Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #121906 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-02
• Original language: English
• 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

Another excellent read
I'm a massive fan of Dean Koontz, and read this book whilst on holiday a few weeks ago, and couldn't put it down! A fast-paced book with a number of intiguing twists and turns. If you like this book, I would also recommend The Face, The Husband, Shattered, Cold Fire and Lightening, to name a few. Brilliant read!

A real stinker
If you don't care that a thriller writer doesn't finally explain the (im)practicalities of how the perpetrators did what they did - let alone 'why'; if you're happy to find that the answer to 'whodunnit' is a sloppy combination of a) the one character that has been set up as the villain almost since the beginning and b) an unbelievable cypher of a character that wasn't even mentioned for the first 9/10ths of the book...well then, enjoy.
This was my first Dean Koontz; nothing would induce me to waste a minute on another one.

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...!