It was a warm summer night when it all began. The dark monstrous killer, Alton Turner Blackwood, was on a massive killing spree. Targeting four families, Blackwood broke into their homes and killed each and every family member, playing with the young and pretty girls in perverse ways before he killed them. But…Blackwood didn’t realize the last family would be his end. Fourteen-year-old John Calvino was the death of Blackwood.
Twenty years later, John Calvino is a homicide detective with a great wife and three wonderful children. Life seems to be normal again, until mysterious murders are being committed that seem an awful lot like the murders by Blackwood a couple decades before. John gets an eerie feeling that his family will be the fourth target in this horrifying killing spree. A very practical man, John still harbors a strange sense that Blackwood has returned, although dead. Still unsure, a very convincing experience occurs that will prove John’s theory just might be sound.
The battle is for John’s family. The mission is for all of them to pay for John’s actions as a boy. The battleground is John’s home.
Don’t miss this excellent book by Dean Koontz. It also goes on my list of favorite Koontz novels. It’s one of his most chilling and creepy novels yet, and the suspense will leave you breathless until the very end.
On a side note, I wanted to mention Koontz’s excellent vocabulary. He’s truly a master of words. I actually learned a ton of new words in this book. Here are a few I had to look up: bathyscaphes, coruscating, abattoir, triptych, clerestory, leitmotif, and geodes. I love when an author can teach me new things, especially when it has to do with expanding my knowledge of word usage and meaning. More authors today should be doing this same thing. It’s great when you can pull unique words from your word bank instead of the same old ones that everyone else uses. Anyway, that’s just the English major in me talking.
Read this book and be sure to leave a light on…
Cozy Corner 