A fast, easy read, simply told tale which pulls you through the action at a rate of knots. It’s dysfunctional family-based, with kidnapping-race-against-time stuff at its core, a good escapist read.
Reviewed by Sarah Broadhurst Sarah Broadhurst spent her early working life in the book trade in both retail and wholesale until the arrival of children forced her to look for freelance work she could do from… More reviews by Sarah Broadhurst
We have your wife. You get her back for two million cash. On an ordinary afternoon, an ordinary man, a gardener of modest means, gets a phone call out of his worst nightmare. The caller is dead serious. He doesn't care that Mitch can't raise that kind of money. If she's everything to you, then you'll find a way. Mitch loves his wife more than life itself. He's got sixty hours to prove it. He has to find the two million by then. But he'll pay a lot more. He'll pay anything.
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Dean Koontz's The City.
Dean Koontz was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He graduated from Shippensburg State College (now Shippensburg University). When he was a senior in college, Dean Koontz won an Atlantic Monthly fiction competition and has been writing ever since.
His first job after graduation was with the Appalachian Poverty Program, where he was expected to counsel and tutor underprivileged children on a one-to-one basis. His first day on the job, he discovered that the previous occupier of his position had been beaten up by the very kids he had been trying to help and had landed in the hospital for several weeks. The following year was filled with challenge but also tension, and Koontz was more highly motivated than ever to build a career as a writer. He wrote nights and weekends, which he continued to do after leaving the poverty program and going to work as an English teacher in a suburban school district outside Harrisburg. After a year and a half in that position, his wife, Gerda, made him an offer he couldn't refuse: "I'll support you for five years," she said, "and if you can't make it as a writer in that time, you'll never make it." By the end of those five years, Gerda had quit her job to run the business end of her husband's writing career. Dean and Gerda Koontz along with their dog, Trixie, live in southern California.
His books are published in 38 languages, a figure that currently increases more than 17 million copies per year.
