Midnight » (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.

In picturesque Moonlight Cove, California, inexplicable deaths occur and spine-tingling terror descends to this "edge of paradise." Growing numbers of residents harbor a secret so dark it is sure to cost even more lives.

Tessa Lockland comes to town to probe her sister's seemingly unprompted suicide. Independent and clever, she meets up with Sam Booker, an undercover FBI agent sent to Moonlight Cove to discover the truth behind the mysterious deaths. They meet Harry Talbot, a wheelchair-bound veteran, who has seen things from his window that he was not meant to see. Together they begin to understand the depth of evil in Moonlight Cove. Chrissie Foster, a resourceful eleven-year-old, running from her parents who have suddenly changed and in whom darkness dwells, joins them. Together they make a stand against darkness and terror.

Publishers Weekly

``Despite some paper-thin characterizations and a predilection for the maudlin, Koontz's sense of pace and the dramatic are sure,'' observed PW. A horror story with science fiction underpinnings, this concerns an insane inventor whose bizarre experiment turns the sleepy California town of Moonlight Cove into a charnel house. (Nov.)