Are Sleepwalkers Murderers?

--Yes or no, depending on which country you're tried in, says international bestselling author Mary Higgins Clark , who explores the legal and moral ramifications of the syndrome in her newest suspense novel, I heard that Song Before.

Protagonist Kay Lansing has gnawing doubts about her husband, Peter Carrington, who is a sleepwalker and a man with an unsettled past. Carrington's first wife was found dead in the family swimming pool. Years before that his date was never found after he drove her home from a party. Though never charged, the police consider Carrington to be a "person of interest."

Now Kay Lansing must uncover the truth about her husband and determine if what she learns will be enough to save his life, or if his life deserves saving.

Fascinated by memory and its fragments, Higgins visited a sleep disorder center as part of her research. She saw the cameras in the rooms, the equipment used to study sleep. She learned one can drive and perform normal daily tasks while sleepwalking, yet have no memory of it. "You have to be careful about waking someone who is sleepwalking or they might perceive it as an attack," she says.

She also read real cases of sleepwalking murders. In the United States, for example, two men were sent to prison after committing murder in their sleep. But in Canada, two men who committed murder in their sleep were released-acquitted of the crime. In all cases the men did not remember committing the act.

Higgins read about an 1898 case in England where a man killed his infant son. The man loved his child but had no memory of committing the heinous crime. Why?

He was sleepwalking.

"I want the underpinnings of accuracy," says Clark. "If there's a scene in a court, a lawyer can read about it and believe in its authenticity. Writing suspense is like creating a crossword puzzle. You want all the pieces to fit."

Mary Higgins Clark's books have sold over 80 million copies in the U.S. alone. She is # 1 fiction bestselling author in France, where she received the Grand Prix de Literature Polici�re in 1980. In 2000, she was named by the French Minister of Culture "Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters." She is the author of twenty-five suspense novels. Many of her works, novels and short stories, were made into television films. Clark's first suspense novel, Where Are the Children? published in 1975, became a bestseller and marked a turning point in her life and career. It is currently in its 75th edition in paperback and was re-issued in hardcover as a Simon & Schuster classic.