Authors: Hallie Ephron

Night Night, Sleep Tight (25 page)

L
ike any young girl growing up in Beverly Hills, I was fascinated by the 1958 murder of Johnny Stompanato. I was ten years old, and I can remember poring over the pictures and articles that ran in the newspapers. The house where it happened was just a few blocks from where we lived, and Cheryl Crane, Lana Turner’s daughter who confessed to stabbing her mother’s gangster boyfriend to death, was just four years older than me.

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 Lynn Wayne

H
ALLIE EPHRON is the bestselling, award-winning author of suspense novels. Her novels have been finalists for the Edgar, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark awards. With
Night Night, Sleep Tight,
she takes readers back to early-’60s Beverly Hills, a time and place she knows intimately. She grew up there, the third of four daughters of Hollywood screenwriting duo Henry and Phoebe Ephron, contract writers for Twentieth Century Fox who wrote screenplays for classics like
Carousel
and
Desk Set
. Ms. Ephron’s novels have been called “Hitchcockian” by
USA Today
, and “deliciously creepy” by
Publishers Weekly
. Her award-winning bestseller
Never Tell a Lie
was made into a movie for the Lifetime Movie Network. Her essays have been broadcast on NPR and appeared in magazines including
More
,
Writer’s Digest
, and
O: The Oprah Magazine
(“Growing Up Ephron”). She writes a regular crime fiction book review column for the
Boston Globe
. Ms. Ephron lives near Boston with her husband.

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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

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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