The Good Guy

The Good Guy by Dean Koontz

Category: Thriller Grade: A-

And back to entertaining garbage... This book has three parts -- a brief ten page section to set up the premise, an involved chase scene and, finally, a relatively brief explanation of why everything happened. The premise is pretty clever -- a man (our hero) walks in to his favorite bar. After a few minutes at the bar, a stranger walks over, hands our hero $10K and a picture of the woman our hero is supposed to kill and leaves the bar. A few minutes later, a second stranger walks in to the bar and walks up our hero to ask for his assignment. The hero, having figured out that he has somehow gotten in to the middle of a murder-for-hire, gives the second stranger the money and tells him "never mind", thinking that'll make everybody happy and keep the woman alive.

Of course, it doesn't work out that way. The contract killer figures out what happened and, because of professional pride and the fact that he enjoys killing people, decides to go ahead with the murder. In addition, he figures that, since our hero can identify him, our hero will have to go to and, since the murderer is a sporting man, he calls our hero and tells him so!

I haven't given away much here. The setup I've described all happens in the first ten pages or so. Then, most of the book is devoted to the cat and mouse game between the murderer and the hero and, of course, the intended victim since we need an attractive, quirky female lead to make the action interesting. Surprisingly, Koontz is then able to give us 300 pages of non-stop, very entertaining action. As I said, its basically one long chase scene and, like the best Die Hard movie, it keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole way.

The last section - the explanation of why anybody wanted to kill this reasonably nice woman in the first place - is the weak point of the book and cost it a couple of points. It was a little lame and felt like Koontz finished and realized he'd left this big issue hanging out there.

The weak points aren't enough to kill the fun of the story and the pace of the action. This is a great summer read. Perfect for sitting by the pool or waiting for the sun to come out.