The Sleepwalker: A Novel by Chris Bohjalian (Epub)

Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of The Flight Attendant comes a spine-tingling novel of lies, loss and buried desire—the mesmerizing story of a wife and mother who vanishes from her bed late one night.

Gorgeous, blond, successful, living in a beautiful Victorian home in a Vermont village, Annalee Ahlberg has another side: at night she sleepwalks, and her affliction manifests in ways both devastating and bizarre. A search party combs the woods, but there is little trace of Annalee and her family fears the worst. Her daughter Lianna leaves college to care for her father and younger sister. She finds herself uncontrollably drawn to Gavin Rikert, the hazel-eyed detective investigating the case, and the two become involved. But Gavin seems to know more about Lianna’s mother than he should. As Lianna sifts through the life Annalee has left behind, she wonders if the man sleeping next to her could hold the key to her mother’s mysterious disappearance.

User’s Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter OneEveryone in the county presumed that my mother’s body was decaying—becoming porridge—at the bottom of the Gale River. It was the year 2000, and we were but three seasons removed from the Y2K madness: the overwrought, feared end of the digital age. It was a moment in time when a pair of matching towers still stood near the tip of lower Manhattan. Fracking and photobomb and selfie were years from becoming words, but we were only months from adding to our vocabularies the expression hanging chad.I was twenty-one that summer and fall, and my sister was twelve. Neither of us fully recovered.The experts were surprised that Annalee Ahlberg’s body hadn’t been found, since a drowned body usually turns up near its point of entry into the water. But near is a relative term. And so police divers had searched long stretches of the waterway and even dredged a section along the levee that was built to protect the road from the flash floods that seemed to mangle the great, sweeping curve there every other decade. But there was no trace of her. They had scoured as well the small, shallow beaver pond in the woods a quarter of a mile behind my family’s red Victorian and found nothing there, too. Nevertheless, my younger sister and I thought it most likely that our mother was in that Vermont river somewhere. We hadn’t given up all hope that she would return alive—at least I hadn’t—but every day it grew harder to feign optimism for our father or say the right things (the appropriate things) when people asked us how we were doing.One day after school, a little more than two weeks after the police and the mobile crime lab and the Zodiac boats had moved on—when all the tips had proven apparitions—Paige took her swim fins, a snorkel, and a mask and had gotten as far as the edge of the river before I was able to convince her that she was wasting her time. My sister was sitting on a rock about fifteen feet above the water in her navy-blue tank suit with the profile of a seahorse on her hipbone, the suit she wore when she swam laps at the pool at the college where our father taught. Clearly she meant business. Paige was in the seventh grade then, already a daredevil ski racer to be reckoned with, and in the summer and fall, at her ski coach’s urging, most days she swam laps for an hour or so. She was still young enough to believe that she was a force of nature. She still dreamt when she was awake.“You know, the water is so low now, you really won’t need your fins,” I observed, hoping I sounded casual as I sat down beside her. I thought it was a little ridiculous that Paige thought her fins might be of use. It was the middle of September and it hadn’t rained in Vermont in a month. It hadn’t rained since our mother had disappeared (which we viewed as mere meteorological coincidence, not a sign of astrological or celestial relevance). The water was only shoulder high in that part of the river, and the channel was no more than ten or twelve yards wide. The fins would be an encumbrance, not an asset, to a swimmer as strong as Paige.“Then I won’t use them,” she mumbled.“Maybe at the basin,” I suggested, throwing her a bone. The basin, a little downstream of where we were sitting, was at the bottom of a small waterfall. The water was perhaps a dozen feet deep there, and she could use her fins to push to the bottom.“Maybe,” she agreed.The riverbank was steeply pitched, the slope awash with oak and maple saplings, the leaves already turning the colors of copper and claret. There were occasional clusters of raspberry bushes, the fruit by then long eaten by humans and deer. There were boulders and moss and mud—though that day, due to the drought, the earth was dry powder. Seven days earlier, Labor Day, the river was crowded with teenagers and children. Girls my age in bikinis sunned themselves on the unexpected rock promontories that jutted into the water. There were fewer swimmers than in summers past because, after all, it had been only a week and a half before then that the river had been filled with the search-and-rescue teams and the police. On some level, everyone who swam there or dozed on the boulders in the center of the Gale those waning days of summer feared they would stumble upon our mother’s corpse. But still the swimmers and sunbathers came. Parents still brought their children.The water was clear that late in the afternoon, and where it was shallow Paige and I could see the rocks along the bottom, some reminiscent of turtles and some shaped and colored a bit like the top of a human skull. Prior to our mother’s disappearance, I doubt that either of us would have associated a rock with a skull; it was inevitable we did now. When we were quiet, we could hear the burble of the current as it rolled west, sluicing between boulders and splashing against the brush and a fallen maple on the shore.I stretched my legs against a tree root. “And you know the water is a lot chillier these days than it was a couple weeks ago. It may be low in this section, but the temperature went down to forty degrees last night,” I reminded my younger sister.“It was sixty-five degrees at lunchtime today,” Paige countered. “I checked at school.”“The sun’s already behind the mountain. It’s probably fifty-five now. Look, you have goose bumps on your arms. You’ll last five minutes. Then you’ll either get out or you’ll get hypothermia. I’ll have to dive in after you.”“I won’t get hypothermia,” she said, unable to hide her irritation with me. “And you wouldn’t dive in after me, Lianna. You just don’t want me to look.”“Not in the river, I don’t.”“We both know—”“If there were clues in there, the police would have found them. They didn’t,” I said—though the truth was, I did in fact believe there were clues in the river. I believed that probably there were more than clues. I couldn’t help but imagine that our mother was in there. The body, in my mind, was lodged beneath the water somewhere between where the river passed through Bartlett and where it emptied miles to the west into Lake Champlain. The corpse was hooked to a jagged rock rising up from the bottom like a stalagmite. Or it was caught beneath a rusting car hood or trashed box spring or the barbed metal from a deteriorating wheelbarrow or boat or some other piece of detritus that had sunk to the bed of the river in those sections where it was deep. But if the divers hadn’t found our mother—or any clues—there was no way in the world that Paige was going to.“Well, we have to do something,” Paige insisted, her voice morphing from vexation to pout. “I know doing something—doing anything except calling your friends at college or doing your magic or smoking pot—is against your religion. But I’m not you.”“I’m doing something right now. I’m trying to stop you from accidentally freezing to death. Or, at least, wasting your time.”Paige lay back against the bank and spread out her arms like she was about to be crucified. For a kid who made short work of Olympic-sized swimming pools, it seemed to me that my sister’s biceps were sticklike. Paige had turned to the river that day only because she had given up her search of the beaver pond and the woods behind our house. I had seen her back there the other day, wading methodically in hip boots in invisible lanes from one end of the beaver pond to the other, scouring the water. In the end, she found nothing more interesting in there than a man’s tennis sneaker. Another time she walked through the woods, hunched over like a witch from a children’s picture book, studying the fallen leaves and humus for any trace of our mother. But this was land that had been searched and searched again by professionals and volunteers. Rows of women and men had walked side by side, almost shoulder to shoulder. They had found nothing. And neither had Paige. She had found nothing there and she had found nothing—other than empty beer bottles and candy wrappers and plastic coffee-cup lids—as she had walked for hours along the river-bank beside the road, kicking at the brush with her sneakers.“What are you going to make for dinner?” she asked me after a moment, the question breaking the silence like a flying fish breaking the water.“Can I take that to mean you’re going to put your energies to better use than going for a dip in the river?”“I guess.”“Thank you,” I said. “I would have been really pissed off if I’d had to go in and drag you out by your bathing suit.”“You didn’t answer my question.”It was a little before five. I had spotted Paige because I’d been walking to the general store for a bottle of Diet Coke and a brownie. I was only a little buzzed now, but I was still very, very hungry. I was also hoping that I might see something in the store’s refrigerator case that I could put on our father’s tab and call it dinner. Some potato salad, perhaps, and a couple of Mexican wraps. For a small store in a small village, the refrigerator case was impressive. When I was stoned—more stoned than I was that afternoon—the deli section made me think of a toy magic trick I’d had when I’d been younger than Paige was now, and I was first fantasizing that I might become a magician when I grew up. The trick was a red plastic vase no more than four or five inches tall, and it seemed never to run out of water. Or, to be precise, it seemed never to run out of water two times. Then it really did run dry. But twice you could seem to empty it before your—theoretically amazed—audience. The refrigerator case and deli section at the Bartlett General Store were a little bit like that to me, especially when I had the dope giggles.“Dinner. Let’s see,” I murmured. In the first days after our mother had disappeared, our father had been a cyclone of activity. He tried to make sense of the path the detectives and a K‑9 dog named Max had outlined across our yard—the way the grass had been matted down in the night, the way you could see what they decided were her footprints in the dew, and (most compelling) the small piece from the sleeve of her nightshirt, ripped and found hanging on the leafless branch of a dead tree along the bank of the river. He had designed posters with her picture on them and had Paige and me plaster them on telephone poles and bakery and grocery store corkboards for miles. I had spent hours and hours alone in my mother’s midnight-blue Pathfinder—an SUV my parents had gotten my junior year of high school because it was perfect for carting us all (but especially Paige) to and from the ski slopes, and because we would use it to haul my belongings to and from college—driving between Bartlett and Hinesburg and Middlebury, where my father taught at the college. He had placed ads with his wife’s photo in the area newspapers to prolong the story’s momentum and to prevent people from forgetting Annalee Ahlberg—because, he knew, quickly they would. People survive by being callous, not kind, he sometimes taught his students, not trying to be dismissive of the species, but realistic. How, he lectured, could we ever face the morning if we did not grow inured to the monstrosities that marked the world daily: tsunamis and plane crashes and terrorism and war? And even when the police followed up on a tip—an alleged sighting of a woman wandering aimlessly in her nightshirt, or a piece of clothing floating miles away in the river—and discounted it, he would investigate it on his own. His inquiries those first days often confused strangers and infuriated the police.At the same time, he had shocked the dean of faculty and the president of the college by informing them the Sunday of Labor Day weekend—barely more than a week after his wife had gone missing—that he still planned to teach that fall. It was, he said, the only way he could take his mind off the madness. Eight days later, Paige and I were sitting on the banks of the Gale. And while our father may have been himself in the classroom—inspiring one moment, glib the next—he had grown almost catatonic around Paige and me. He was utterly spent. He would drink till he slept in the evenings. In the days immediately after my mother’s disappearance, he had depended upon my aunt—his sister-in-law—to make everyone dinner and do the laundry and, occasionally, brush Joe the Barn Cat. And then my aunt had left, returning to her own family on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. My mother’s parents, frail and inconsolable, tried to help, but my grandmother was descending fast into the murk of Alzheimer’s. They understood they were making things harder, not easier, and soon had gone home to their colonial outside of Boston, where my grandfather could do his best to care for his wife in the surroundings she knew. The neighbors stopped bringing us lasagna and macaroni and cheese and bowls of cut fruit. And so the task of making dinner had now fallen to me. Though our father’s classes met only three days a week, he had gone to the college every day since Labor Day. Faculty meetings, he said. Introducing himself to his new student advisees. His own writing. Talking to people himself who thought they might have seen Annalee Ahlberg. Each day he had left early in the morning and come home just before dinner. It seemed to me that he couldn’t bear to be in the house. Did he believe that his wife was still alive somewhere? At first he said that he did, reassuring his daughters, but already he was more likely to speak of her in the past tense. I knew in my heart that, like me, he was convinced she had walked herself to her death in a moment of slow-wave, third-stage sleep.For a couple more minutes I sat beside my sister on the bank of the river, and neither of us said a word. I was just about to rise and resume my walk to the general store when Paige surprised me and asked, “Did they fight a lot? I mean, in comparison to other married couples?” She was talking about our parents.The short story prequel to THE SLEEPWALKER, THE PREMONITION (9781524732936) is available to read now! –This text refers to the paperback edition. Review A New York Times Bestseller”The Sleepwalker is more than a mystery: it’s a beautiful, wrenching novel of family secrets and the enigmas that link husbands and wives and lovers. And then that ending? Devastating and perfect.” —Harlan Coben”Great mystery writers, like great magicians, have the ability to hide the truth that’s right before your eyes. Bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian is at the full power of his literary legerdemain in his newest book. . . . The Sleepwalker is Bohjalian at his best: a creepily compelling topic and an illusionist’s skill at tightening the tension. This is a novel worth losing sleep over.” —USA Today”Sex, secrets and the mysteries of sleep: These are the provocative ingredients in Chris Bohjalian’s spooky thriller The Sleepwalker. It’s a dark, Hitchcockian novel. . . . Trust me, you will not be able to stop thinking about it days after you finish reading this book.” —The Washington Post”After a chronic sleepwalker goes missing, the general consensus is accidental death. But nothing is what it seems in this gripping mystery.” —Cosmopolitan”It takes unexpected answers to solve this mystery. Bohjalian’s latest will captivate readers who crave an edge-of-your-seat page-turner they can’t put down.” —Library Journal, starred review”One night when her professor husband is out of town, and while her teenage daughters sleep in their rooms, Annalee Ahlberg walks out her front door and heads toward the river. She is never seen again. . . . Bohjalian raises essential questions of identity and heredity, sexuality and desire, bringing the Ahlberg family conundrum into focus with a didn’t-see-that-one-coming powerhouse ending.” —Booklist”This stylish fusion of mystery and domestic thriller from Bohjalian explores the aftermath of the inexplicable disappearance of a woman prone to sleepwalking. . . . [The Sleepwalker is] powered by brilliantly rendered characters, an intriguing topic (parasomnia) and a darkly lyrical narrative that captures the melancholic tone of autumn in New England perfectly.” —Publishers Weekly”Sleepwalking inspires a hard-to-put-down story that also mixes sex and a mystery in a polished package. . . . Bohjalian is a gifted writer. . . . [He] weaves in hints, a red herring or two and a backstory that will leave readers with competing theories about who Annalee was and how that might have determined her fate. . . . Bohjalian is on top of his already stellar game with The Sleepwalker.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch”This is Bohjalian at his very best.” —The Seattle Times”Chris Bohjalian savors the experience of getting behind his characters’ masks, deep into their psyches, such that readers know far more about why the people in his novels do what they do than the characters themselves know. . . . Bohjalian’s newest novel, The Sleepwalker, is one of his most skillfully plotted. . . . An increasingly gripping tale layered with grave moral dilemmas.” —The Portland Press Herald”A perfectly crafted surprise ending. . . . Bohjalian succeeds in making us accomplices in a dark world we never knew existed.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel”Sex, secrets and the mysteries of sleep: These are the provocative ingredients in Chris Bohjalian’s spooky thriller The Sleepwalker. It’s a dark, Hitchcockian novel. . . that ends with a surprising and satisfying twist. It was so deliciously dark that I reread The Sleepwalker to pick up on all the subtle clues this clever novelist dropped with poetically perfect precision throughout.” —Houston Chronicle “The kind of mystery that builds to a startling climax, the kind that makes the reader wonder how such a trick was pulled off. . . . Bohjalian does a masterful job.” —The Boston Globe –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ Imagine a mountain. A boulder is on the top. The wind and rain eventually–but slowly–push the boulder inch by inch to the crest. And then gradually it begins to tumble down that mountain…ever so slowly at first and then it picks up an inexorable amount of speed until it comes crashing to the bottom. That crash is the reader finishing this book. And the sudden wind that just blew over the boulder at the bottom of the mountain? Those are the goosebumps on the reader’s arm.”The Sleepwalker” tells the story of a typical, but accomplished, woman, Annalee Ahlberg. Married with two daughters and a successful career as an architect, Annalee could be anyone–except she sleepwalks. And her sleepwalking has an unusual, if not creepy, undercurrent. One night, Annalee simply vanishes from her home in a small town in Vermont. Author Chris Bohjalian expertly tells this tale that morphs from a simple story about a grieving family into a thriller laced with lies, guile, sex and mystery.The book starts out VERY slowly. Repeat: very slowly. I imagine there are some readers who give up. Don’t be one of them. And pay attention. There are important clues embedded in this somewhat mundane beginning. But all of this is absolutely required as fuel for the powerful blast that is to come. Stick with it, and you will be richly rewarded. (See goosebumps above.)Hint: Read the Kindle Single “The Premonition” first. It’s a short story prequel to “The Sleepwalker” and offers great insight into the characters’ lives before the events of the novel.

⭐ I did finish this book, but I had to do it by skimming over a great deal of the last half. Once I’d begun, I needed to know how the mother actually died, but getting there was like dragging myself across a desert in search of water. I did learn a great deal I didn’t know about sleep walking, more than I wanted to know. I’m not at all sure what the purpose of the book was. None of the characters was particularly likeable. The plot could have been spelled out in 2 pages. It must have been written simply to inform. I know I’ve read another of his books I liked, but this one was a total waste of time and money. Bummer!

⭐ This storyline follows a young woman, Lianna, who has left college to return home to her father and younger sister when her mother goes missing. Even though Annalee Ahlberg is a successful architect and, to outward appearances, has everything, she harbors a secret problem, nocturnal sleepwalking. This isn’t an ordinary case. Annalee is known to wander the woods. One time, a few years before, Lianna heard her mother rise at night and followed her. Luckily, she did. She intercepted her mother about to jump off a bridge.Everyone, including the police, are worried that this scenario has been repeated. Only this time, no one was present to save her. The police have scoured the woods and searched along the nearby river, but no body has been found. Summer has turned to fall, and Lianna, Paige, her 11-year-old sister, and her father exist in a sort of limbo, not able to fully grieve.For Lianna, the passing time is challenging. She finds herself attracted to a detective on the case, Gavin Rickert, who at 33 is twelve years her senior. Rickert reveals he has a particular interest in Annalee’s case because he suffers from the same sleepwalking affliction. Lianna discovers how dangerous this can be when she sleeps with him overnight in his apartment. Gavin admits that he knew her mother through a sleep clinic they both attended to get help. To Lianna, this is highly unsettling. She begins to think that Gavin and her mother were involved. Lianna wonders what more Gavin is hiding.Few writers can create the same sense of uneasiness in readers as Chris Bohjalian. Each chapter begins with a diary entry from Annalee, which sometimes refers to an overwhelming sense of guilt for something she has done. The positioning of these personal reflections next to the evolving story of Lianna’s investigation into her mother’s past ratchets up the tension. I found Lianna’s dilemma to be overwhelmingly creepy. The idea that she would be seeing the same man that her mother might have increased the ick factor but propels the plot. I did have a problem with the idea that a detective would immediately form a relationship with the victim’s daughter, risking his career. This didn’t stop me from flying through the pages to the conclusion. Most mystery readers should find this book well-written and suspenseful with plenty of red herrings.

⭐ This is the best book I’ve read all year. Great pace, plotting, and a good twist. Once I finished it, I was tempted to start at the beginning and pick up on clues I missed. The subject of sleepwalking and its variations was new to me. It makes for a novel that pulls you in deeper with each chapter. I’ve read other books by this author and enjoyed them but this one is my favorite. You cannot tell who is lying, hiding something, or is totally out of the loop. Guessing answers is a blast here because you are unlikely to get it right. Great read.

⭐ I will read anything written by Chris Bohjalian and was eager to read this one as I had read the prequel. As another reviewer said, the book starts out very slowly but it is important to pay attention to all of the details revealed in these early chapters. This is not just a book about the disappearance of a woman with a unique sleepwalking disorder, but is about her family and the effect her disorder and disappearance have on them. It is told from the point of view of her older daughter who learns about herself, about her parents and their relationship and about her mother and her sleepwalking problem. I loved the book and put my Kindle down after finishing it and just sat for awhile digesting it.This is a book that I will remember for a long time and characters who will stay with me. An excellent read.

⭐ Boring book. I like this author and so was surprised by this droning, no action book. It takes half the book to finally find the sleepwalked mom (dead,btw) and then it stumps on trying to decide if she was killed and who the sister’s father was. Sigh. Do not buy this book unless you wish to be terminally bored.

⭐ I have read several other books by Chris Bojahlian, so I expected a well written series of events. Also, I am interested in the scientific aspects of sleepwalking. The suspense continued until the end with many possibilities for resolution. I felt that the conclusion was rushed, but maybe that was the author’s style,after presenting the reader so many clues. Still one of my go-to writers. Gritty, realistic, and satisfying books.

⭐ It has been years since I read work by Chris.Stupid! I love his writing.Lucky! I have many books of his to read.I read this one in two days. Been a long time since I did that. Probably the last time I read one of his.I am a old school feminist who reads almost only women writers!This man is a gifted writer.Read this book.I guarantee after you do, you will read them all.What ever was I thinking? I feel like an idiot.Sorry Chris.And thank you!

⭐ “The Sleepwalker” is a strangely mesmerizing book as it takes the reader on a journey with a pair of sisters who have lost their mother. It’s assumed she injured herself or came to harm during a sleepwalking episode but there’s no body and no evidence that confirms the suspicions or the police or her family. It’s also a coming of age story as a friendship develops between a police officer and the older sister. It’s the kind of book that nags at you until you finish it. It’s made me a fan of Chris Bohjalian.

⭐ I loved “ the flight attendant” ( one of the best mysteries I have ever read!) so I decided to read more from the same author. But this book that seemed so promising turned into a big disappointment and I could not finish reading it. Too little action, too much description of irrelevant facts and memories. The big reveal (about the nature of the protagonist ‘s sleepwalking) is hard to believe and gives an ugly twist to the book.Not recommended

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