Sandman, Sleep

Veteran author Herbert Lieberman just last year landed on the New York Times best-seller list for Shadow Dancers, which Inside Books heralded as "absolutely brilliant ... a plot that is, to say the least, bone-chilling." Now he returns with his newest and most unusual work to date: Sandman, Sleep. The time is the year 2070. In the brave new world of molecular biology and genetic coding, the previously unthinkable has become the perfectly commonplace. Scientists have unlocked the key to aging; some have even discovered ways to arrest it. In a twelfth-century French castle, transported stone by stone to the remote vastness of a North American wilderness, Mr. Orville Jones, an elusive billionaire industrialist-cum-amateur scientific tinkerer, has isolated a protein that renews the capacity of aging cells to reproduce themselves almost indefinitely. But just outside the castle walls in the vast surrounding forests, a degenerate race of fierce, highly inbred, dwarflike creatures known as the Woodsmen have their own agenda. They covet Mr. Jones's biologically superior strain of long-lived offspring and are determined to crossbreed them with their own. All of these forces exist within an uneasy peace. But the morning that Orville Jones is found dead in his bed with a dart driven through his throat is the signal for the Woodsmen to go into action and for all hell to break loose. Onto the scene steps Colonel Porphyry, Chief Inspector of the mainland's Criminal Investigative Unit - a man unlike any other detective in all the annals of crime literature. Imagine if Tolkien, the brothers Grimm, H. G. Wells, and Georges Simenon had collaborated on a story about genetics, immortality, and murder. Imagine if Inspector Maigret had come to the Island of Doctor Moreau to solve the riddle of Sleeping Beauty's ageless trance and you have something approaching Sandman, Sleep: a totally original, and unforgettable, novel.


Genre: General Fiction