Night Night, Sleep Tight

During the commercial for Cerulean, violins, piano, and finally an accordion swelled to a tango rhythm. A tall, slender man dressed all in black moved slowly away from the camera toward Bu

Because

you’re a woman

“Cerulean,” Bu

Deirdre turned the television off.

“That woman is a piece of work,” Tyler said.

“She is that,” Deirdre said.

“And she makes it sound as if the story is all about her.”

“It always is.”

Deirdre had been invited to a screening of the movie. She and Henry had gone together. The movie echoed Sunset Boulevard without the grit and irony, with the screenwriter aging and the Hollywood star young and glamorous. Arthur’s life story was relegated to a few meager flashbacks.

In the movie’s climactic scene, Tito works himself into a jealous rage. He hits Bu

Bu

The camera lingers on Tito’s face. Stu

In the movie, there was not a whiff of Deirdre’s presence at the house that night. No trace of Henry’s role in the tragedy, either. Henry still had no idea how close he’d come to being thrust into the limelight. Charged with murder. Revealed as the father of Bu

After they sold Arthur’s house, Henry quit his job at the motorcycle dealership and used his share of their earnings to buy a one-story fixer-upper on a canal in Venice. In the garage, he’d opened a small recording studio.

Audio of Bu

“How would your father feel about the way she hijacked his story?” Tyler asked.

Deirdre paused. How would Arthur have felt? He knew writers got no respect. That his job was to put words on the pages of scripts that directors and actors inevitably rewrote, mangled, or ignored. But now he had a bestselling book. A major motion picture. Earnings that could have easily have paid for a bigger swimming pool and a credit that might yet garner an Academy Award nomination. He was still in the game.

“He’d have been thrilled,” Deirdre said.

Author’s Note

Like any young girl growing up in Beverly Hills, I was fascinated by the 1958 murder of Joh

Readers may recognize the crime as one of the inspirations for this book. But in researching Night Night, Sleep Tight, beyond rereading news accounts that ran at the time of the crime, I deliberately avoided learning anything about the people involved in the real crime. Instead I took the murder and its trappings, along with my own visceral response to it years ago, as a jumping-off point for an entirely fictional story with fictional characters I could build from the ground up.

About the Author

Author photograph by Ly

HALLIE EPHRON is the bestselling, award-wi

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Also by Hallie Ephron

Fiction

Never Tell a Lie

Come and Find Me

There Was an Old Woman

Nonfiction

Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: How to Knock ’Em Dead with Style

Credits

Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

Cover photograph © by Colleen Farrell/Arcangel Images

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

NIGHT NIGHT, SLEEP TIGHT. Copyright © 2015 by Hallie Ephron. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-211763-2

EPub Edition MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780062117656

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