I actually trudged through to the end hoping it would all be explained, all the way up until I got to 'Audible hopes you have enjoyed'. Alas, even the words 'logical explanation' never turn up again. And you keep listening, waiting for it to unfold, confident that a skillful, solid storyteller like Iles who has steered you around so many corners isn't going to leave you in this narrative ditch he's driven you into.

As people tend to end up doing when Things Happen, Waters finds himself telling the whole story to a lawyer, who advises him to ignore the supernatural, Fringe-like explanation and find the logical one. Problem is, old girlfriend herself has been dead for the past ten years, and the heavenly body she is supposed to be inhabiting now is ten years younger than hers would have been. Yes, that would be the college girlfriend who tried to kill him, OK tried to kill him twice. Once everybody has their clothes off she tells him that she's actually his old college girlfriend. He spots a gorgeous woman at his daughter's soccer game, so gorgeous she just about drops him in his tracks, and next you know she's hunting him down like he's a six point buck. John Waters - the name made me giggle, which wasn't an auspicious start - is a happily married oil man with a seven year old daughter and an antebellum mansion. Shakespeare let Julius Caesar leave the house and head over to the Roman Senate on the Ides of March, and we know how THAT turned out. They are tightly, even dizzingly plotted, even if sometimes someone is about to do something so eyepoppingly stupid you want to yell out 'hey! Little blonde cheerleader! Do NOT open that back door to see if someone's really out there! For God's sake, you're babysitting!!!' You can forgive that, though. Some minor characters in one book become major characters in another, or vice versa. They're all set in the same universe, in Mississippi or New Orleans, and you start to feel like if you woke up tomorrow morning in Natchez, you'd head right over to the Trace, and if you were in New Orleans, no problem locating the FBI field office on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. I'm not a big mystery suspense reader, but I've been on a Greg Iles binge in the past five weeks.

Sleep no more explanation