Desperate circumstances forced Lunzie Mespil, Healer (a combination of doctor and psychiatrist) to abandon the starship on which she was a passenger. Since she made it to a lifeboat, Lunzie is not too worried; she will spend a month or two in cryogenic stasis awaiting inevitable rescue, and then proceed with her life. Only it's not a month or two. Lunzie waits for sixty-two years before she is finally picked up. How Lunzie deals with being reborn to a world she never made, a world that has grown strangely dark and dangerous during her long sleep, is the story of The Death of Sleep.

The Death of Sleep is a science fiction novel by Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye, published by Baen Books in 1990.[1] It is the second book in the Planet Pirates trilogy and continues the Ireta series that McCaffrey initiated with Dinosaur Planet in 1978.[1] Elizabeth Moon and McCaffrey wrote the other two Planet Pirates books