Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39191 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Synopsis
The new fast-moving thriller from Dean Koontz is the story of an innocent man forced by a serial killer to choose who will be murdered next. William Wiles is an easygoing thirty-something, a bartender who lives a quiet life alone until a serial killer singles him out - not to kill him, but to force him to decide who the next victim will be. On his SUV, Billy finds the first note: 'If you don't take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blonde schoolteacher. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have four hours to decide. The choice is yours.' Billy pays an informal visit to an acquaintance, Lanny Olson, who is a policeman, and who thinks the note is a prank. The schoolteacher dies. The next note reverses the choices: if Billy takes the note to the police, a mother of two young children will die. If he doesn't, an unmarried man who won't be much missed will die. Lanny has to take this note seriously but the deadline runs out before he can decide how to make his involvement official. Billy doesn't hear from him again because Lanny himself, unmarried, who will not be much missed, has become the next victim. There will be more communications from the killer, more hideous choices, with ever tighter decision times, and with each choice Billy is drawn deeper into an accelerating nightmare, which steadily becomes more personal, more confrontational, until he is isolated, with no one to turn to and no one to rely on but himself. Finally he must risk everything to save the intended victims...

Customer Reviews

Brilliant
This is the first book by this author that i have read and i was hooked from the first page! I love the way that this author writes, keeping the reading wanting more - will defiantly be reading more...!

Not the best Koontz book out there
This book was ok but definitely not the best that Mr Koontz has given us. I've read several of his books and this wasn't really in the same league. In fact, I stopped reading them for quite a while as I started to find them formulaic so this was my step back into the Koontz world having been drawn in by the 'story' on the cover. This was an ok thriller but I felt that things were a little too 'pat' towards the end, too easy and not enough real tension.

One of the things I've always liked about Koontz are the strong female characters he draws, even if the lead in the book is male. There was none in this book, there is only really one good female character and she's never developed fully. Plus, we didn't really learn enough about the lead to really feel we knew him and the way he managed to deal with the killer - I'll say no more for fear of spoilers!

If you are looking for a Koontz book to start with, go for Watchers (classic Koontz), Lightning (my fave that really could do with being filmed), Tick Tock (quick read and quite funny), Strange Highways (great short stories), Mr Murder, Sole Survivor... I could go on.

Utterly utterly brilliant!
Velocity is my favourite Dean Koontz novel ever (so far) and is one of my top 10 favourite book by anyone. This was the first book of Koontz that I had read and from then on in have been hooked.
Its a fast paced murder thriller with great characters, intrigue, a bit of gory detail and a macabre sense of humor. Great.