Book Review
Title: Are You Sleeping
Author: Kathleen Barber
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Rating: ***
Review: The opening to Are You Sleeping was interesting, we are introduced to Josie living a domestic life in New York with her partner Caleb, who is away working in Africa. One night at 3 a.m. Josie gets a phone call and she believes it to be a Caleb, when she says she misses him a female voice answers saying that she misses Josie too. She puts this down to a bad connection and puts it out of her mind until Caleb responds to her email saying he never called her. Josie on the train hears about a podcast that is investigating the murder of her father 13 years before and Josie is rattled as she has lied to everyone in New York about her past, even her last name in order to distance herself from the event. She realises that the phone call might have been from her twin sister Lanie, but she is warned by her cousin, Ellen, not to listen to the podcast and they are trying to get it shut down but curiosity gets the better of her and she ends up listening to the first 2 episodes. In them we meet the supposed killer, Warren Cave who has been in prison from 13 years because one of the twins said they saw him committing the murder but it also came to light that Josie’s father was having an affair with Warren’s mother but the case was circumstantial at best.
We learn that Lanie was the one that said she saw Warren kill their father but this wasn’t the first statement she gave the police, in her first statement both twins had said they were sleeping and were woken up by the gunshot. In the wake of the podcast, Jo is overcome by paranoia which doesn’t settle until Caleb returns home from Africa. At this point, Ellen is pleading with her to come clean to Caleb as she won’t be able to hide the truth forever, especially with the podcast becoming a sensation and her mother suddenly committing suicide which means she has to return to her childhood hometown. We also learn that for 5 years, Jo travelled the world trying to outrun her father’s death eventually leading her to Africa where she met Caleb but the pressure is rising for her to come clean to him but she can’t bring herself to do. Her mother abandoned them after their father’s death opting to join a cult instead and her death just makes Jo angry but she knows she has to go back from her Aunt A and the other members of the family left behind.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, we learn a lot not just about Jo but the family she left behind all those years ago and the emotional scars she has buried long before her mother’s death. As she waits to return home, she has become obsessed with the podcast and reading anything related to it but she also begins to drink in order to sleep and forget. Upon returning home, she is immediately bombarding by the memories of the happy life she has before her father’s death but despite Ellen and her Aunt A basically pleading with her to get in touch with her sister, Jo refuses. The relationship between the sister’s took a nosedive after their father’s death but it only got worse as Jo prepared to leave for college and then the contact was cut completely with Jo refusing to acknowledge her sister and banning any of her family from even mentioning her name. Despite her learning her sister still lives in their home town and got married, this only fills Jo with anger as she has suffered much more than Lanie and doesn’t seem to feel like her sister deserves a happy life and the paranoia only intensifies when she begins listening to the third episode of the podcast which starts to examine who else had motive to kill her father besides Warren Cave which include her own mother and Warren’s father.
As we cross the ¼ mark in the novel, Jo isn’t adjusting to be back home especially with everything going on but it is made worse knowing that her sister is going to be at the visitation. As the day dawns to view her mother’s body, Jo desperately wants to tell Caleb everything but something keeps holding her back. The day does not go well, the first issue is that Jo doesn’t believe the body in the coffin belongs to her mother, then she finds out her sister married the man she loved, Adam Ives, and has a child with him which may be the betrayal that was mentioned in the synopsis. The day gets even worse when Poppy, the investigator running the podcast turns up followed by Melanie Caves, Warren’s mother. She mistakes Jo for Lanie and starts ranting about how she lied and the truth needs to come out for her son to be free. She leaves with the threat that she is watching Lanie and my suspicions over her being the murderer are heightened when we learn she left their father a message the night he was killed saying he would answer for the problems he had caused, namely the breakdown of her marriage.
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel, tensions are rising but we are no closer to finding out the truth of what happened that night other than Lanie was telling the truth when she said she witnessed the murder but signs are pointing to her also being the potential killer. Very soon the past and the present begin to collide when Caleb turns up unannounced and Jo is forced to explain she has lied about her entire life which might have changed their entire relationship but he does turn up for the funeral and supports her when she needs it the most. We also get scenes from the past that show how unhinged Lanie was and might still be, the night before their mother left, Lanie was at the movies at the same time Jo, Adam and Ellen were but when the movie ended with a wife shooting her husband Lanie freaked out. Jo being the responsible sister took her home only for Lanie to try and smoother their mother forcing Jo and their Aunt A to restrain her. Lanie verbally abuses Jo until she lashes out violently and the next day their mother was gone but Jo can’t forget Lanie screaming that it was their mother’s fault over and over, but to this day she has no idea what her sister meant by that but I have a feeling we are going to find out.
As we cross the halfway mark in the novel, Jo begins mending the relationship that were damaged long ago with her cousin, her aunt and most importantly her sister. Caleb despite the lies Jo told is still by her side helping through this exceedingly difficult time in her life as best he can and honestly he is the purest character in this book. We also get some truth revealed when we learn that Jo and Lanie’s relationship starting to break down the night she slept with Adam at a party who was Jo’s boyfriend at the time. It turns out that Adam was drunk and Lanie was high but he knew what he was doing and his defence that he thought Lanie was her are utter crap as Caleb puts it. We also see Jo getting the chance to build a relationship with her niece and things seems to be going great but something is building as Lanie hasn’t slept in days and the podcast is causing her to start to unravel to the point where she might be hurting herself. The podcast is writes off Erin as a suspect as she wasn’t aware of the affair and she already struggled with mental health issues which led to her joining the cult in the first place and now it begins to look at Melanie Cave as a suspect and one twitter user might be Melanie.
As we approach the ¾ mark in the novel, Jo and Lanie seem to be on the road to mending their relationship even though there is a lot of bad blood between them but when Ellen asks Jo if she ever considered that Lanie killed their father she can’t even consider it. Poppy makes another appearance pleading for the sister’s to join the podcast and tell their side of the story but even with their strained relationship they stick together which Jo even lying to cover up the fact that Lanie stole her boyfriend all those years ago. When the new episode of the podcast drops, Caleb and Jo are making plans to return home but she has to listen to it and Poppy points the finger at Lanie, claiming that at the time she said Warren killed her father the images of them and the truth were reverse. Lanie was seen a good girl when she was anything but that and Warren was seen as an outsider and loner possibly capable of murder when in reality he couldn’t even kill a spider and Poppy has a witness from the night of the murder saying that Warren was telling the truth about getting throw into the lake but they never came forward because they thought it was possible that he could have made it back to Chuck’s home and killed him. The questions I have are rapidly building but with just over 70 pages in the novel left I don’t know how it is going to end, and I have no idea who really killed their father.
As we cross into the final section of the novel, things really heat up when Lanie goes off the rails sending her daughter Ann to Jo with what seems like a suicide note. Everyone rushes to try and find Lanie but Jo is the only one that understands her sister and the only one who knows where she would retreat when she felt threatened or frightened. When Jo finds her Lanie tells her that she did lie about Warren killing their father because she couldn’t believe who killed him and while she doesn’t announce who did it, Jo jumps the conclusion that it was Melanie. Upon returning home they go to bed only for Lanie to wake Jo up in the early hours of the morning and together they put together the pieces of the puzzle. The first clue was the references to pearls, not the precious stones but a woman named Peral who their father had an affair with, the shooter was left handed and bore a resemblance to Warren which Melanie doesn’t but their mother did. The final piece is the cupcakes they made as children, Jo had been sick and ate a piece of the bigger one only for her mother to storm in and make her spit it out telling her it was meant for their father. It seems that Lanie knew about the affairs and that their mother was planning something, she initially tried to poison him but didn’t get the chance because of Jo and then shot him. This is confirmed by a note their mother wrote in her beloved copy of Anna Karenina and it seems the mystery is solved.
Overall, this wasn’t the most original reveal with the main suspects being the wife or the mistress, I would have been more shocked if Lanie had killed her father but as this was more about he relationships between the characters I can see how Erin’s unstable mental health and Chuck’s cheating behaviour could have pushed her to do what she did and her retreating to the cult was a way of hiding what she did from the world and protecting her daughters from it if it ever came to haunt her. Are You Sleeping was a suspenseful novel but it was okay at best.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
I received this review copy from NetGalley
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