Customer Reviews

ok but fails at the end
Compared to his latest stuff (The Cold Moon and the appallingly poor "More Twisted") this is a good thriller. It is very long but Deaver keeps you interested through the numerous pace changes, twists and turns etc. And the bad guy is really original, very wicked with some charming side, which I think was successfully rendered, he being some cult guru of sorts. But again the end of the book has a string of "it is not what it seems" and I got a little bit dizzy, it is too much, he could have made the book 40 pages shorter. In summary it was entertaning, but will not make a lasting impression. Not his best but not his worst.

Good, but far from the best.
I have to confess to being a huge Jeffery Deaver fan, I love his books and I've read most of them so when this came out I got my hands on it as soon as possible. It's a real shame to say it but I was really underwhelmed by this initially promising book.
First off, this is a spin-off from the Lincoln Rhyme series centered around Kathryn Dance, a kinesics expert who featured in 'The Cold Moon'. Dance is a strong central character at first and this book being based around kinesics rather than forensics makes a nice change not unreminiscent of 'The Devil's Teardrop'. Sadly the kinesics angle simply becomes repetitive as Dance interviews key person after key person with the same techniques and outcome which though relatively accurate to fact is not always very engaging since the whole process takes on a severe inevitability later on in the book. Dance herself is explored a fair bit in the book and shows a fair chunk of potential, however she's simply not as good a protagonist as Rhyme and she lacks enough individual charm to carry a book off on her own like Kincaid or Gillette could in 'The Devil's Teardrop' and 'The Blue Nowhere' respectively. Dance shows promise, but she would have probably been better kept as a continuing Rhyme character then a book's focus in and of herself.
The villain of 'The Sleeping Doll' is by far it's strongest point. Daniel Pell is a creepy and threatening force who oozes pure menace throughout the characteristically twisted plot, he stays unsettling and genuinely frightening to the very end but Deaver was never going to be able to make a whole book work purely on the basis of a really good villain.
The plot has all the trademark Deaver twists you'd expect, though seasoned fans may spot a few coming there's so many in there towards the end you'll definitely be surprised at least a few times and that's always good. I don't want to give too much away here so I'll stop just in case.
There's a further issue with the book that really damaged my enjoyment of it, which had not happened before with Deaver and isn't his fault, and that is the proof reading. I have no idea who proof read this thing but they did an appalling job since there are sentences and words repeated all over the place that are clearly Deaver just getting too caught up in what he's writing and that shouldn't be a problem since a half decent proof reader would pick up on and change them immediately but for some reason that didn't happen here and it really pulls you out of the book and gets pretty confusing in a few places.
'The Sleeping Doll' is an effective psychological thriller with an excellent villain and an adequate if underwhelming heroine, it's fun to read and still manages to surprise it's reader. But it's not all that great, Deaver's not given himself the best tools to work with and he's not used them as well as you'd expect from him. The novel's also badly proof read which is a major fault you wouldn't expect and can really hamper your enjoyment of the book. An OK installment for fans looking for something to tide them over till the next Lincoln Rhyme book, but that's really all it is - OK.

Subpar effort by Deaver
In the past I have had very positive experiences with Deaver's books, both in the Rhyme series and in the short story collections. Therefore, I was really looking forward to this novel, featuring a new main character, Kathryn Dance, an investigator that's an expert in kinesics. Sadly, even though I cannot say the book is bad, the overall result was well below what I expected.

Dance gets involved in the case of a cold-blooded killer, Daniel Pell, who, shortly after the book starts, escapes from prison in an ingenious and bombastic way. After that, the plot basically consists in the chase after the killer. I think that Deaver did a very good job in the development of the character of Daniel Pell, since we can clearly picture his motivations and way of thinking. On the other hand, he clearly falls short when considering the same aspect relatively to Dance. I felt that the author spent way too much time telling us about how she spots tells in the people she is talking to, identifying lies, fears and doubts, than he spent providing us with details that would allow us to form a complete picture of the lead character.

At first, the description of the process involved in kinesics is really interesting, but Deaver goes to that place way too often and towards the end of the novel it feels like he is beating a dead horse. The pace of the novel is pretty uneven too, with a start at full-speed and hitting several bumps along the way, some of them more pronounced than others. It looks to me as if the author is planning to continue using this character in future novels, and my hope is that he will correct the existing issues and deliver the kind of works we are used to getting from him. In my case, I am willing to give Dance a second chance.