Sleeping Dogs

Thomas Perry

Thomas Perry is probably best known for his Jane Whitefield novels, in which he features a strong female protagonist who has a gift for making people disappear. But in Sleeping Dogs, he deals with a different type of protagonist, another who also possesses a gift for making people disappear, the difference is that the latter puts a permanent twist on their eclipse. He's a "specialist", one of the elite, up there at the very top with a very few men known in the trade as "hired killers". He wears many names, one face, and mostly we come to know him in this novel as "the butcher's boy". When the novel opens, the butcher's boy is in a foreign country, having spent the last ten years trying to do what he is best at, making people disappear, but this time it's his own shadow he's focused on. He seems to have succeeded, but as fate draws its sword, he ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. So begins a series of events which will have the reader turning the pages well into the night. When he is marked, he misjudges the reasons for that, and makes a decision which takes him back to American soil and a quest to destroy all those who won't allow him his anonymity. Once he hits the first American airport, Perry keeps the reader glued, as the action bursts off every page. The butcher's boy's retreat from his former life has not left him dull or lazy, he's just as good as what he does as he always was, it would seem the mere thought of a person's name in his head is an epitaph. It isn't old enemies who make the butcher's boy falter, but rather a new one, technology. As the course of this novel unwinds, this in itself becomes one of his toughest adversaries, in the hands of an agency who wants this ticking timebomb, and one FBI agent in particular. It becomes the classic novel of the hunter becoming the hunted, and Perry is a master with all he brings to this novel. The characters, the plot, the atmosphere, all sweep the reader along like a great rollercoaster ride, just as you hit the top of the rail, take a moment to breathe, Perry sends you down the hill again. My greatest disappointment with this novel is that it didn't end up in the hands of a great director with a great cast, this is the stuff good movies are made of.