Sleeping Beauty is a
carefully plotted murder mystery that starts out with the rape and murder of a
teenaged girl and the killing of the heroine’s father.  Author Miles Van Meter
describes the murder of the girl and the escape of her best friend sixteen year
old Ashley Spencer in his true-crime book, called Sleeping Beauty.  Van
Meter’s book vividly describes how the killer invaded Ashley’s house,
terrorized her, and tied her up.  Her fatally injured father crawled into his
daughter’s bedroom and helped to free her, and she jumped from the second story
window and ran for her life.  In the present, Van Meter is on a book tour
promoting his best-selling book, but the book spends most of its pages to
describing the past, and the bizarre series of events that lead up to the
present.  At the start of the novel, it seems that anyone who is close to
Ashley Spencer was likely to die.  However, the death rate starts to slow down
after the first quarter of the book, once Ashley decides to leave America and
lives in Europe until she is twenty-two.  She returns home when she learns some
startling news about her family.

Margolin’s characterization is weak:
the people in his novel are one-dimensional and consequently dull.  The leaps
in the plot are massively implausible and often silly.  The writing is somewhat
repetitive and lacks style.  Yet, for all these weaknesses, the book is
compelling and diverting.  The unabridged audiobook is read competently by
Suzanne Houston, although she lapses into silly accents for some of the minor
characters. For people looking for graphic violence, far fetched plotlines with
many twists and turns and a "surprise ending," and rather mindless
entertainment, Sleeping Beauty will suffice.  Margolin does plant clues
about the solution to the mystery all through the novel, and manages to write
in a way that will keep the reader’s interest. 

© 2005 Christian
Perring. All rights reserved. 

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also
editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on
philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction, AudioBooks