Sunday Salon: Dean Koontz and New Subscribers

Today was a big day for the Sunday Salon. We've got three new participants today, whose blogs have been added to the group feed, so you should be reading their initial posts soon. The new members are Ginny of Ginny in Wonderland, Alisia of Book Haven, and Amanda of The Blog Jar. I hope everybody enjoys themselves.

I've been suffering mightily from a headache today, and haven't managed to read pretty much any Salon posts yet. I did manage a few chapters of my current book, however, which is Dean Koontz's The Husband. I'd never read anything by him before, and I wasn't sure what to expect. But I'm enjoying it. It's one of those quick reads that'll keep you up late: short chapters and breathless action. It reads pretty well. In short, a landscaper gets a call on his cell phone one afternoon from his wife. It turns out she's been kidnapped, and her abductors expect him to cough up two million dollars in 60 hours. Which of course he can't do, because he's just a landscaper, after all. But they soon make it very obvious that they're very serious. So of course he can't go to the police, and we follow his response to this crisis, watching as he tries to out-think these people. I like watching the reasoning in print. It turns out that how he was brought up becomes relevant to the storyline. It's not pretty: his parents were mentally abusive and brought their kids up as if they were science experiments. This part is hard to swallow, and I'm waiting to see if it's too over the top for the story. But even so, I'm quite liking the read for what it is. I'll be curious after I write my own review to see what the aggregate response to it has been over at Amazon.

Tags: The Sunday Salon