Sleep with Slander

by Dolores Hitchens

Book Overview

Private eye Jim Sader returns in a hard-hitting thriller set in the dark corners of sunny southern California

"You're playing with a child's life" The search for a kidnapped boy leads private detective (and ex-alcoholic) Jim Sader through a labyrinth of well-hidden family secrets and into the heart of an elaborate and malevolent deception. With little to go on--a tight-lipped client, an anonymous letter, a mother who is supposed to be...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1598536982
• ISBN13: 9781598536980
• Release Date: July 2021
• Publisher: Library of America
• Length: 245 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Out-Macdonalds Macdonald, yet falls short of classic status.

No less an authority on mysteries than Bill Pronzini has called this novel the finest mystery ever written by a woman. It is unquestionably a fine effort, although I think Leigh Brackett's works surpass it in panache if not plot.The hero of the book, Sader, is a PI in the Marlowe tradition, a single, good-hearted but tough, world-weary man given to smoking and thinking when not peering into keyholes. And the feel of the book is pure Ross Mac, as Sader is hired to locate a missing boy by a pompous rich man hiding more than a few skeletons in his family closet. Sader doesn't like the man, but agrees to take the case because of the boy. (And perhaps, just perhaps, because the man annoyed him by wanting to know if Sader was any good.) No one wants to seem to level with Sader, the trail is much colder than it should be, and then the one woman who may have been persuaded to help is killed before she can.This is as sad a tale as anything in detective fiction, with humor in one character for a couple of pages, then a return to all gloom and foreboding (which is not necessarily a criticism). It's about murder, dirty secrets, child abuse, rape, insanity, hidden identities, drunkenness, accidental drowning and dog-napping, among other things. After its twists have been straightened, it is neither about what nor whom it started out being about; you may guess whodunit, but not how or why. The fractured family situations and tortuous, tortured plots of Ross Mac have nothing on Hitchens' here.Still, something is missing. I was recommended this book as an able substitute for Chandler and Howard Browne, and while it somewhat fits that bill, there are certain attributes I expect from a book being given such a comparison, which Sleep With Slander does not provide. Despite all the hard-boiled elements of the Chandler idiom (minus the first-person narrative) being firmly in place, there is an indefinable softness to the work which holds it back. Hitchens scribed primarily feminine gothics, so this foray into PI-land might seem an inauthentic pastiche. A further detriment is the lack of perspective. This sort of thing seems to demand the intensely personal glimpses into battered souls only first-person writing can really achieve.What may be most damaging is the lack of any real style, or distinctive voice, to Hitchens' writing. There are none of the wisecracks of Chandler or Browne, little humor like Latimer or Davis would have injected, no explosive brusqueness as per Hammett. It is gracefully generic, somehow self-conscious prose, hung over the formidably crafted plot like loose skin.All these comments may make it sound as though I had an unfavorable impression of the book, and that's not true. I enjoyed reading it quite a bit. But it does not reach the status of a masterpiece, as I had been led to believe. And hindsight being 20/20, it was not memorable enough to purchase.