Sleeping With Fear is an excellent addition to Hooper’s Fear trilogy. In this edition, Hooper starts out with clairvoyant Riley Crane, a federal agent, waking up with partial amnesia and covered with blood. To make matters worse Riley’s normal spider sense and other clairvoyant powers seem to have deserted her, leaving her vulnerable to the unknown events that have transpired over the last three weeks. Her newest memory is of having been summoned by her ex-army friend, Gordon Skinner, to Opal Island off the coast of South Carolina, to investigate a series of bizarre occult occurrences. The plot thickens when the headless body of a man is found hanging over a tree in what appears to have been a satanic ritual. Sheriff Jake Ballard reluctantly asks Riley for her help in solving the case, although he is furious that she dumped him for Ash Prescott, the local district attorney who she also cannot remember. However, Riley discovers that Ash is the one person that she feels she can rely on to help her figure out what evil is at play on Opal Island and stop it before it ends up killing her.

Despite this and subsequent lapses in her memory, however, she persuades her boss, Noah Bishop, chief of the FBI Special Crimes Unit, to let her stay to “stabilize” the situation. However, Riley is on her own without a partner as Bishop and the rest of his agents are spread thinly across the United States working on their own investigations.

The only certainty in Riley’s mind is that someone close to her has targeted her for death. As the weeks pass, Riley senses that she is missing something important, but in spite of her best efforts, she cannot get a handle on the case. Regardless of their appetite for the paranormal, readers will be mesmerized by a plot that moves quickly to a chilling conclusion. Sleeping With Fear is a suspenseful and engrossing page-turner with great dialog and character development and some very scary times! Additionally this reader found Riley to be a courageous, tough, and tenacious protagonist, and her torrid relationship with Ash heated up the pages. In other words, another great read from Kay Hooper.

Tags: satanic rites, occult practices, paranormal, fiction, book review, kay hooper, sleeping with fear, murder, rituals, amnesia, fbi special crimes unit