Killer Dreams

April 17, 2006
Bestseller Johansen (On the Run
), in her latest thriller full of heavy-breathing romance, turns to mind-control of the Manchurian candidate variety, a state induced by the chemical REM-4 and mysterious sleep-manipulation methods guaranteed to turn regular folk into killer zombies. It promises to be a lucrative technology, as one of the heroes in the novel predicts: "Mind control is just too tempting not to attract the scumbags of the world." The head scumbag is Robert Sanborne of Sanborne Pharmaceuticals, whose goal is to perfect the REM-4 program so he can sell it to the world's evildoers. The heroine, Sophie Dunston, a leading sleep researcher and the original inventor of REM-4, falls hard for Matt Royd, a former zombie who has come to his senses and is trying to kill Sanborne. Royd and Sophie, forced by circumstances to be allies, begin by hating each other and then—no surprise—fall wildly in lust and love. Johansen offers nothing new, but her many fans will overlook a rather improbable premise and be happy with a familiar cast of characters (many from the author's other novels), familiar situations and familiar outcomes.

May 1, 2006
In her latest thriller, the prolific, best--selling Johansen, dubbed the queen of suspense, introduces a new heroine, Sophie Dunston, a top-notch sleep researcher who developed a drug to battle the insomnia from which her father and millions of others suffer. But her nefarious former boss and his cohorts have used the drug she created to alter the minds of ordinary people like her father, who killed his wife and threatened Sophie and her young son. With hardened heart, Sophie has one goal: to kill her former boss, since every attempt she's made to expose him to the authorities has failed. Just as she discovers that there are many victims of her nemesis' mind-controlling experiments, one shows up with the same murderous intention. Sophie is leery of Matt Royd, and his first thoughts are to use Sophie, the author of his nightmares, to destroy the others. Brutal and deadly himself, Royd leaves Sophie no choice but to cooperate. The danger increases tenfold as the hunters become the hunted in this suspenseful tale of nightmarish evil.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)