Fb2 While Other People Sleep (Sharon McCone Series) ePub

A major pleasure of a series like Muller's Sharon McCone mysteries is getting an update on the characters you've become familiar with. It's somewhat akin to meeting an old friend and getting caught up. On that basis, WHILE OTHER PEOPLE SLEEP works just fine. Indeed, that's enough reason to buy and read it if you've read most of these and enjoy the company it allows you to keep.

There are actually two mysteries going on simultaneously here. The main plot revolves around McCone's attempt to identify and stop an imposter who is threatening her reputation and interfering in her personal life. A secondary plot revolves around McCone's gay receptionist, Ted, who seems to be having personal problems of his own. Both plots proceed satisfactorily enough through most of the book, but seem to bog down at in the end. The "Ted" plot, in particular, ended rather weakly, in my opinion.

Finally, I'm getting a little weary of the flying angle. So McCone is a pilot. OK, I have no problem with that, but when you reach a point where flying is a major factor in the outcome of every story, it's gotten out of hand. Enough, already! It's time to devote less energy to rhapsodizing on the joys of flying and more on writing an engaging whodunit.

WHILE OTHER PEOPLE SLEEP is a passable installment in the ongoing saga of Sharon McCone. If McCone is almost like one of your old friends, then getting this update is probably going to be enough to justify reading it. I was for me. As a stand-alone mystery, though, it's mediocre. A soft four stars for people into the series, but if you're a first-timer or occaisional reader, you might want to look for a better one.

Just finished Muller's latest - While Other People Sleep - and thoroughly enjoyed it. Muller continues to grow and develop her characters. Even after 19 books, Sharon McCone and her colleagues maintain this reader's attention. The book had great atmosphere. Muller's suberb touch with characterization make it an excellent book to enjoy by the pool, on the beach or curled up at home with a glass of chardonnay.

As always, Marcia Muller has grabbed me on the first page and has not released me until the last. I enjoy this series immensely and always read the book in just a couple of days leaving me anxious for the next.

great character development - page turning plot

Great!

Love this series!!!

This book marked a steady, several-book recovery of the Sharon McCone, P.I. series from a low point in A Wild And Lonely Place. Marcia Muller made these successive books interesting along the way, despite continuing difficulties crafting the stories with enough depth and intricacy, resolving them in an effective, satisfying way, and developing the lead and certain other characters.

Muller's While Other People Sleep is about a technically skilled woman who impersonates McCone, breaks into her office and home, and steals her identity. Reminiscent of the author's best work in Games To Keep The Dark Away and The Shape Of Dread, the premise is intriguing, a mysterious figure haunts the story, the book proceeds at a decent pace, and at least some rich detail is developed about that character by the end. As the stranger intrudes more deeply and destructively into McCone's present and past, the reader gets some new glimpses, albeit sketchy, into McCone's background. McCone is largely on her own in this book. With some skill and success, Muller tries to develop this into a theme of its own, along with the theme that events that can change a person's life can be so random. It also gives the reader more of McCone's own legwork, interrogations, and thought processes. And it is some welcome relief from the shallow Hy Ripinsky boyfriend character and the "living on the edge of danger" action-hero direction to the stories that for too long has passed for character development of McCone (whose ongoing deadpan inability to connect with situations like a flesh-and-blood human being has meanwhile grown increasingly frustrating). References to her assistant Rae Kelleher and McCone's informal ward Habiba Hamid continue to be cringe-worthy, due to how badly these characters were developed (Rae in Broken Promise Land) or introduced (Habiba in Wild And Lonely Place), but Muller does try to rebuild a familiar environment for McCone, with a new crew of co-tenants and office-mates and new details about the home life of her past and present office manager, now that McCone has left behind for good All Souls Legal Cooperative, its Victorian group house, and the Remedy Lounge.

What held the book down from rising to any higher level than it did was the lack of a larger creative vision and depth of character that could have given the narrative real intricacy, purpose, meaning, and impact. As a result, despite some good attention to detail, the book was nothing more than an above-average procedural. Wisely, Muller kept it 100 pages shorter than each of her last few books, but even so, it still began to feel repetitive, haphazard, and aimless. McCone came across as increasingly slow, inept, and blank with each successive gambit from the stalker. McCone's constant boasts that she was going to outsmart her nemesis became an empty form of words, as she never really did, always following a step or more behind, even at the end. Although there was more of a final confrontation with the villain in this book than in recent predecessors, it still was not a clear, direct, satisfying one. Again, a Muller ending went off track by allowing action-oriented happenstances to crowd out any real battle of wits and skills and to muddy the water. Also weakening the ending was the fact that the stalker's intentions and objectives never came clear or made much sense even on her own muddled terms, much less added up to anything in the end, in spite of the detailed background Muller provided for the character. While not a cliche, the stalker ended up an all-over-the-map mish-mash of traits, some appearing gratuitous, slapdash, or incongruous (sheltered perfectionist, bookkeeper, care-giver, puritanical about McCone attending a fancy party or using birth control pills, a glib, promiscuous party girl who happens to feel the need to stick her nose into a club owner's business and fight about it, etc.). Nor was it clear what to make of the book's flippant, last-minute insinuations of (unrelated) past misconduct on her part. For a while, a parallel subplot of anonymous harassment of McCone's office manager and his gay partner added an element of interest and suspense. But it was ruined by the hasty, simplistic way in which it was solved, with the up-to-then devious and secretive culprit suddenly coming right out into the open with a clumsy confrontation, even if Muller later tried to salvage some depth.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this story of impersonation and privacy theft would come across as a Lifetime Movie of the Week. In the skilled hands of Marcia Muller, however, this mystery sings along as if it were on a highwire. McCone is disturbed, to say the least, that a woman has been handing out her busness cards and occasionally bedding prospective clients in her San Francisco neighborhood. As McCone struggles to understand the woman's motives for invading her life, her office manager, Ted Smalley, begins behaving erratically and his partner asks McCone to investigate.

The book was written in 1994, well before any hate-crime laws were passed, so the bigotry against Smalley and his partner seems a bit hollow now, but Muller writes very realistic characters, which add to her mysteries. There are several great scenes in the book, such as when McCone chases her doppleganger to an empty loft apartment and loses her trail afterwards and the eerie scenes where McCone finds her home violated by this person. If nothing else, the book will make you want to lock all your doors and shred important documents.

This is the 19th entry in the McCone series, and Muller shows no signs of slowing down. I want to read all the books in this series.