No Sleep Till Wonderland is the second book in the Mark Genevich PI series by Paul Tremblay. Released 20th April 2021 by Harper Collins on their William Morrow imprint, it's 304 pages and is available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats.
This is a humorous but very very dark PI novel with a quirky protagonist who's struggling/failing with narcolepsy. His life is difficult, which is understandable, and his narration is by turns full of pathos, hopelessness, gallows humor, and a seething sub voce anger. The author is gifted with the more technical aspects of writing and I found the prose compelling, although I honestly found it challenging to engage with most of the characters and also found the (undoubtedly intentional) wandering and disconnected plotline more distracting than clever. (He's a narcoleptic, so the first person train of thought stutters, wanders, and stops dead in places). The author has a straightforward style, unvarnished, and unpolished. It went to the same place in my head that Tim Dorsey and Carl Hiaasen live, with a little glimmer of Elmore Leonard. The setting, Boston, has a starring role, and the author seems intimately familiar with the area and the special linguistic vernacular.
This is the second book in the series and since there is a *strong* continuity between the books, I do not recommend trying to jump into this book without having read the first book. The language is gritty and rough in places and there's very little refined sensibility to be found. Readers who enjoy darkly sarcastic gritty realism will find a lot to like here.
Three and a half stars for me. I would recommend it to fans of bleak and gritty PI stories.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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