Dead Sleep (2006)

By Greg Iles
Another thriller – in this, our heroine, Jordan Glass, is a burnt-out photojournalist whose twin sister vanished over a year ago from her home in New Orleans and is thought to have been the victim of serial killer. While in Hong Kong, Jordan stumbles across an exhibition of paintings, all of nude women, who may be sleeping but look more like they may be dead. And – one is an exact portrait of Jordan’s sister! (And therefore also of Jordan). Jordan immediately contact the FBI agents investigating the disappearances in New Orleans with this new information, and the story goes from there.

This was quite a nifty book, plot wise – nicely written too, and the author has certainly done some research regarding painting and art authentication. However…the character of Jordan bugged me from the start. She’s a pretty hard-nosed character – she’s tough, she gets what she wants, has had to survive in a man’s world etc etc – and I wondered if I was suffering from some culturally inflicted misogynism that disapproves of a somewhat mannish woman. Or did I succumb to my prejudices regarding men who write from the female perspective? (I.e. It never quite works). Whichever, I felt Jordan didn’t ring true. It felt like Iles was trying a bit too hard to make her a post-feminism modern woman – and yet a woman of which men would approve. Tough, but non-threatening all round. I don’t know, I’m babbling now. But not a bad read – I’ll give Iles another go.

So, is it possible for a man to write convincingly from a woman’s perspective, and vice versa? People seem to get in trouble, for example, for writing from the perspective of a black underprivileged drag queen if they are in fact a straight, upper-class white chick, but nobody blinks twice at men writing as women and so on. Not that I think you should blink, I think anyone should be free to write in the character of whoever they like – just that your resulting book might not be terribly convincing to anyone who really is a black underprivileged drag queen. The trouble with my theory is that I can’t judge its validity from anyone else’s perspective – I can only really judge books portraying white middle-class women of a certain age, after all.

Rating: 7 out of 10