“They want her dead. One thing stands in their way…The Good Guy.”
That’s the tagline on the latest paperback from Dean Koontz, one of my favorite authors. I’ve read most of his stuff and a few of them have been brilliant.
This latest one sort of lacked the uniqueness he puts into most of his work.
The Good Guy is about a man who basically lives alone and sits at a bar most evenings, instead of getting out there and finding a wife and starting a family.
One night, a case of mistaken identity leads him to discover that a woman who he’s never met, is the target of a hit or contract. He has a choice: Stay out of it, or help the poor girl.
Well, it’s obvious what he chooses to do, or else there’d be no book.
There is excitement here and Koontz definitely knows how to write action sequences and does a great job with pace and tension. At the ending climatic scene, I was on the edge of my seat for an entire chapter. Good stuff.
But the one part that really bothered me about this book, which he does a lot and perhaps now I’m just really noticing, is that his characters are all too ready to get along with everyone they meet.
The Good Guy finds out the Girl is in danger, and goes to warn her. They immediately hit it off, with witty banter and a dry humor that you really only find with someone after a long friendship.
Then later, maybe only hours, they call up his friend, and end up having a three-way relayed phone call filled with jokes and humor that is just impossible to believe.
Koontz is a master at funny dialog I think and he creates characters with fun personalities, but lately they seem to all run together. The humor and banter has been done many, many times before and I guess I just really didn’t buy into it this time around.
The last Koontz book I read, The Husband, was much better, had more uniqueness and energy, plus a great twist that blew me away. That’s what I’m talking about.
The Good Guy was just an okay for me dawg…another basic entry into the massive Dean Koontz library.
LOL’d at “The Good Guy was just an okay for me dawg…”
Adams last blog post..The Deets on the Song From Yesterday
I didn’t find this book as addictive as The Husband. (Sorry I don’t know how to italicize on this thing.) It took me a while to read it which is unusual for a Dean Koontz novel. Of course, that could have been because I was caring for a newborn at the time
found the same problems with the book as Mike did. It seemed like the two were already a couple by the end of the book even though it spans, if I remember correctly, a day or so.
Yeah Ana, glad to see someone else read it and thought the same thing.
And what about the VERY end, the big important person he talks to? Where did that come from?
The Husband was great, had a SWEET plot twist that totally threw me for a loop.