The Silent Corner

Not that I didn't find that an intriguing read, but that took forever to finish! I have to admit the twisted, evil use of technology in the book made me shudder! Loved Jane, such a strong, brave and courageous woman who'll stop at nothing to get to the truth! Look forward to reading the next book in the series.

Good enough. Not really anything special. Good enough to make me continue the series, but not good enough to make me dive deeper into Dean Koontz if I wasn't already familiar with him. I had a fair amount of pacing issues with this. For a relatively simple and fast moving novel, there was so much that I felt was over written and drawn out.

I was given an advanced copy of The Whispering Room by Dean Koontz and in order for me to properly start that I had to read the first one. I use to go back and forth between Dean Koontz and Stephen King when I was younger they were my favorite and I have to say I LOVED this so much that reading over 400 hundred pages in one day came easy.
For me, this is Dean Koontz at his best. Jane Hawk is the main character. She is an FBI agent on leave after her husband commits suicide. He leaves a note “I need, I need, I need to die.” This sets her on a mission to discover the why of her husband's death. During her research of suicides, she comes across the fact that suicides are rising at an alarming and steady rate. Happy, purposeful people are committing suicide. Her commitment to finding and uncovering the truth makes this novel relatable and easy to read. This book makes me eager for the next one. hands down an awesome book.

My favorite Dean Koontz books have long been his action-packed thrillers, whether they have an element of sci-fi and/or the supernatural or not. It seemed many of his more recent books over the past dozen years or so had lost that edge, that excitement, so I've not been very interested lately. Having said that, I still have hope and that hope has finally been rewarded with a thrill-a-page book that burns rubber off the first page and never lets up. If I had one criticism, it would be that, while Jane Hawk is a fascinating character that is pretty well-developed, many of the other characters seem a bit one dimensional, more stereotype than archetype. But, considering how much I enjoyed the story, and how much I want to read the next title in the series, I'll let that slide for the moment.

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Paranoia is the setting of this book.

Jane Hawk is a widow. Her husband committed suicide despite being a successful Marine, a young father and deeply in love. Jane is an FBI agent so she does not accept the idea that this is a normal suicide, particularly when she notices that suicide rates have inexplicably risen and that these suicides involve successful men and women. In the midst of her investigation, her son is targeted.

Jane decides to go off the grid and investigate.

This story is about her investigation. Initially, the story is slow and I was bored by the detail being given to Jane's painstaking efforts to hide her identity from cameras and information sources. I found some of the initial interactions between Jane and the shadowy forces that were stalking Jane to be a bit more than I was willing to accept.

However, in the last half of the book, the story's energy seemed to ramp up as Jane began to unravel the mystery of a stunning and insidious conspiracy.

Koontz strikes me as an essentially nice man. His characters always seem nice and virtuous, saintly, in fact. (Odd Thomas has been described as the story of a saint.) He always works a dog into the story, in this case, a fictitious Golden Retriever makes an appearance as a cover story. The parallel story of Jane's boss, Nathan Silverman, has that aspect, as he is unwittingly and involuntarily drawn into evil but ultimately finds redemption.

But it is in Koontz' ability to depict human evil where he excels. He seems to have a sense of the evil and darkness that makes a misery of human existence. In this case, his villains are evil slavers who totally deprive their victims of dignity. They made me angry, which is probably why I enjoyed the rain-soaked, bloody ending where Jane and her new-friend Dougal take on the fortress of one of the villains.

All in all, this book was ultimately satisfying and I look forward to future installments.