller about a vicious killer's escape from a California super-prison and the mysterious and deadly quest he embarks
on once he's free.
Making her first appearance in The Cold Moon (2006), special agent Kathryn Dance—a brilliant interrogator and body language expert—stars in The Sleeping Doll,
where she and her partners at the California Bureau of Investigation hunt down escaped killer Daniel Pell, a self-styled Charles Manson.
Deaver's most frightening villain to date,
Pell is a master of control, who mesmerizes, seduces, and exploits people for his own murderous ends. To track down Pell before he destroys more lives, Kathryn Dance must enlist the help of people from
the killer's past: the three women who lived under his sadistic sway in the cult he once headed, as well as the young girl known as The Sleeping Doll, the only survivor of her family's slaughter at
Pell's hand.
Filled with masterful plot twists: Jeffery Deaver creates plots with so many twists and turns they could "hide behind a spiral staircase" (People), and The Sleeping Doll has Deaver's trademark twists in spades. It is guaranteed to keep readers guessing right up to the breathless end.
The Sleeping Doll has been released in hardcover in the USA, Canada, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, the
UK, and Ireland. It is also available as an audiobook, an eBook, and in large print. The mass market paperback will be released in May 2008 in the USA and Canada, and in July in the UK and Ireland.
Reviews:
Something like Jeffery Deaver's intricately plotted thriller "The Sleeping Doll" serves me just fine. Taking his own kind of break here, Deaver leaves his regular series detective, Lincoln Rhyme, back in
New York to putter with the forensic evidence that engages his brilliant intellect. Instead, Deaver turns the story over to a new protagonist, Kathryn Dance, the California interrogation expert who made
a brief but strong contribution to his previous Lincoln Rhyme novel, "The Cold Moon." Although Dance's specialty is kinesics — the scientific evaluation of the hidden clues in body language — she's just
as obsessive about minutiae as Rhyme, and her first case is a dazzling mental contest with a charismatic cult leader, Daniel Pell, who has escaped from prison and found a new slave to carry out his
homicidal agenda. Because Pell is too wily to leave any physical evidence behind, the only way Dance and her colleagues at the California Bureau of Investigation can try to predict his moves is to
interrogate the victims he has duped and the surviving members of his former "family." With Dance analyzing every verbal and physical expression for stress clues, all talk becomes treacherous. The
attractive Dance has plenty of personal business going on (including a nice hobby as a folk music "song catcher") and could easily carry a new series, but Pell, who with good reason fancies himself a
modern-day Pied Piper, is the main attraction here. "What a total high it was to practice his art once again," he exults after killing a victim so gullible she practically walks into his arms. This
disturbingly intelligent monster takes us deep into his confidence, sharing both the philosophy and the diabolical techniques of an utterly ruthless cult leader: "Nothing made him happier than
transforming someone into a creature of his own making." Master manipulator that he is, Deaver shows us exactly how it's done — and makes us admire his own literary artistry.
— Marilyn Stasio, New York Times
Kathryn Dance, an investigator with the California Bureau of Investigation, returns from Deaver's The Cold Moon (where she was a secondary) in this post–prison break pulse-pounder. Dance is the lead cop handling the escape of psychopathic killer Daniel Pell, dubbed "Son of Manson" by the press for his "family" of young runaways and his most horrendous crime, the murders of computer engineer William Croyton, Croyton's wife and two of their three children. The only child left alive, nine-year-old Theresa, is known as the Sleeping Doll. Pell, charismatic and diabolically intelligent, continually eludes capture, but Dance, a specialist in interrogation and kinesics (or body language), is never more than a few suspenseful minutes behind. Dance is nicely detailed, and procedural scenes where she uses somatic cues to ferret out liars are fascinating. The book sags in its long middle, but toward the end Deaver digs into his bottomless bag of unexpected twists and turns, keeping readers wide-eyed with surprise, and leaving them looking forward to more of the perspicacious Dance.
— Publishers Weekly
The prolific Deaver sets California Bureau of Investigation agent Kathryn Dance on the trail of a brilliant, sociopathic murderer who has broken out of jail. The chase is on, and so are the surprises.
— Sacramento Bee
This is a fascinating novel, full of surprises, especially as it approaches a conclusion. The novel is up to the standard of a Jeffrey Deaver effort and is rewarding reading. Highly recommended.
— Gloria Feit, Crimespree Magazine
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