Sleeping Policemen

Horror combines with noir motifs and a fast-moving plot in this tale of four college students who run over a pedestrian while driving at night in the Smoky Mountains. Finding a sheaf of hundred dollar bills and a mysterious key in the pockets of the dead man's coat, their curiosity is piqued and the friends follow clues to a bus station locker and a homemade video depicting the rape and murder of a missing teenage girl. In the hours that follow, the students find themselves under pressure from both a private detective who claims to represent the father of the missing girl and a state trooper who has connected them with the man they left for dead on the fog-shrouded mountain. Suddenly, into their nightmare of guilt and confusion, a shadowy underworld figure known as the Pachyderm appears, vehemently demanding his money and video back. Inexperienced young people battle both criminals and their own flawed instincts in this disturbing lesson about greed, excess, and cultural corruption.

From Publishers Weekly

Returning to campus after a night out, college students Finney Durant, Nick Laymon and Reed Tucker discover the dark heart that lurks just below the surface of "civilized" morality when Finney's car hits someone on a winding Smokey Mountain road. Nick insists they return to the scene of the accident, where they find the victim-along with his loaded .45, a roll of hundred-dollar bills and the key to a bus station locker. They decide on a cover-up-despite his qualms, Nick wants the dead man's cash-and things turn grisly for the young men and Nick's girlfriend, Sue. The hit-and-run incident is just the beginning of their problems once they also nab the victim's key and find a videotape of the rape, torture and murder of a teenage girl in the bus station locker. Pivoting on Nick's tenuous grasp of morality, this nightmarish, graphic debut novel from Bailey (The Resurrection Man's Legacy and Other Stories) and Slay (Ian McEwan) attempts to imitate noir authors such as Jim Thompson and James M. Cain, but falls short on style and grit.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Dale Bailey is a professor at Lenoir-Rhyne College, a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and an award-winning short fiction in Amazing Stories and SciFiction. Hisfull-length worksinclude American Nightmares, The Fallen, House of Bones, and The Resurrection Man's Legacy and Other Stories. He lives in Hickory, North Carolina. Jack Slay, Jr., is dean of students at LaGrange College. His work has appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Cemetery Dance, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Mississippi Magazine. He lives in LaGrange, Georgia.

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