Product Description

Harry Lyon is a cop who embraces tradition and order. The biggest bane of his life is his partner, Connie Gulliver. Harry doesn’t like the messiness of her desk, her lack of social polish or her sometimes casual attitude towards the law. ‘Look, Harry, it’s the Age of Chaos,’ she tells him. ‘Get with the times.’

And when Harry and Connie have to take out a hopped-up gunman in a restaurant, the chase and shootout swiftly degenerate into a surreal nightmare that seems to justify Connie’s view of the modern world. Shortly after, Harry encounters a filthy, rag-clad denizen of the streets, who says ominously, ‘Ticktock, ticktock. You’ll be dead in sixteen hours.’ Struggling to regain the orderly life he cherishes, Harry is trapped in an undertow of terror and violence. For reasons he does not understand, someone is after him, Connie Gulliver and the people he loves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111788 in Books
• Published on: 1993-12-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

About the Author
Dean Koontz was born into a very poor family and learned early on to escape into fiction. His novels have sold over 200 million copies worldwide and more than thirty have appeared on national and international bestseller lists. He lives in southern California with his wife, Gerda and a vivid imagination.

Customer Reviews

How would you file that? Under "W" for "weird"
"There's a Chinese saying that goes, 'Sometimes life can be as bitter as dragon tears. But whether dragon tears are bitter or sweet depends entirely on how each man perceives the taste.'"
"In other words, life is hard, even cruel - but it's also what you make of it."
"Perhaps wisdom may yet enter through the thick bone of your Yankee head."
- private investigator and Connie Gulliver, herein

DRAGON TEARS covers a fine, sunny Tuesday in the lives of career cops Harry Lyon and Connie Gulliver that starts out beautifully until they have to shoot a maniac at lunch. After that, the day quickly slides into the Twilight Zone, as a huge vagrant thug with mysterious powers begins stalking Harry and Connie, warning them that they'll be dead by dawn. The thug has also appeared to Sammy Shamroe - a bright man who wound up on the streets after destroying his own future through cocaine and alcoholism - and to Janet Marco, who with her preschool son Danny and his dog Woofer have taken to the streets as sanctuary from the memory of her abusive husband.

The viewpoint cycles primarily between the victims-to-be (emphasis on Harry and Connie as professional investigators) and the stalker, with a nice little Columbo-style mystery going: how can the victims win the vicious hide-and-seek game the stalker is playing with them? How can they find him when he acts only through golem puppets, never directly risking himself in confrontation?

Very interesting novel here, partly playing out as a homicidal fairy tale in a California landscape. (Harry is very fond of the Brothers Grimm; while the unexpurgated original tales are violent, at least the goblins don't get the queen's daughter in the end. Connie, by contrast, collects true-life tales of modern horror stories.) DRAGON TEARS has varying portrayals of homeless people and of the general population's reaction to them, from Sam the Sham's retreat into alcoholism to blot out his own worst memories to Janet's ability to make a precarious living as a scavenger, from the deliberate blindness of most people on the street to the generosity of a care facility that feeds the homeless with leftovers after the patients have eaten.

Harry and Connie have a kind of good cop/bad cop routine along the lines of Jack and Rebecca from DARKFALL, where Connie is the more cynical bad-attitude partner, having come through a mixture of child abuse and foster homes in her youth. Harry, on the other hand, is uptight about rules and procedures, but not so much so that he can't laugh at himself a little. (They'd both like to know what the priest in THE EXORCIST looked up in the index when he consulted a psychology book, for instance.)

I recommend the unabridged CD narration by Jay O. Sanders. He makes an effort to give each character a distinct voice without throwing in senseless pauses for campy effect; he plays it straight.

Drive-in totals:
- Six dead bodies (though I may have lost count), including a dog.
- Sexual content, including one serial rapist turned murderer, though no "on camera" rapes.
- Connie Gulliver is much given to recounting grim true-life "new Dark Ages" anecdotes, e.g. murders committed for trivial motives
- One psycho shooter with grenades
- Injury to eye motif
- Aging female rock groupie motif
- Psycho with psychic powers
- Time control fu
- Golem fu
- Illustration of rave culture, including Ecstasy drug abuse

A fantastic build-up to an ending that doesn't arrive...
Koontz can write. No doubt. The suspense throughout the book, and the telling of the story from many different perspectives, hooks you in and it's difficult to get away from it. It haas everything a good tale should; a malevolent bad guy, a strong partnership and sometimes crackling chemistry between the two leads, many different people with their own story and views and just a little tint of the supernatural. The whole book was a build up to an ending, with just a little bit more of each character being revealed as we go along, and he suspense felt can almost equal that of Stephen King himself, yet the ending hits like a fly hitting a windscreen. Still a good read, but prepare for a whistle-stop ending.

No dragons but plenty of action!!!!!
Firstly if you want to read this book try and get your hands on the audiobook version of this book it is brilliantly read and makes the book come to life. All elements of koontz writing are in this book The heroes, The villains, twists and turns and the obligitory dog. As soon as the hulking tramp charachter entered the plot I was hooked "Tick Tock". Great paced novel and an unusual ending. Any koontz fans should add it to their collection.