LET'S TALK ABOUT WHEN YOU HAVE TROUBLE GOING TO SLEEP

"K" IS FOR KILLER
Sue Grafton
New York: Fawcett Crest, 1994 (1999 printing)
307 pages, paperback, $7.99
ISBN: 0-449-22150-4

Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg

To solve the murder of Lorna, a call girl, private investigator Kinsey Millhone must work at night, too. She tracks down Lorna's acquaintances, including another young prostitute, a disc jockey at an all-night radio station, a nightshift emergency-room nurse, and a supervisor at a 'round-the-clock' water treatment plant where the woman worked afternoons as a receptionist.

Even the victim's mother, who hired Kinsey to follow a trail the police thought cold, works from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. at a coffee shop. To talk to the mother without other family members around, Kinsey must see her then. Kinsey's difficulties with her new schedule mimic those of one in five Americans who work outside traditional daytime hours.

Initially, Kinsey simply stays up later and later. She doesn't know that naps as brief as 20 minutes benefit alertness, although she recognizes that longer naps may leave you groggy. "Naps leave me feeling hungover without the few carefree moments of an intervening binge," she tells readers. "...I drank two cups of coffee and...headed out into the night."

When she returns home near dawn, she's weary but sure she won't be able to sleep. Sleep specialists sometimes talk about the opening and closing of gates to sleep, times when it is easier or harder to fall asleep. "If I'd gone to bed at nine or even ten o'clock, I could have slept through the night," she muses. "But now my sleep permit had reached its expiration point. Having stayed awake this long, I was consigned to further wakefulness." In fact, Kinsey's biological clock has kicked in here, promoting morning alertness despite her lack of sleep.

Grafton enlarges later on this same point, which has been verified in sleep laboratory studies. "The tricky factor with sleep," Kinsey says, "is that aside from the number of hours you put in, the body seems to hold you accountable for their position. Snoozing from four a.m. to eleven a.m. doesn't necessarily equate with the same number of hours logged between eleven p.m. and six."

Kinsey engages in risky behavior when she is drowsy. She starts a six-hour drive at 3 a.m. "There's nothing as hypnotic as a highway at night," she observes. "...I found the drive narcotic and was struggling to stay awake." Fueled by coffee, she is lucky to make it home safely. Afterward, she has an insight we all should heed: "The problem with being tired is that your brain doesn't work so hot."

Working at night exacts an emotional toll. "I was vaguely aware of a psychological shift, a change in my perception now that I'd substituted night for day," Kinsey reports. "Like a form of jet lag, my internal clock was no longer synchronized with the rest of the world's. My usual sense of myself was breaking down, and I wondered if a hidden personality might suddenly emerge as if wakened from a long sleep."

Readers of Grafton's popular alphabetic mystery stories know that Kinsey eventually discovers the culprit. The search for whodunit and how makes these books page-turners, which prompts this warning: Don't start reading this book near bedtime. You may end up missing sleep yourself.