The Plastic Nightmare / While Love Lay Sleeping

by Richard Neely, J.F. Norris (Introduction)

THE PLASTIC NIGHTMAREWhen he comes out of the coma, they tell him he’s been in a very serious accident. His car flew off the side of the road, throwing his wife clear, but badly disfiguring him in the smashup. They’ve performed plastic surgery on him, but the problem is, he doesn’t remember any of it. He doesn’t even remember who he is. Dan Marriott only knows that he has a sexy wife named Judith, partnership in a successful stockbroker firm, and a beautiful home in the Marin hills. But none of it seems familiar to him. Then he begins to discover that his happy marriage hadn’t been so happy, that there had been another man, that possibly he had been set up to drive over that cliff. If only he could remember, before they try to kill him again…WHILE LOVE LAY SLEEPINGTwenty years ago Paul Sevrance returned from World War II to find that his young wife Cathie had committed suicide in her apartment. The ghost of that past still haunts him. Now he is going through her trunk for the first time since the tragedy and discovers a letter she had written to him the same day she turned on the gas—but had never sent. He also finds her suicide note. But something just doesn’t make sense here. Part of the suicide note has been cut away. And nothing in Cathie’s letter indicates the thoughts of a woman contemplating killing herself. While Paul was away, could his wife have had an affair… and if so, could her suicide have been instead a case of murder?

347 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 15, 2021

About the author

Like a lot of American pulp authors, Richard Neely started out a newspaperman. He then embarked on a successful career in advertising before turning to crime writing in his 50s. In 14 years he produced 15 novels.

Reviews

[John Marr · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE PLASTIC NIGHTMARE: Few noir tropes are as well-worn as amnesia. But Neely manages to come up with a new one--highly unlikely, wildly unrealistic, but refreshingly startling for us jaded readers. Recommended.