The Silent Corner

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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.