To Sleep Gently [Kindle Edition]

Trent Zelazny (Author)

Book Description

When career criminal Jack Dempster gets caught and put away for five years in prison, he finds time to seriously reconsider his chosen line of work. Before he can make any serious decision, some old acquaintances track him down with a proposal. They want him to go to Santa Fe, New Mexico. With the help of an inside man, he's to lead a small group of professionals on a daring robbery of the El Dorado Hotel, one of the finest, and most secure establishments in the Southwest.

Double-crosses, love triangles, and immersion in his own self-destructive past conspire to lead him to ruin. It's not easy to sleep when searching for normalcy in the heart of a brutal past.

Product Details

• File Size: 440 KB
• Print Length: 248 pages
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Crossroad Press; Crossroad Press Digital Edition edition (August 30, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B005K9K31W
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #622,931 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars To Sleep Gently by Trent Zelazny March 26, 2012

By Karen Doering

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

"To Sleep Gently" is certainly not your usual noir but it is noir with an update. It is dark, gritty, harsh and most of all human.

Jack, our protagonist, is a criminal, no doubt about it. A smart one, but none the less a man just out of prison from a 5 year stint for armed robbery. Not a nice man but he has good qualities. More than anything he wants to end his life as a criminal and go straight. But life isn't that easy for someone who has a career of crimes behind him, no education other than the one he has given himself by reading, and no job history. With no money to help him, no place to go and no one to take him in his choices are limited. So limited he gives in to a friends offer of another armed robbery. This time in the relentless heat and dust of the desert. A place unfamiliar to him with unknown partners and less than ideal time for preparations. A recipe for either total disaster or unmitigated success.

Along the way Jack does a few good deeds, runs into old friends, falls in love and lust, tries to pull a team together and examines his life in a way that we can't help but hope he can either pull out of the crime or pull it off. It's not often we can hope the criminal succeeds but this time I couldn't help myself. I wanted Jack to be able to get his financial stash.

An easy breezy little crime story this is not. "To Sleep Gently" will not put you to sleep and it won't let you put it down. One of the best written crime stories I have read, it grips you as restlessly as the action scenes it contains. The characters are realistic in both their humanity and lack thereof. The dialogue is clean, crisp and focused. The settings and scenery are well composed and bring you into the locations where you feel the heat and grit of the desert.... The ending is stunning and while not totally surprising, considering the characters, its raw and unrelenting action is frightening in its believability.

This is a book I highly recommend and an author whose previous works I intend to read. Great work Mr. Zelazny.

Karen Bryant Doering
Parent's Little Black Book Read more ›

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars To sleep not so gently November 28, 2011

By Gerald Hausman

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

For those who love Santa Fe, this book will pull you in. For those who love Trent Zelazny's writing, another pull. For those who like biff-and-bam and honey love, yet another pull. Pulls all over the place in this short sweet funny sad novel.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "To Sleep Gently" pulls you along on a wild ride April 9, 2012

By Lori Safranek

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Trent Zelazny writes like someone who in another life threw back whiskey with Dashiell Hammet, dated a young Elizabeth Taylor (between marriages), died in a fiery car crash, and was born again to discover that nothing ever really changes. Life's still hard.

The main character of "To Sleep Gently" is Jack Dempster. Jack wants to be a good man. In many ways, he is a good man. But he gravitates to crime like a magnet is drawn to steel. He is just out of prison, and already reluctantly agreed to be part of a burglary that could make everyone, from Jack to the bumbling hired guns, to the Big Boys who wait in the wings. Jack even begins to think he might take this one last crime to fund a "normal life", a life with someone to love and a place to be. Even as he heads toward Santa Fe and the "job", Jack gets a glimpse of that normal life when he stops to help a family whose car has broken down on the highway. When he meets Sandra, beautiful, classy, interesting Sandra, he is even more drawn to the idea of leaving the criminal life.

Jack's life seems to tumble him around like a pair of dice, and he's left to go with whatever rolls up. His best intentions always, always seem to hit a stumbling block. Even his efforts to reunite with an old friend and encourage his friend to pursue his career as an artist pulls Jack through memories of a horrible time in his life, another bad roll of the dice. By the end of the book, I was shaking my head, thinking "Can this guy catch a break?" No, he can't. Life doesn't give guys like Jack a break. Life breaks guys like Jack. Or does it?

Every character in the book is well-drawn, vivid and you will either love them or hate them.... Even Jack -- sure he is a criminal, sure he is planning to rob people of their possessions, but he's a helluva guy. He stops and fixes cars. He educated himself, reading classic literature, even studying art. He's good looking, he's passionate. Every time Jack craps out, I couldn't help but groan and hope the next page would bring salvation. He should have been okay. He should have sailed through the crime, he should have just swept Sandra up in his manly arms and run off into the sunset. And he should have never been in that particular place on that particular day. Over and over, that is Jack's problem -- he's not a bad guy, he just can't catch a break.

Zelazny is a terrific writer, full of description, full of passions, but possessing a firm control of his characters and his storyline. It's amazing how these jagged-edged jigsaw puzzle snap together and form a flawless book. I'm very happy I discovered Trent Zelazny's books. Read more ›

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Delicious! December 23, 2011

By Michael Wolfgang Weaver

Format:Kindle Edition

A classic tale of a reformed criminal who just can't stay out of trouble. Mysterious and compelling, To Sleep Gently evokes the atmosphere and drama of a Humphrey Bogart film with every delicious detail. If you are looking to be entertained, you have come to the right place!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sheer brilliance December 1, 2011

By David L. Brzeski

Format:Kindle Edition

This is one hell of a great book!

Jack Dempster is a good guy, who lost his way & did bad things.
He's out of prison & wants to turn his life around, but he needs to do this one final bad thing first, then he's going to change.
He meets someone, who wants to share his new good life, but he has to do this one bad thing first.
You know it's not going to go smoothly, but he's a good guy & you pray that it will.

Trent Zelazny is a superb writer & this book has one hell of a great movie in it, if any producers have the good sense to pick it up.

I've given five star reviews before, but this one genuinely makes me wish I could go to six.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Exciting, psychological noir fiction November 29, 2011

By LemonLion

Format:Kindle Edition

Trent Zelazny has a knack for plucking you up by the collar of your shirt and dropping you straight into the mind of his characters. In this case, the character is Jack Dempster, an autodidactic ex-con dabbling in normalcy for a brief time before he is seduced back into a life of crime (and seduced in other ways as well). To Sleep Gently is a ferris wheel of sex, violence, paranoia and desire that plays out like a gritty film noir, with a pin-you-to-your-chair bloody ending that you won't forget too soon. Highly entertaining and highly recommended.

More About the Author

Trent Zelazny is the Nightmare Award-winning author of To Sleep Gently, Destination Unknown, Fractal Despondency, Shadowboxer, The Day the Leash Gave Way and Other Stories, A Crack in Melancholy Time, Butterfly Potion, and his latest, Too Late to Call Texas. He is also an international playwright, as well as the editor of the anthologies Mirages: Tales From Authors of the Macabre, and Dames, Booze, Guns & Gumshoes.

He was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has lived in California, Oregon, Arizona, and Florida. He currently resides back in Santa Fe.

He is the son of the late science fiction author Roger Zelazny.

He has a son named Corwin.

He also loves NBA basketball.





PRAISE

"A powerful and good writer...someone who's been through hell and come out, I hope, the other side."
--Neil Gaiman, winner of almost every literary award on the planet

"Trent Zelazny's work is as powerful as a .45 slug and as memorable and pleasing as a scar obtained during feverish sexual activity. One of the best of the new breed of writers."
--Joe R. Lansdale, Edgar Award winner and eight-time Stoker Award winner

"Trent Zelazny has already begun to carve out his own genre niche. He's got the right stuff to make fiction both engrossing and literate."
--Tom Piccirilli

"The raw honesty of Fractal Despondency heralds Trent as a talent to watch, and I plan to be reading him for years to come."
--Mark Ordesky, Executive producer of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy

"Trent Zelazny is the best hard-boiled noir writer of this generation!"
--Sarah L. Covert, Editor of She Never Slept News and Reviews

"Some people write from the heart, but Trent Zelazny leaves his blood on the page."
--Erin Underwood, Underwords