The Servants of Twilight » (Reissue)

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.

A strange old woman descends upon Christine and her six-year-old son in an ordinary southern California parking lot and makes violent threats. Suddenly Christine's only son is targeted by a group of religious fanatics. They want to kill him . . . and they are everywhere!

Publishers Weekly

Previously issued as a paperback original under the pseudonym Leigh Nichols, this is one of Koontz's better thrillers. Single parent Christine Scavello and her young son Joey find themselves confronted by a madwoman, Grace Spivey, who fancies she discerns the Antichrist in Joey's cherubic visage. Spivey is the charismatic leader of a religious cult whose fanatic members do her every bidding, including murdering the little boy, and everyone who stands in their way. After the police fail to provide adequate protection, Christine turns to private detective Charlie Harrison, whose business and home are soon firebombed by the cultists, and two of his men murdered, even as he finds that he is falling in love with Christine. The narrative moves along briskly until the last third, at which point a frantic chase sequence goes on too long. Nevertheless, this is a better than average adventure with supernatural overtones. The possibility of Joey's actually being the Antichrist is a deftly handled (and unresolved) tease. (March)