Killer Dreams
A Novel
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Countdown returns with a knock-out suspense thriller that pits a mother and son against a killer who's the stuff of nightmares.
If you close your eyes, he’ll get you. Sophie Dunston knows all too well how dreams can kill. As one of the nation’s top sleep therapists, she specializes in the life-threatening night terrors that her ten-year-old son, Michael, suffers from. But she is also an expert in another kind of terror–the kind that can turn a dream life into a living nightmare in the blink of an eye.
Someone is watching. He’s a shadowy figure from out of her darkest fears and he hasn’t forgotten her. In one shocking moment of violence, he’d shattered Sophie’s world forever and left her with only one thing to live for: her son. But the nightmare isn’t over for Sophie Dunston. It’s just begun. He’s been waiting. Sophie was supposed to die the first time around, but fate intervened. This time he’ll make sure that not even a miracle will save her.
It wasn’t a miracle that saved Jock Gavin, but it was pretty close. A semiretired hit man, commando, and jack-of-all-deadly-trades, he knows what Sophie is up against–and that she’ll need help. But the man he’s chosen for the job is as unpredictable as he is dangerous. Matt Royd is a wild card–hard, cool, merciless–and putting him into play changes the game completely. But to whose advantage?
Sophie will soon find out. She will have to trust Royd because she has no choices left. Because the bogeyman haunting her dreams is all too real and he’s on the hunt again. Because the nightmare he’s got planned for Sophie won’t end when she wakes up screaming. It won’t end. Ever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Johansen (On the Run), in her latest thriller full of heavy-breathing romance, turns to mind-control of the Manchurian candidate variety, a state induced by the chemical REM-4 and mysterious sleep-manipulation methods guaranteed to turn regular folk into killer zombies. It promises to be a lucrative technology, as one of the heroes in the novel predicts: "Mind control is just too tempting not to attract the scumbags of the world." The head scumbag is Robert Sanborne of Sanborne Pharmaceuticals, whose goal is to perfect the REM-4 program so he can sell it to the world's evildoers. The heroine, Sophie Dunston, a leading sleep researcher and the original inventor of REM-4, falls hard for Matt Royd, a former zombie who has come to his senses and is trying to kill Sanborne. Royd and Sophie, forced by circumstances to be allies, begin by hating each other and then no surprise fall wildly in lust and love. Johansen offers nothing new, but her many fans will overlook a rather improbable premise and be happy with a familiar cast of characters (many from the author's other novels), familiar situations and familiar outcomes.