Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 8, 1995 TAG: 9501130123
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
\ Well, maybe this delivers $24-worth of entertainment, and it certainly makes best-selling author Dean Koontz's point (even without his afterword to underline it) that a powerful government is capable of powerful excesses. This must be the theme of the month: several other novels, even including the 97th series paperback featuring a hero called "The Destroyer" published at the same time as Koontz's chase thriller, make exactly the same point.
But this time around, Koontz has written a double love story. The relationship that grows between both the story's couples makes little sense, but the plot moves so fast that the reader scarcely has time to think about it.
First we meet Spencer Grant (the phoney-sounding name is not a weakness of the author; we soon learn that it is, indeed, made up), a man branded by a facial scar which we learn about only gradually. Grant meets a young woman calling herself Valerie Keene (nope, it's not her real name, either) and promptly falls in love with her. He decides to become her protector, even after he finds out the hard way that a band of government thugs are trying to kill her for reasons he does not know (he finds out because, once he shows an interest in the lady, they come after him, too, and even after his dog, Rocky, a devout coward of a canine who is charming despite being nothing like such courageous dogs as Rin-Tin-Tin).
It takes Spencer almost half the book just to catch up with Valerie again, dodging bullets on the way, and she ends up more saving him than the reverse.
Meanwhile, the leader of Valerie's pursuers, a George Smiley type of rotund agent named Roy Miro, keeps barely missing her and Spencer even though he has all manner of governmental resources and technology (some of which hasn't quite been invented yet) on which to draw. The thing about smiling, affable, harmless-looking old Roy is that his hobby, unknown to his fellow agents, is trying to make the world around him more perfect by murdering those he comes across who lack his concept of perfection in such areas as health or beauty.
He finds his own soul-mate in the evil but beautiful Eve Marie Jammer, who works in telephone surveillance for the evil government agency, and impresses her on their first date with a double snuff. If anyone ever tries to track him down for easing so many people off this mortal coil, Koontz never lets us see it. The only other key character in the novel is a nice, normal Everyman whose life and family are ruined because Miro takes a dislike to him and sics the agency on him. It's enough to make the reader paranoid about income tax audits.
One almost gets the feeling that Koontz is having more fun with Miro than with the good guys, but the villains these days seem to have most of the good lines in many stories. "Dark Rivers ..." even manages to pull in a "Silence of the Lambs" style mass murderer. (It all ties together because the imprisoned mass murderer has something to do with that scar of Spencer's.) Miro, naturally, sees him as admirable. He would love Hannibal Lecter.
If this novel is ever made into a movie, it ought to be a serial; there is literally one cliffhanger after another. The thing is that, when all is said and done, not much has changed - except that the two diverse couples have found one another.
Koontz might have better made his point about the amorality and power of unaccountable government bureaucracies by keeping Roy Miro as a zealous bureaucrat with all-too-realistic excesses, rather than grafting a deranged serial-killer tag onto him -- but the story wouldn't have been half as much fun.
Paul Dellinger covers Pulaski for this newspaper.
by CNB