With a dark brown, almost black oval body, with very thin antennas waving this way and that way, the cockroach inches closer to Leon's open mouth while he sleeps.
Leon opens his eyes and sees the cockroach approaching, but he is paralyzed with fear. In his mind, he is screaming for his wife, Natalie, to help him... but she doesn't answer. A long moment later, he is able to move again and realizes it was just a dream .... wasn't it?
Leon looks around and finds his wife packing a suitcase, and he is surprised. They've only been married 3 years .... and as she turns around, he sees the bruises on her face, the slash marks on her arms, the torn out fingernail. She says she has to go, grabs her suitcase and runs out the door. He is still dreaming, isn't he? Or is this reality?
As a child, Leon suffered from insomnia. His foster parents once found him standing over their other son with a knife held up as though ready to strike. The next morning he was returned to the home.
Another foster family took him in and sought psychiatric treatment for his condition. Eventually he felt he was cured. And now it's back again, isn't it?
This is a psychological thriller that finds an insomniac blending his waking hours into his sleeping hours. And now it's so bad, he can't tell when he's asleep and when he's awake. One thing he knows is that he can't remember anything from his sleeping time.
Leon is desperate enough to make major changes in order to determine what's real and what's not. Is that really a door behind the dresser? Or is is there only when he's sleepwalking? The maze that takes him to other people's apartments?
People die ... did he resort to violence while sleepwalking? Or was he awake?
Millions of people suffer from insomnia..and some of them walk in their sleep ... eat in their sleep ... can carry on complete conversations... and yet never remember what went on. It's only during waking hours that an insomniac may see something out of whack, something moved, something missing, something new they've never seen before.
This book is about Leon Nader... a man who thinks he might be going crazy. He can't tell the difference between waking and sleeping .. or the area in between.
As the readers follow along, reality blurs into fiction. There are so many twists and turns, the reader loses his/her own sense of reality.
This is a well-written psychological thriller. There is a major twist at the end that you never see coming!
Many thanks to the author / Pegasus Books / Netgalley who provided a digital copy. All opinions expressed are my own.