Dead Asleep

Freveletti’s undistinguished fourth Emma Caldridge thriller (after 2011’s The Ninth Day) takes the biochemist from her Miami, Fla., lab, Pure Chemistry, to a Caribbean island not for vacation. After discovering a bloody voodoo offering and pin-transfixed doll left in her office, the scientist finds herself confronted by a sinister woman, accompanied by a machete-wielding zombie. When the woman demands that she leave the island, Emma refuses. After narrowly escaping a bloody death at the zombie’s hands, Emma begins searching for the motive behind this upsetting visit. Her investigation leads to the legend concerning an underwater cave supposedly guarded by a sea monster that imbues seaweed with its hue. What she learns proves to have implications much weightier than Emma’s routine cosmetics research, but the thrills are few and far between, and the melding of the supernatural and the real world doesn’t work. Agent: Barbara Poelle, the Irene Goodman Agency. (Nov.)