Sleep No More

Few authors are as prolific and successful in their chosen field as Jayne Ann Krentz, and has who knows how many NYT Bestsellers to her credit. Sleep No More kicks off a new trilogy, The Lost Night Files. Krentz specializes in Romantic Suspense with a paranormal twist in both contemporary and historical settings.

Pallas Llewellyn spent the night at The Lucent Springs Hotel and woke up with frighteningly enhanced psychic abilities and no memories of the night. Two other women, Amelia Rivers, and Talia March had the same experience. They reacted differently, but all their lives changed. The three have banded together and now have a cold case podcast. They cover all sorts of cases, but their own is always uppermost. When Pallas gets a message from Ambrose Drake suggesting she investigate the Carnelian Sleep Institute and that he witnessed a murder there, she agrees to meet him. After a rough start, the two make a deal to work together. There is a lot of shady activity in the town of Carnelian, including murder, drug rings, and financial malfeasance at a small local college.

Krentz always writes engaging characters, and Sleep No More does not disappoint. I especially liked Ambrose Drake, a writer whose life has been upended by his experience at Carnelian. He suffers from crippling sleep deprivation and is not precisely the macho hero. His writing career is in shambles, and his personal life even more so. He is a mess, but the two manage to find love and support despite it all. It is quite a refreshing twist on the usual, and this mystery comes with another twist, one I never saw coming.