Book review: The face

A dangerous psychopath wants to kidnap the son of a famous actor.

At first glance this should be a very interesting concept. In one side there is a classic Koontz villain while on the other there is a young boy and the chief of security who must protect him. We can envision a lot of preparation, cat and mouse action sequences and a sprinkle of “the crazy lives of very wealthy persons”.

Sadly for the author this wasn’t enough and so after not even fifty pages he starts a completely different story about ghosts and various other random things. Now this is not bad per se, often having two parallel plot lines can enrich a book and make it smarter without making it too complicated but here this trick doesn’t work.

See the ghost storyline completely eclipse the kidnapping one. Not only it takes more space, it becomes literally a deus ex machina because virtually all the important actions are made by an all powerful supernatural being.

This is a shame, the villain is stock Koontz psychopath but the author actually manages to make him interesting and so I would have liked to see him acting in a real plot instead of the obvious and bad developed one that the author created.

Koontz remains a crafty writer but this book is one of his least inspired efforts.