Each year, a thriller captures the zeitgeist. It receives an enormous publishing advance, sells in truckloads and sends its author on a whirlwind tour of literary festivals and media engagements – think Paula Hawkins’ Girl on a Train, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl or TJ Newman’s Falling.
The first contender this year is this much-hyped debut (its tagline is “the thriller that will wake up a nation”) about a young woman who, it appears, stabs two of her best friends and then promptly falls asleep for the next four years due to a psychosomatic condition called resignation syndrome.
Enter forensic psychologist Dr Benedict Prince, who specialises in sleep issues. He has written papers on the case, consults for most major crime agencies and works at a clinic in London’s Harley Street, where the wealthy go to soothe their psychic sleep demons.
That’s where Anna Ogilvy, the “most famous murder suspect in the world”, ends up, too, hurriedly transferred from a secure hospital as her case is being challenged by Amnesty International for inhumane treatment. The prosecutors need her to wake up so she can stand trial.
Prince is given the okay by the Ministry of Justice to try out his experimental theories, which seem to consist of playing the sleeping patient some of her favourite pop songs, in a last-ditch attempt to rouse Anna.
He has been tied to the case from the beginning since his then wife – a police officer – was one of the first on the murder scene.
The premise is rich with promise and Matthew Blake, who has worked as a speechwriter and researcher in Westminster, essentially writes a pretty straightforward detective story with Prince in the role of the flawed detective.
The public reaction to Anna is deeply divided, the press storm fuelled by her two prominent parents, a hedge fund dad and a mother who was a baroness in the House of Lords before her daughter’s actions forced her to resign and turn to religion.
Anna’s perspective is delivered via her notebooks, which reveal her business partners in a magazine venture are conspiring against her and her family life is in freefall: “Mum is politicking in her study. She barely raises an eyebrow at my arrival. Dad is printing money in New York City and probably romancing some Eiffel Tower blonde with impeccable lashes and a degree from Wharton.”
She also hopes to write the next great crime novel – the modern equivalent of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood no less. Blake also references Harry Potter, various Greek myths and copious Alfred Hitchcock movies.
Blake’s research into “sleep crime” features prominently and he’s deft at incorporating it into the narrative without it appearing as an info dump.
The novel was inspired by the real-life cases of refugee children who sought asylum in Sweden, their life circumstances so traumatic they disconnected from the world.
Blake writes half a great thriller. The second half unfortunately becomes somewhat confused and convoluted, as if it’s trying to will the narrative to a satisfactory ending. A major plot point – after much build-up – is passed over in a few pages and readers will have trouble investing emotionally in any of these characters.
Things aren’t helped by the fact that the final twist is pretty easy to spot, although many readers are likely to close this novel puzzled, as some of its key events make little sense in hindsight.
