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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
*Starred Review* It's another boring day in paradise for gardener Mitch Rafferty, planting impatiens on a rich client's lawn. Then his cell rings. It's Holly, his wife, and she doesn't sound good. Someone slaps her, she screams, and a man comes on to tell Mitch that he has 60 hours to raise $2 million to ransom her. Just so Mitch knows they mean business, the man says, see the guy walking a dog across the street? Mitch looks and blam! A bullet to the head kills the dog walker. Let this be a warning, too, that the kidnapper-killers will know if Mitch says word one to the cops about his predicament, and Holly will suffer. Where is a gardener supposed to get $2 million? The sinister caller says he'll let Mitch know; just be a good machine and follow instructions. Despite his terror, Mitch does until . . . But uh-uh-uh, nothing should be given away about this sinuous nail-biter's developments. Suffice it to say that Mitch's intensely warped family, managed according to his rigidly materialistic psychologist-father's theories; two betrayals, one of Mitch, the other of the kidnappers; a slick child pornography entrepreneur; a humane but persistent police detective; and a New Ager psychopath all help ratchet up the suspense and the violence. But Koontz focuses relentlessly on Mitch and, in chapters scattered judiciously throughout the latter 230 pages, Holly. Not for him the flirtation with evil thinking that an Elmore Leonard does so well or the temptation to sympathize with evildoers that an Alfred Hitchcock offers. And yet Koontz is no less an artist for his championing of the good and his determination to have readers identify with it, as this hair-raising thriller attests. Ray Olson
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, or if you like violent westerns based on history, Blood Meridian by the same author.