Tricky, tantalizing ‘Sleepwalker’ will keep you up at night
Great mystery writers, like great magicians, have the ability to hide the truth that’s right before your eyes.
Best-selling novelist Chris Bohjalian is at the full power of his literary legerdemain in his newest book, The Sleepwalker (Doubleday, 304 pp., eeeg).
The author of Midwives and The Guest Room returns to smalltown Vermont for this mystery thriller about a gorgeous sleepwalker, Annalee Ahlberg, who disappears from her bed one night when her husband is away on a business trip.
Annalee’s daughters, Lianna and Paige, are panicstricken. It’s been nearly four years since Annalee’s last nighttime escapade; she sleepwalks only when her husband is away and has been in treatment for her parasomnia since she walked naked to the precipice of a bridge before Lianna arrived to rescue her.
Clues are scant: a swatch of blue cloth from Annalee’s nightshirt is found clinging to a branch.
Lianna delays her senior year at Amherst to take care of her father, Warren, a professor, and Paige, a worldly-wise 12-year-old, until Annalee — or her body — is found. Lianna and Paige’s relationship is just right; loving siblings aching for their mother while asserting their independence as young women.
While Lianna numbs herself with pot and hones her magic act as Lianna the Enchantress, she finds herself increasingly drawn to Detective Gavin Rikert, who has a disturbing level of intimate knowledge about her mother’s sleep issues.
Patching clues from cryptic emails her mother sent and conversations with Annalee’s friend and a gossipy pastor, Lianna discovers that her mother was a sleepsexer, a rare disorder that compels people to seek nocturnal sexual encounters with the same relentlessness that vampires stalk blood.
Bohjalian teases and tantalizes the reader, alternating chapters with diary entries from a sleepsexer. But whose diary is it?
Annalee’s disappearance soon becomes a mysterious death, and Lianna is suspicious of everyone, including the handsome Gavin. Bohjalian’s masterful plotting evokes a magician who distracts his audience to look this way, not that way.
The ending will have the reader rereading for missed clues.
The Sleepwalker is Bohjalian at his best: a creepily compelling topic and an illusionist’s skill at tightening the tension. This is a novel worth losing sleep over.