The Good Guy
by Dean Koontz
rated: 4 out of 5
Timothy Carrier is having a drink alone at his his friend’s tavern when a man who enters the bar & sits next to him mistakes Tim for a hired killer and gives him a manila envelope full of cash.
The man says “Ten thousand now. You get the rest when she’s gone.”
The stranger walks out, leavs a photo of the woman marked for death, and her address.
A few minutes later, the real hired killer comes in, sees Tim with the envelope and thinks he is the man who has hired him. Tim tells the killer that he has had a change of heart and gives the killer the cash. The killer finds this hard to believe, but takes the cash and leaves. Tim follows him out and figures out the killer is a cop.
Tim keeps the womans photo and adress and goes to the womans home to warn her. They have a mutual friend who vouches for Tim. She believes Tim's story and they both set out for a while to try to figure out why Linda is on a hit list.
The hired killer figures out what is going on and tracks Tim and Linda down and you soon see how crazy he is. His name is Krait and he is pretty much nuts. He has alot of resources and help in tracking down his targets and kills other innocents in the process as well.
It becomes like a cat and mouse chase with Tim and Linda narrowly escaping the killer. They are trying to figure out why he is after Linda and trying to stay alive now that that killer is after both of them.
'He had not fallen in love at first sight. He had not spent his life looking for someone like Linda. Her face had just been another face, attractive but not enchanting. The feelings he had for her now were nothing he could have imagined then.
Maybe it was this: The name of the person marked for murder is just a name, but the face makes real the cost of violence, for if we have the nerve to look, we can see in any face our own vulnerability.'
I enjoyed this book. I liked it from the start, it was interesting and suspenseful.
It had Koontz' good humor in it as well. Throughout most of the book, you are reading from either Tim or the hired killers perspectives. I liked this, because this way you get to see what both are thinking during the story.
I also liked Linda and Tim's romance, it's not forced and gradually shows up.
"This was not the moment of no return, for Tim had passed that moment earlier in the night. When he had walked out of the street and into her house, when he had seen that she possessed a poster of a TV instead of a TV, he had committed himself to a course as irreversible as the one that Columbus had taken when he weighed anchor in August of 1492."
I always love reading a good Dean Koontz novel. It's kinda like good chocolate.
visit the author's website @ http://deankoontz.com/
this read is part of the following challenges:
suspense & thriller
TBR
