查理给你温暖冬日《不眠》夜

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Our book reviewer Alan Cheuse is no doctor, but he does have a cure for the winter blues, a healthy dose of science fiction. Here's his prescription.

ALAN CHEUSE: Are suffering from sleepless nights? Charlie Huston's new novel, "Sleepless," may be just what you need to get through the dark. "Sleepless" is about an insomnia plague spreading across Southern California and the rest of the country. The disease first keeps you awake and after a couple of months kills you. It's turned L.A. upside down causing riots and gun battles in the streets and driving even the healthy toward the brink. Meanwhile, a big pharma company seems to have developed a drug called Dreamer. It's a very expensive treatment for the disease, if not a full cure, and everybody wants it.

Enter a police detective named Parker, whose wife is suffering from the disease, leaving the care of their small child mostly to him and charging him with a hope that he can find some Dreamer to help her condition. If following Parker on his dangerous quest to find the drug doesn't keep you awake, and I really think it will, you can pick up the new Douglas Preston novel, "Impact," in which human beings find themselves threatened at the planet level by strange bombardments coming from the direction of Mars.

The science laced through the story comes right out of today's science news. I had a lot of fun following an American intelligence freelancer named Wyman Ford and a college-bound female science student from the jungles of Cambodia to the barren islands off the coast of Maine as they join forces to try and head off the menace from outer space. Well, I said you can pick up this new one. If you love this variety of narrative fiction, you will and should do it. Night is coming.

SIEGEL: The books are "Sleepless" by Charlie Huston and "Impact" by Douglas Preston. Our reviewer is Alan Cheuse.

作者介绍： Charlie Huston is the author The Joe Pitt Casebooks (Every Last Drop, Half the Blood of Brooklyn, No Dominion, and Already Dead), the Los Angeles Times bestseller The Shotgun Rule, The Mystic Arts of Erasing all Signs of Death, The Henry Thompson Trilogy (which includes the Edgar Award-nominated Six Bad Things). He is also the writer of the recently relaunched Moon Knight comic book. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the actress Virginia Louise Smith.

查理．休斯顿（Charlie Huston），是乔．皮特个案记录簿（Every Last Drop, Half the Blood of Brooklyn, No Dominion, and Already Dead），《洛杉矶报》畅销图书The Shotgun Rule, The Mystic Arts of Erasing all Signs of Death，亨利．汤普森三部曲（包括被提名爱伦坡奖的Six Bad Things）的作者，同时他还是《月亮骑士》系列连环漫画的创作者。他现如今与妻子居住在洛杉矶。