Whispers

I've been reading a lot of DK's earlier works lately because apart from a few notable exceptions (Odd Thomas & Jane Hawk) they are far better then some of his more recent stuff. Whispers joins titles like Watchers, Lightning and Phantoms that for me is DK at his best.The synopsis doesn't give the reader much to work with but this is a tense and intriguing thriller. Hillary Thomas is a successful screenwriter whose life is turned upside down when she is assaulted by Bruno Frye, a man who outwardly appears to be a successful and respectable businessman but is fixated on ending Hillary's life. As the attacks become more bizarre and sinister, Hillary joins forces with cop Tony Clemenza stop the psychotic Frye once and for allI really enjoyed this one. Hillary and Tony are strong characters, and Koontz does a great job with the villain Bruno Frye, somehow making him both evil and sympathetic as more of his tragic upbringing is revealed. The twist of why he does what he does was creative and unique, and stands up well 30 + years later in 2022. Fantastic story.The only negatives I can say is, as with most Koontz books, this is a little too long with plenty of descriptions and background that really don't need to be so in depth. There are also times when this reads like a romance novel with pages and pages of Hillary and Tony having sex repeatedly and declaring their undying love for each other, even though they've known each other for less then a week. I don't mind building a relationship between the main characters, but not really interested in reading in depth descriptions about their steamy encounters every second chapter or so.

Great 📚 reading

It kept me intrigued! I never wanted to put the story down!!!!! It was very suspenseful!! I will probably read it again!

This is an early novel of Dean Koontz. It is a murder, mystery, slasher, psychological, thriller, action, romance novel. It is fairly lengthy compared to many modern mystery novels. It is at times, rather graphic in terms of violence, sex, and sexual violence. As a matter of personal taste it is too graphic for me.I know I used a lot of adjectives in the above paragraph to describe the type of novel this is. There is a point to that. I felt that Mister Koontz was trying to write a novel that was everything to every reader. There is some ghastly violence that is graphically depicted. There is sexual activity that is graphically depicted. There are lengthy narratives about social issues. There are lengthy discussions about psychological matters. There are narratives about food, wine, art, and architecture, Although I liked the novel and it is certainly a better work of fiction than anything I have ever attempted, by the time it was ended, I was just ready for the book to be finished.In summary, this is a fairly well written, somewhat lengthy novel. I am glad that I read it and intend to read a latter work by Dean Koontz. I am not sure which one. I have no intention of reading this novel again without good cause. Thank You...

I saw the television movie of the book and felt that there had to be more to the story.There was far more to the story than in the movie. It has good character development of the main figures in the story. I liked the amount of detail to support the premise of the story and develop the action. The story flowed well.I liked that Hilary was a fairly strong character. She knows what she wants and how to take care of herself but it is also her weakness.There were some minor flaws but they do not detract from the action. The old mansion was built on a site that was almost inaccessible so how did they get workmen and materials up to such a remote site. Despite Katherine's complicated story, in a small town, there would always be one or two busybodies who would have suspicions and there would have to have been some gossip. I'm also not so sure an experienced detective would have let himself and two civilians walk into a potentially dangerous situation or access a house where there was possible evidence in an active crime investigation, even to air it out.Still these did not detract from the overall suspense of the story. It was a work of suspense, not a study on police techniques or true crime.It was entertaining and it filled in a lot of details left out of the movie that tied the story together.

This book was written in 1979, before Koontz got famous. In fact, it is pretty much the book that made him famous. Or as he puts it in the Afterword, "this is the book that saved me from a life of crime." He argues that writing was his only skill, and if this had not sold . . .But it did. It's a tight psychological thriller that delivers the full complement of chills up the spine, and eventually offers a compassionate view of a horrible killer. Or as one of the main characters, Joshua the lawyer, put it: "i just wish all of the villains in this piece were thoroughly vile and despicable. It seems wrong, somehow, to feel so much sympathy for them."This is a problem for real-life criminologists, too. I recently saw a TV special about "The Man Who Studies Murder." In digging into murderers' stories, learning what twisted histories they had, how often they were themselves the victims of horrible abuse, it is easy to forget that they are still responsible for their reactions to that abuse and their dehumanizing of their victims. Lots of people had crappy childhoods, but not all of them became killers. Plenty become therapists or criminologists or perhaps even writers of psychological thrillers.This story is very good, but it is early Koontz. If you enjoy it, you will clearly want to read his more recent works. I'm giving this one five stars mostly because it is a deeply moving story of the psychological thriller type. Later Koontz was able to transcend genre categories and write stories more uniquely his own. He's definitely one of our handful of best writers.

Recently reread on Kindle after a very long gap, and it was just as good as I remembered. Much of his later fiction is what I might term cheap & shoddy, with little real thought. This is a proper novel, in the same way as the magnificent Watchers is.Obviously the basic premiss is signalled quite early, but not the details, which are well-thought-out.The Kindle version must have been redone, because I noticed no errors.

As usual an excellent novel from Dean, leads you into it until you need to know the outcome.If there were any part to criticise it would be the time spent on the romantic/sex scenes, I am no prude, however in this novel there was (very good) descriptive interludes into the main characters relationship. Dean has done this before very effectively but not to this depth which personally I found a bit tedious. It was clear where their relationship was going and shorter descriptions would have achieved the same.Nonetheless an excellent read which I would recommend

Three and a half stars!Early, easy to read Dean Koontz novel.The good. The story, starting rather slowly eventually gets going and becomes intriguing. Well, for most of it that it. There is one rather boring section where too much is explained and it reminded me of another book I read recently where the whole story was explained in an `email' at the end. Also the main concept was quite obvious early on, long before the so called `experts' who were investigating it figured it out. However it did keep me wondering how it would all pan out. But I did however find the heroine somewhat annoying, and I thought the ending was rushed.The bad.This was the Kindle edition, and I can only say that I have never encountered such sloppy spelling mistakes, punctuation and grammatical mistakes in my entire reading life. It was terrible. Part of it read like it had been typed up by an idiot. Sometimes you had to read a whole section twice in order to make sense of it. At one point I actually had to guess what was being written!However the story itself was an overall good read and if you like mystery/horror thrillers then you might like to try this one, but bear in mind, there are much better Dean Koontz book out there.

I don't usually write reviews, but this book. What a page turner. If you could read a book whilst covering your eye's, like watching a scary movie and you're anxious of what is yet to come.....well this is that book. Fantastic...can't wait to read more of Mr Koontz's novels ❤

Even ignoring the shoddy conversion of this book to kindle format this book is terrible - it's littered with endless ridiculous errors demonstrating it was not proof read, some easy to interpret (be instead of he, ean instead of ear, older instead of order) and some are just baffling collections of random words or letters, but both kinds make it frustrating and disjointed to try and read this book.As for the plot, the characters, the beginning, middle and ending. Oh my goodness. Cliched, predictable, shallow, tedious, awful. This is very, very clearly an early example of Koontz's writing. Really quite embarrassing.The plot development is bizarre (great potential totally squandered), and the "great reveal" blatantly obvious almost immediately, yet for some reason takes the characters until around 75% of the way through to even consider. The ending may as well have been "and then they all lived happily ever after" and didn't bother to explore any of the issues raised. The characters are shallow, idiotic, and very difficult to empathise or sympathise with. They are also breathtakingly stupid on several occasions, in ways that just undermine the limited credibility of the storyline.A very large portion of the book is also dedicated to repeating myths surrounding rape, in particular that women ask to be raped, that reports of non stranger rapes are almost always made up, and that abuse victims are complicit in their own abuse. I presume because of the age of the book, but it doesn't make it any less appalling and frustrating to read.The idea behind this book could have been explored in so much more depth and more interesting ways, but never even tried to do so. It started off promisingly, which suckered me in, then went off on a massive, tedious tangent that added nothing to the plot, before quickly glossing over the main plot point and wrapping up in record quick time with a huge cliché.Koontz has produced some fantastic works of fiction, but this is most definitely not counted among them. Read something else, anything else.