On the 30th of August, 2019, Anna Ogilvy committed a double homicide, brutally killing her two best friends. The catch is that she was sleepwalking when she committed the murder, and she has not woken up since. Four years later, Dr Benedict Prince, a forensic psychologist specialising in sleep disorders and sleep-related crimes, is called as a last hope to wake up Anna O, find out the truth, and bring her to trial.
But as Dr Prince spends more time by Anna’s side, he finds himself obsessing over her, her motivations, who she was, and how her story is related to the case of Sally Turner. Sally is a woman who, 20 years earlier and on the exact day and month of Anna’s crime, killed her two stepsons while she was sleepwalking. He begins to truly question something he’s never had to before: if someone commits a crime while asleep, are they guilty or innocent? Should he wake her up and be the prince to her ‘Sleeping Beauty’, as the media has dubbed her? Or should she remain asleep, and avoid prosecution?
This spine-tingling novel had me in the clutches of curiosity and suspense until the very last page, especially after I learned that the story was inspired by the cases of Resignation syndrome in Sweden, and the real ‘Anna O’, a pseudonym given to Bertha Pappenheim. She was a patient of Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud who suffered from partial paralysis, hallucinations, language aphasia, and amnesia. I was compelled by the mythology of Anna O and the actual truth, as well by the contemplation of whether humans are more monstrous in fiction or in reality.
Perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn and Alex Michaelides, Matthew Blake’s debut is an ingenious and Hitchcockian thriller. Brimming with deftly hidden clues and mind-bending reveals, Anna O is an endlessly compelling novel that will keep you awake long into the night.
