Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Dead and Alive by Dean Koontz

The appeal of a thriller is in the suspense, the plot twists, the near-misses. Sadly, that's missing in this book. Throughout the book, the heroes encounter not even a hint of danger. There's no sense of urgency, no dangerous situations, no resistance at all. Their plans to undermine the villain proceed without a hitch in sight. Meanwhile, the villain's minions either self-destruct, abandon him or are killed by the villain himself. It almost seems as if he's racing the heroes to put a nail in his own coffin. If the heroes had all stayed home, one gets the feeling that it wouldn't have made a difference in the end.

Unless you are a die-hard fan of Dean Koontz who doesn't care about the content, only that he wrote it, don't bother with the book.

How it started

Two words. Dean Koontz. One of my friends had recommended Odd Thomas, with her exact words being her "all time fav fiction book" and so I checked it out from the library.

And I liked it. Not "Oh, wow it was totally great", but more "I like it, not enough to knock my favorite authors off their spot, but enough to check out his other books"

Which was what I did.

Another trip to the library yielded Books 3 to 5 of the Frankenstein series.

After reading them, I was left with a sneaking suspicion that a ghostwriter had been involved . Wondering if anyone had had the same thought as me, I went looking for reviews online. (And in case you are wondering, yes I did find a couple of people who had drawn the same conclusions)

Which was when I thought of checking to see if there was some sort of site with book reviews catering to Singaporeans.

There was one, just one, and it had quite an impressive looking editioral board to boot, but the number of reviews were dismal enough that I simply could not visualise it being the place Singaporeans went to for reviews anytime soon.

And so I started this. What I plan is to have a group of reviewers, but for now there's just me.