โ Scribed by Dean Koontz
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Dean Koontz's Odd Apocalypse.
Timothy Carrier is an ordinary guy who enjoys a beer after work. But tonight is no ordinary night. Instead, Tim will face a terrifying decision: Help or run. For the jittery stranger sitting beside him at the bar has mistaken Tim for someone elseand passes him a manila envelope stuffed with cash and the photo of a pretty woman. Ten thousand. The rest when shes gone.
Now everything Tim thinks he knowseven about himselfwill be challenged. For Tim Carrier is the one man who can save an innocent life and stop a killer as relentless as evil incarnate. But first he must discover resources within himself that will transform his idea of who he is and what it takes to be the good guy.
Starred Review. Bestseller Koontz (The Husband) delivers a thriller so compelling many readers will race through the book in one sitting. In the Hitchcockian opening, which resembles that of the cult noir film Red Rock West (1992), Timothy Carrier, a quiet stone mason having a beer in a California bar, meets a stranger who mistakes him for a hit man. The stranger slips Tim a manila envelope containing $10,000 in cash and a photo of the intended victim, Linda Paquette, a writer in Laguna Beach, then leaves. A moment later, Krait, the real killer, shows up and assumes Tim is his client. Tim manages to distract Krait from immediately carrying out the hit by saying he's had a change of heart and offering Krait the $10,000 he just received. This ploy gives the stone mason enough time to warn Linda before they begin a frantic flight for their lives. While it may be a stretch that the first man wouldn't do a better job of confirming Tim's identity, the novel's breathless pacing, clever twists and adroit characterizations all add up to superior entertainment.
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Big Tim Carrier maintains the lowest possible profile, but that tactic crumbles after he is mistaken for a hit man, and when the hit man arrives, poses as the client and tries to cancel. But no one aborts this guy's missions. Tim rushes to shield the prospective victim, writer Linda Paquette, and it soon becomes obvious that the killer has access to every auto-, phone-, and credit-tracing device known to law enforcement (is he a cop?). Moreover, he somehow can pressure law enforcement to be unhelpful, as Tim and Linda discover when Tim's police friend Pete Santo is warned off so firmly that he joins Tim and Linda on the run. For most of its length, this is white-knuckle suspense as gripping as any Koontz has ever written, and the principals all have intriguing backstories that are eventually, with the frustrating exception of the killer's, fully disclosed. Yet the climax and the denouement seem half-baked and perfunctory. This is, however, as politically passionate and common-guy witty as his other, better recent books. Ray Olson
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Timothy Carrier is sitting in a bar when the man next to him mistakes him for someone else and hands him an envelope with $10,000. The man leaves after handing Tim a photo of a woman marked for death and her address. Soon the killer arrives believing Tim is the one who wants to hire him.
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