Sleeping Dogs Lie

by Julian Gloag

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671424947
• ISBN13: 9780671424947
• Release Date: November 1981
• Publisher: Pocket
• Length: 404 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Slow starting, but a frenzied finish of food for thought....

A friend supplied this 1980's novel to me recently, perhaps because of my career as a domestic violence counselor. I found it tedious for the first 70 pages, but the next 240 grabbed me and would not let go. It is a murder mystery, a psychological puzzle, a study of arrogance, smugness, guilt, gossip, shame, blame and misunderstandings. A college student enters therapy because he cannot bring himself to use a stone staircase at his dormitory. That "presenting problem" leads the psychiatrist, Hugh Welchman, the ostensible hero of the book, to try to unravel the truth behind the "accidental" death of the boy's mother 14 years earlier. There are half-a-dozen people who might have pushed the woman down the home staircase. By the time the book ends, nearly each one has accused someone else and also confessed to the deed him or her self. In fact, after a couple of tragic events, as the book comes to a sad close, we, the readers, are not really sure we know the full truth. Has anyone survived the detective work in better shape than he or she was at the start? Is the final explanation for who killed whom, and who tried to kill whom, and why the latter plan was foiled, really the solution, brilliant as it seems? If you like novels with an excess of British atmosphere, this is for you...the fogs and drizzles of Dr. Welchman's college town are presented with great force, almost characters themselves. Have patience with this one. I'm glad I did. The story stays with you long after you are done, but don't expect a cheerful ending.

Close to timeless, but certainly excellent

This is an excellent book. There is enough deception to keep your attention, enough variety of character to keep you interested, and enough skillful writing to make you sit back in admiration. The tale is simple but yet far from simple. A young man needs help. And a psychiatrist, who thinks he knows it all, has to see whether his profession really has something to offer this needy young man. He knows all the right words, the proper diagnoses, and the names and papers, but struggles with making all this "stuff" actually apply in the lives of people around him. Hugh Welchman cannot make it work, and the beauty of his self-discovery, the layers of deception and confusion and misery and unhappiness, obscured by the fog of Cambridge and the fog of his cigarettes, is just delightful. "A world in which things are not what they seem" as every film trailer says, and in this case, it is true. And never to be filmed by Hollywood, for the falseness here is not on the surface, but beneath layers of gentility, English propriety, and tradition. A beautiful tale. Worth a careful read.

Back Cover Copy

Alex Brinton's mother was dead at the bottom of the stairs...An accident.It was over now. Let the dead rest. Why trouble the innocent? Let sleeping fogs lie.But it was not over for Alex Brinton - or psychiatrist Hugh Welchman. Why was Alex paralyzed with fear of descending the stone staircase at the college? And what hidden terrors still shrouded the whole Brinton family in mystery and suspicion?Now a psychological puzzle has become an obsession for Hugh Welchman, driving him to dig deeper and deeper...to question his own neighbors...his own friends...even his oown wife. Suddenly his ordered world is beginning to slip...and fall.For among the most ordinary people lurk secrets...secrets of secual aberration...secrets of betrayal...dark secrets...Guilty secrets."An absorbing, affecting, richly detailed tour de force...it demands to be read!"- CHICAGO SUN TIMES

Sleeping Dogs Lie

Is it better to allow sleeping dogs their eternal rest? Oedipus couldn't do it, not while the city he ruled suffered. Neither can psychiatrist Hugh Welchman, no matter how many times he is warned, when he takes on a 19 year old student terrified to descend his dormitory's stone. Nor can the reader stop turning the pages of elegant prose, a psychological thriller in which twists and turns of plot --and genre-- verge on the Gothic.