Sandman, Sleep

The murder of an enigmatic man named Jones leads authorities to the children the man had kept locked away in a castle at the northernmost point of the American continent. From the inside flap The times is the year 2070. In the brave new world of molecular biology and genetic coding, the previously unthinkable has become the perfectly commonplace. Scientists have unlocked the key to aging; some have even discovered ways to arrest it. In a twelfth-century French castle, traspoted stone by stone to the remote vastness of a North American wilderness, Mr. Orville Jones, an elusive billionaire industrialist-cum-amateur scientific tinkerer, has isolated a protein that renews the capacity of aging cells to reproduce themselves almost indefinitely. But just outside the castle walls in the cast surrounding forests, a degenerate race of fierce, highly inbred, dwarflike creatures known as the Woodsmen have their own agenda. They covet Mr. Jones's biologically superior strain of long-lived offspring and are determined to crossbreed them with their own. All of these forces exist within an uneasy peace. But the morning that Orville Jones is found dead in his bed with a dart driven through his throat is the signal for the Woodsmen to go into action and for all hell to break loose. Onto the scene steps Colonel Porphyry, Chief Inspector of the mainland's Criminal Investigative Unita man unlike any other detective in all the annals of crime literature. Imagine in Tolkien, the brothers Grimm, H. G. Wells, and Georges Simenon had collaborated on a story about genetics, immortality, and murder. Imagine in Inspector Maigret had come to the Island of Doctor Moreau to solve the riddle of Sleeping Beauty's ageless trance and you have something approaching Sandman, Sleep : a totally original and unforgettable novel. REVIEWS "Lieberman has tapped humerous deep wells of classic literature and mythology and produced a novel that is at once horrigying and thrilling, and that transcends genre. Sandman, Sleep is a remarkable achievement."George Chesbro, author of The Language of Cannibals Formats : EPUB