Dean Koontz is a very fine painter of characters. They’re all believable and captivating, and their feelings are the same. One lives and breathes with the story until the end. The plot is also filled with enough twists and turns so as not to be boring, without becoming overcomplicatedly absurd either. Only one thing I didn’t like namely the ending with was way too oversimplified: one moment Mitch is running from everyone, being framed with murder and with a big chance of also having problems with his brother, the next moment he’s happily at home and every villain involved is in prison, including some very powerful ones. This is quite unlikely and I was quite curious how he will disentangle himself from all this mess so I was a bit disappointed that all this part has been omitted.

Some characters I found curiously interesting were Mitch’s parents, reputed psychologists, with an “infallible” child rearing system (which in truth left all their five kids with quite a few emotional scars). Both they and their system are so hard to understand and relate to, one keeps wondering how they could be so dense, how they chose to live their lives so blindly (as a minor example they wanted their kids to have no shame so they at times forced one of them to do his chores completely naked, being watched by people even when on the toilet; they has a dark room where they kept their kids without food for days in order for them to achieve clearer thinking and so on).

All in all, a captivating read that kept me on the edge of my chair. I throughly recommend it (understandably enough given that Koontz is one of my favorite writers). :)

Written by the same author:
Life Expectancy
Odd Thomas
The Taking
Lightning

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