Mr.
Murder (1993)
Are you looking for some good chase scenes entwined
with witty, lively dialogues? This and, honestly, not much more is what you're
likely to find in this book that reads in a gulp but leaves not much of an
aftertaste.
Life was generous with Martin
Stillwater. He's not a top-notch writer, yet, but his thrillers and mystery
novels are renowned enough to bring him a fair amount of fame and money; his
family is a perfect (too perfect?) example of how love should rule in a house
and his expectations for the future couldn't be brighter.
Yet things are bound to take an
uncontrollable swerve onto a path of pure madness as a vicious stranger, who's
Marty's astoundingly perfect dead-ringer, breaks one day into the Stillwaters'
house. He accuses Marty of stealing his family, his name and his job, and he's
got no other purpose than getting his life back. This is only the beginning of
a daring escape, in which Marty, his wife Paige and his beloved daughters are
forced to play the part of hopeless mice (actually stalked by more than one
cat). Their enemy, in fact, seems to have unnatural resilience and recuperative
abilities along with an uncanny capacity of tracking his prey.
The theme of one's double has
always been a classic in literature and Koontz tries his hand at it giving it
his personal touch. You could naturally be reminded of Stephen King's "The
dark half", but Koontz definitely draws his own path and after the first
pages the evil he depicts turns out to be a real, living spawn of human
wickedness, not just a figment of a writer's imagination.
What is certainly good in this
book, even though that shouldn't surprise you if you've read your share of DK's works, is the way the characters are
depicted. All of the important ones are far from being paper-thin and even the
bad guy is really…fleshy (well, that's the right word, and you'll know why when
you read it). This is probably one of the few baddies whose guts you're not
supposed to hate, since after a while you almost …feel for him, too.
Particularly accurate was also Koontz's effort with Stillwater's daughters,
both endowed with sharply designed personalities.
No weak points in 480 pages,
then? Well, not exactly. The whole idea is appealing, all right, but when you
discover what's hidden behind the curtains of this book you might think that
the solutions Koontz came up with were overexploited and a bit trite. Something
you've already read about, then, starting in such a promising way but losing
some of its energy as you grab what's really going on. In a nutshell, at a
certain point the word that kept ricocheting in my head while I was reading
was… "again?!"
This is clearly not a classic and
you'd better not expect to be scared by it. It is an easy read, though, and it
certainly doesn't lack the strength to take you to the end with some
interesting twists. Recommended for fans who would cram their shelves with
every possible thing Koontz wrote, shopping lists included, or for occasional
summer readers basking in the sun. 7+