Ah. Finally a book review. It’s been a while since I dabbled in the world of paperbacks and novels - so this book is a resurrection of sorts. Faced with an uneventful weekend and plenty of time to kill and no one to kill it with, I ended up at my friendly neighborhood Barnes and Noble. Here’s where I chanced upon ’’Tell Me Your Dreams’’. The title seemed to beckon to me so I picked it up, headed to my favorite sink-in couch in the far corner of the bookstore and let myself loose in the action-packed, racy world of Sidney Sheldon’s imagination.
Well for those of you familiar with Sheldonisms - the book’s feel is very familiar. But the twists and turns that you encounter in this story are rather interesting and by the time you get past the first 2 chapters there’s no looking back. You’re in the zone.
The story
The story is about MPD. Multiple personality disorder. Schizophrenia. Call it what you will. Imagine having more than one personality residing in your being with you completely unaware of it. The protagonist in Part One of this story is one such sadly afflicted individual, Ashley Patterson. An ostensibly normal young girl working at a computer graphics company as a graphics artist. She has a famous father Dr. Steven Patterson who is a world renowned cardiologist. Well the story unfolds with depicting Ashley as a typical goody two shoes girl. But totally unbeknownst to her are two ’’alters’’ that live inside her. One is Toni Prescott, a London bred wild child who stops at nothing to get what she wants. Toni likes to sing and dance and meet men on the Internet. The second is a dimunitive painter from Rome called Alette Peters. Her passion is art. And these two ’’alternate personalities’’ take over from Ashley without her control.
All is well until a series of shocking murders start happening. All the murders seem to have a common pattern, the victim is brutally stabbed and castrated. What is more is that none of the murders appear to have a motive. A detective assigned to the case tries putting the pieces together but in the process gets killed himself. Ultimately with fingerprint traces and irrefutable evidence, the murders get traced to Ashley Patterson. But the poor girl has absolutely no recollection of ever committing them. What is worse is she does not even know two of the people that she purportedly murdered. Nevertheless, the police arrest her and keep her in custody.
Then comes the story of David Singer, a young attorney on the throes of becoming the partner of a reputed law firm. But the partnership opportunity is jeopardized when Steven Patterson, Ashleys father insists that he represent her in the murder trial in return for a favor he did to him years ago. Reluctantly Singer takes the case and quickly realizes that the public, the jury, the prosecutor and a very unforgiving judge are all not buying the MPD story. But Singer is convinced that Ashley is innocent after he sees Ashley’s metamorphosis into her alters in a hypnosis session by a psychiatrist. After a long trial when Singer is at the end of his tether, he manages to get the judge to see videotaped proof of Ashley’s multiple personalities where it is clearly evident that the dominant alter Toni Prescott was the one that committed the crimes and thus saves her from death row.
And now we’re at Part Three - where Ashley is now transferred to a facility where patients having a similar condition as hers are being treated. The story goes on about the futile attempts of doctors to cure her and as always when there is no hope, evidence presents itself in the form of her own father with whom Ashley carries a terrible secret that manifested itself into the alter egos that protected her from facing her harsh reality. There are some interesting twists throughout but in the interest of those that have not read the book, I will stop here. A twist in any tale is what gets me juiced up - and this book is not lacking on that front at all.
Conclusion
If you have about 3-5 hours to spare and don’t have anything better to do, pick this paperback up to entertain yourself. The one thing I like about Sidney Sheldon novels and I am sure not too many will disagree - is that reading them is like watching a movie. There is not too much left to the imagination, the plot itself is well executed and the story builds up as it goes. Sheldon does not ever go too far off the beaten path - which is a rather important aspect of storytelling - he will keep you interested through the entire story despite the various nuances that require to be portrayed. However, the Italian painter character was kind of an anachronism - was Sheldon looking at rolling in a Michael Angelo kind of angst into her personality? I would have liked to see a little more contemporary depiction there. In essence, I didn’t really think she was much of a character, more a space filler - it almost seemed like she didnt really need to be in the story at all. But in the MPD characterization there had to be a dominant alter and a benign alter - so I kind of went with the flow. If you are willing to overlook a few anomalies and take the story at face value and enjoy it for its pace, its glitz, its sleaze and its mystery, I would recommend this as decent reading to while away a few hours!!