Not a full review...more of just a quick commentary on the read...

I finished this book very quickly. I think I started it on Sunday, and finished it on Monday. It was a good story; Koontz is a good plotter. It follows the story of two people who are in love: Amy Redwing, a dog rescuer who works for an animal rescue foundation, and Brian (can't remember the last name right now), who is an architect. Both have a past. And of course, both pasts are converging on the pair. But into their lives comes an extraordinary golden retriever named Nickie.

I think Coben does this "past intrudes on present life" better, more compellingly (is that even a word?). But Koontz does it pretty good, too.

My problem with this, and with a lot of Koontz novels, is that he seems to write with a thesaurus in hand. He crams in as many obscure words as possible, so that if you don't have a pretty darned good vocabulary yourself, you probably need to look up a bunch of them. (Some meanings are evident from context, so maybe part of his idea is to expose people to new words. I don't know.) This sometimes pulls the reader (at least it does me) right out of the story.

I must say that, other than the title of Netta's journal, I've never seen the word "susurration" used in a work of fiction (or nonfiction, for that matter) until this novel.

If the object is to use as many big unusual words as possible, this book is a winner! It's a good enough story that stripping down the writing style might not help that much. As I said, I finished it really fast because it did get to be a compelling read. I still would like to see a tighter writing style from Koontz. But who am I to advise him? The guy's written dozens of best sellers, I suppose.