When he’s cooking on all burners there is no one who can match Dean Koontz for pure excitement when writing highly charged thrillers. The author’s latest offering, “Velocity,” matches the quality of his very best novels – “Dark Rivers of the Heart,” “Intensity,” “Odd Thomas,” etc. – in the areas of plot, character and writing.
Starting things off with a jolt, Koontz has bartender Billy Wiles (a man with a shadowy past) discover a note on his car that reads: “If you don’t take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher somewhere in Napa County. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours.”
With that horrible knowledge hanging over his head, Billy tries to enlist the help of Lanny Olsen, a deputy friend who tells him it’s a prank. When a beautiful schoolteacher turns up dead, both men take a subsequent note, promising another death, much more seriously. In fact, Lanny decides to destroy both notes in order to save his job, but since the deputy is the next intended victim, his actions regarding the future won’t matter much.
It isn’t long before the psychopath behind the crimes starts zeroing in on Barbara, Billy’s fiancée, who is in a coma. And when Billy discovers that the maniac behind this twisted game has been using his house and some of the items in it when perpetrating the crimes, he realizes that (because of his past) he won’t be able to go to the FBI or local police because he’ll be their first suspect.
Koontz’s love of odd and unusual characters sometimes works against the realism of his novels, especially when he peppers his entire cast of characters with enough quirks and extraordinary “gifts” to bless the characters of a dozen books. But in “Velocity,” he keeps these things to a minimum. Billy is, for the most part, an ordinary schlub, albeit with an extraordinary past.
The quirky characters, such as Ivy Elgin, who believes she is a practitioner of Haruspicy (an ancient art in which people are able to divine the future via corpses of animals, bugs, etc.), are perfectly realized. At one point, Ivy even gets to the heart of the novel’s thematic core when discussing with Billy how people tend to wear “masks,” even those whom we know and love. These are thoughts that reflect those of Charles Dickens (Barbara’s favorite author), who wrote of how each person is “constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” As readers will discover, there are more than a few characters with secrets and mysteries. And there are lots of lines from T.S. Eliot, musing on friendship, faith and the struggle between good and evil, wafting through the well-crafted chapters.
But such thematic underpinnings won’t distract readers from their enjoyment of “Velocity” because, in the end, Koontz’s latest is, essentially a good, old-fashioned, barn-burning, beat-the-clock thriller that pits an innocent man against the worst sort of evil. It is guaranteed to have armchair detectives hanging onto their easy chairs by the ragged ends of their well-chewed fingernails, “Velocity” is a corker.
Dorman T. Shindler, a freelancer from Missouri, contributes regularly to several national magazines and newspapers.
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Velocity
By Dean Koontz
Bantam, 401 pages, $27
