A work both exciting and engaging—and with its heart in the right place.
In this thrilling, rather poignant sequel to Koontz's Odd Thomas (2003), the young psychic seeker visits a California monastery poised for attack by shadowy foes.
Koontz marvelously sets the scene in the tight, heart-stopping first chapter: One December night, Odd Thomas, a 21-year-old hard-luck kid from Pico Mundo, Calif., now a guest of several months at St. Bartholomew's Abbey in the Sierra Nevada, follows some ghosts on a mission to Room 32 of the monastery's school for handicapped children. Called “bodachs,” after evil spirits in British folklore, these horrifying protean spirits prefigure some kind of disaster to the children—and Odd, using the paranormal gift shared exclusively by the dog, Boo, has only a day or two at most to try to find out what the danger is and how to block it. Odd, tragically, lost the love of his life, Stormy, 16 months before, when she perished in a fire, and yet she now seems to be speaking through one of the paralyzed children, indicating to him who among them might know more about the imminent threat. Indeed, evidence points to Jacob, a retarded artist at the school, who renders in his drawings startlingly realistic depictions of a ghoulish, bony creature at the window that he calls the Neverwas. Meanwhile, Odd interviews numerous folks at the monastery, including a former New Jersey hit man for the Mafia, a world-renowned physicist who turned increasingly self-tortured and the inimitable Mother Superior, as steely as General George Patton. Terrific characterization and patient plotting mark Koontz's work, and this novel about the triumph of modesty over hubris proves exemplary on both counts.
A work both exciting and engaging—and with its heart in the right place.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2006
ISBN: 0-553-80480-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Catchy title; too bad the psychothriller behind it—despite the publisher's big push—is a mostly routine tale of cop vs. serial-killer. And it's really too bad for Patterson (The Midnight Club, 1988, etc.) that William Diehl's new thriller, Primal Fear (reviewed above), covers some of the same territory with superior energy and skill. A few charms lift this above run-of-the-mill: Patterson's hero, D.C. psychologist/cop Alex Cross, is black, while his lover, Secret Service honcho Jezzie Flanagan, is white; and the narrative moves briskly by cutting between Cross's ambling account and a sharper third-person tracking, mostly of the killer's movements. He is Gary Soneji—a nobody living a deceptively quiet life as Gary "Murphy"—who has killed 200 people and now wants to commit the Crime of the Century and become Somebody: Soneji/Murphy snatches the daughter of a top actress and the son of the US secretary of the treasury. Enter Cross and Flanagan, whose bad luck at finding kids and kidnapper—who, taunting the cops, kills an FBI agent and gets away with a $10-million payoff, while one of the kids turns up dead—changes only when Soneji/Murphy, cracking up, holds hostage to a McDonald's and is wounded by a cop. Here, Patterson's tale begins to mirror Diehl's: Soneji/Murphy turns out to suffer from the same sensational psychosis as Diehl's villain; and in the ensuing trial, Soneji/Murphy's lawyer pursues a defense similar to that of Diehl's attorney-hero. But where Diehl's villain roars on the page, Soneji/Murphy barely smirks; and while Diehl's courtroom crackles with intelligence, Patterson's is almost transcript-dull. Patterson does wind up, however, with a fine noir twist. Cross is a likable hero, but with a watery plot and weak villain—Hannibal Lecter would eat Soneji for breakfast—he doesn't have much to work with here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-69364-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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