Krishna
When I was about to finish this book, my reaction was ‘Gosh, here we go again!’. As I said elsewhere, Dean seems to have lost the ability to tell great stories consistently. Some of his recent books are undeniably good but some of his current books seem to fall flat when it comes to endings.
The narrative gift is al there. Even there, he seems to have turned preachy a bit and trivial. For instance, even in this book there is that repetitive advice on what constitutes a good life and who is a good soul that reads like watching a government documentary in a totalitarian country that jars on the nerves. He has given up (thank god) the surfer lingo after the series starting from Seize the Night.
Again, familiar themes resurface: taking care of a person who is completely disabled or in a coma or unaware of the surroundings and not doing it as a duty but out of love – how many times have we seen it in these books. (Thankfully he does not have a Golden Retriever with whom the hero shares a special bond and love – I am not against pets or anything but if ALL these themes are in every one of his books, you do get the feeling that you are reading the same book over and over again!)
The story starts well, if you ignore the preachy tone prevalent throughout the book. Billy has a wife Barbara, who is in a coma as an invalid, and whom he loves very much. (My rant in the beginning refers to this). One day, he gets a note with a macabre choice, stuck to the windshield of his car. Choose out of the two – the killer describes the choices – whom he would like killed. If he makes no choice or goes to the police, the killer will choose the victim. When he ignores it, he actually realizes that someone is getting killed. The killer then interferes with him, leaving a note inside his house on the fridge, asking him if he is ready for his first pain.
The situation escalates. He initially is sure it is Steve Zillis, the playful, but good for nothing bartender who relieves him (yes, he is an aspiring writer who works in a bar) at the end of his shift, but the person you suspect in these kinds of books can almost always be written off, can he not?
In the meanwhile, a shady element called Ralph Cottle comes to see him to take his threat seriously. He, Ralph, is badly rattled as, apparently, this killer is a vicious one who promised to peel the face off of Ralph if he did not get the note taken seriously by Billy, and showed a face that he had preserved in Formaldehyde as proof.
Billy cannot trust the police either, because of his past and the brutal and selfish nature of the police officer. When he realizes that clues have been left in his apartment and elsewhere which connect every one of the victims of the killer’s escalating violence linking them to him, he knows that the killer has a devious masterplan to completely destroy his sanity and his peace of mind. The police, with or without a little prompting, will ultimately realize that Billy is connected too all the murders!
The book is interesting, racy, and narrated well. When the conclusion comes, you sit up and say, ‘What? This is a last minute conclusion again! The same deux ex
machina ending!”. But luckily, through a double twist, Dean manages to salvage some of the interest you had lost up to that point.
From the point of view of the good storytelling, and the double twist at the end, this is not as bad as his usual books. I think it deserves a 6/10
— Krishna