Dickinson, Peter - Sleep and His Brother
Inspector Jimmy Pibble, recently laid off, managed to stumbled into the McNair House for cathypnic children, courtesy of a tip from his wife. Cathypnic children tend to be sluggish and very, very sleepy, with low body temperatures; some of the staff call them dormice. They seem to be vaguely creepy and yet loveable and tend to inspire obsession in
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I'm hoping this won't deter you from trying some of Dickinson's other mysteries. I don't think this is one of his best - I own it, but I've only re-read it maybe 3 times, which is a bad sign, because I'm a compulsive re-readers.
My favorite Dickinson mysteries are One Foot in the Grave (where Pibble ends up in a nursing home - the best bits IMO are his conversations with a couple of aging crimelords - one male, one female - who have interesting views on life); King and Joker (an alternative U.K. with a totally different royal family; the story is told with viewpoints alternating between 13-year-old Princess Louise and aging, bedridden Nurse Durdon, nanny to about 4 generations of royals); and The Poison Oracle (where a psycholinguist who works for an eccentric oil emirate sultan is in charge of a symbol-using chimp who is the only witness to a murder - loads of tasty fictional anthropology bits about a marsh-living tribe on the borders of the sultanate).
You might like any of those better than Sleep.
- Cho
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With Dickinson, for me, the draws tend to be the characters and his use of language. I like both his dialog and his own authorial voice. Sometimes I just get in a Dickinson mood and have to start reading through all my favorites of his work, without regard to genre: his YA historical novel The Dancing Bear, for example, and Heartsease, which is my favorite of the YA SF/F "Changes Trilogy," and The Ropemaker, as well as my favorites of his mysteries.
Enjoy!
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