Authors: Dean Koontz, Jay O. Sanders
ISBN-13: 9781101105504, ISBN-10: 110110550X
Format: MP3 Book
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Date Published: March 2010
Edition: Unabridged
Amazingly prolific and relentlessly suspenseful, Dean Koontz can be counted on for chilling, sometimes gory stories that occasionally overlap genres. His novels can jump from straightforward crime to sci-fi to horror, but the one thing he's consistent about is delivering nail-biting yarns that have kept fans reading for more than three decades.
Harry Lyon was a rational man, a cop who refused to let his job harden his soul. Then one fateful day, he was forced to shoot a man–and a homeless stranger with bloodshot eyes uttered the haunting words that challenged Harry Lyon's sanity:
"Ticktock, ticktock. You'll be dead in sixteen hours...Dead by dawn...Dead by dawn...Dead by dawn..."
Playing police logic against the supernatural, Koontz ( The Bad Place ; Night Chills et al.) delivers fairy-tale horror in the form of a detective thriller. In southern California, police detective Harry Lyon and his partner, Connie Guliver, find themselves hounded by a golem who appears in the shape of a towering vagrant. Called Ticktock because he grants his victims only hours to live, the vagrant has tremendous physical power, a taste for gruesomely described violence and the ability to stop time and rearrange reality. Koontz romps playfully and skillfully through this grown-up enchantment, dealing out such motifs as a talking dog and taking potshots at recognizable pop culture: e.g., the book's epigram is a Garth Brooks lyric, and during a killing spree the murderer yells out titles of Elvis Presley songs. The prose may occasionally strike a false note, but Koontz's breakaway bestseller pace does not dally for the mot juste. As irresistible (and nutritionally valuable) as a stack of brownies. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selections; Mystery Guild featured alternate. (Jan.)