Book Review: Sleep Tight by J.H. Markert

Once upon a time in a small American town called Twisted Tree, a serial killer called Father Silence was caught in a house of horrors. 19 bodies were discovered and there was only one survivor: a boy now locked away in an asylum for the criminally insane. Now, two decades later, Father Silence has been executed, setting off a chain of events that no one could have foreseen. Children have been disappearing, bodies are turning up, and a new cult as emerged. Detective Tess Claibourne has a history with Fr. Silence. When her child goes missing, it's up to her and her tight knit group of friends to find her - before the worst happens.

Sleep Tight is a twisty, rapid-fire thriller. At the core is damaged detective Tess Claibourne, who battles inner demons and submerged traumatic memories with pills and alcohol all while watching her marriage go to shambles. When her parents are murdered and her daughter goes missing, she's forced to work with her ex-husband to solve the case before her child is hurt. The core cast - Tess, her husband Justin, their married friends the Gomeses - are solid characters with depth and vulnerability and, despite the many, many, MANY horrors and traumas in this book, there is a strong line of hope and decency throughout that surprised me.

That said, this book is... a lot. There are lots of characters, multiple back stories that twist and turn, and when I say trauma, I mean there is a LOT of trauma - child abuse, kidnapping, murder, torture, mutilation, drug abuse, rape, insanity, multiple houses of horror - you name it, this book has it. One character suffers from multiple personalities and Tess herself deals with submerged memories, an amnesia that protects from the horror of her past (she's initially a very unsympathetic character, which was off-putting.). It's a lot, maybe too much - there are too many characters and so many psycho murderers that someone should really look into the water supply of Twisted Tree. I was exhausted reading this and feel that it should have either been longer or about one third of the plot could have been excised to allow other plot points to be expanded upon and made digestible.

Can I recommend this book? If you like thrillers that border on horror, with a core of true decency running through it and an ending that is complete (if almost too neat), then yes, Sleep Tight is for you. But if you're like me and start to get annoyed after about the fifteen horrible discovery of immeasurable misery (usually enacted on a small child), then stick with Simone St James or Riley Sagar.

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