Matthew Blake

A slow burning and twisty psychological thriller that reads like a cross between true crime and fiction. My new favorite description "faction".

The focus of the story is a phenomenon known as resignation syndrome. The main character, Anna Ogilvy, purportedly killed two people, wrote a confession, and promptly fell asleep. She's been in that state for years. Now, the powers that be want to wake her and bring Anna to trial. Forensic psychologist, Dr. Benedict Prince, is an expert in sleep disorders and Anna O is transferred to his clinic for a new method of treatment in the hope that he can wake the sleeping beauty. No spoilers.

So many characters and so many different points of view providing lots of detail lull the reader into believing they can figure out the truth of Anna's story. Did not work for me and I was quite surprised at several turns of the page. Just when I thought I had the gist, I found out that I definitely did not. Just don't bother and let the author string you along dropping hints and pieces here and there and let it all unfold in due course. Yes, the pacing was a bit slow and at times things drug a bit, but I feel like it all came together so well. I think an incredible debut and will definitely look for this author's future books. I liked the subject of sleep disorders and the clinical information as it showed a lot of research behind the scenes. More interesting is the question of how culpable someone should be for their actions if in the throes of something that they cannot control, don't choose, can't predict. Psychology, psychiatry, mental health -- perceptions of what goes on in the mind as separate from the brain. Something that happens in the psyche is as real as functional neurological disease. All great topics for discussion.

I enjoyed the book and thank the publisher for the e-book ARC to read, review, and recommend. I read along while listening to the audiobook of this title and appreciated the different narrators as they brought the story to life.… (meer)

There was a certain serendipity about my purchase of this book. I read a favourable short review of it in The Times, but decided to buy it as a consequence of a misunderstanding about the author. I misconstrued a throwaway comment in the review, and thought that Matthew Blake was a pseudonym for another writer whose recent spy fiction I had greatly enjoyed.

This was not, then, the espionage thriller that I had anticipated, but it proved no less enjoyable for that. It actually recounts the bizarre story of a young woman who was presumed to have murdered two friends and business partners while sleepwalking, and has remained in a state of sleep or catalepsy ever since – a span of four years at the time the book opens. That must sound bizarre, but this is all conveyed in a far more plausible manner in the book than my synopsis would suggest.

The book is largely narrated by Dr Ben Prince, a psychologist specialising in sleep issues, and especially cases of very deep sleep, with occasional interpolations from other characters, including Prince’s estranged wife (who was the first police officer on the scene of the original murders), and a woman who had been trying to investigate an infamous similar crime that had happened twenty years earlier.

I was hooked within the first three or four pages, and found the book positively fizzed along. While there is a lot of discussion of the psychological aspects of irregular sleep patterns and sleep deprivation, the jargon is never allowed to intrude in an awkward and inaccessible manner.… (meer)