Review for You - The Husband

The Husband by Dean Koontz

2.5 stars

Every once in a while you need to sit back and read something that will not really take a lot of effort. That’s the perfect time to pick up a Dean Koontz novel. They’re thrilling and intense, but not too intense so that you have to do a lot of heavy thinking.

The Husband is a pop-fiction mystery thriller about a landscaper named Mitchell Rafferty. He’s basically an all-around nice guy that has married his dream girl and is trying to put away a little money at a time working in his nice little self-made business. But everything drastically changes for him when he gets a call that his wife has been kidnapped. They want one million dollars or she’s dead. And to show they mean business they kill a man walking his dog right in front of him.

But how on earth is he ever supposed to raise that kind of money? He’s just a small-time landscaper. The kidnapers must know this. His mind races as he runs back to his house to search for his wife. There he finds a gruesome scene. The kitchen is smeared with blood. It’s obvious that, as the kidnappers told him, his house has been staged to look like he had murdered his own wife. With a police detective hot on his trail asking lots of curious questions, Mitchell goes to seek the help of his older brother, Anson.

Anson was always the smart one in the family. He adhered to the strict and very strange teachings of their weird parents and excelled. Mitchell is sure he can help. Anson is sure he can too because he’s helped many of his siblings when they were in jams before, albeit not as horrible as this. He’s made a fortune in his lifetime and thinks he can get the money together to pay the ransom for Mitchell’s wife. But will it be in time? Terrifying events unfold as Mitchell fights to find and rescue his wife and he learns the true reason behind her kidnapping.

I will not say this is Koontz’s best novel but it was definitely a fun read for what it was supposed to be. The twists and turns are very quick and it kept me very much entertained. Like most of Koontz’s work, a few of the plot twists I saw coming but a few of them I did not. And in the end one has to kind of suspend disbelief a little bit in one instance. I remember kind of rolling my eyes a little bit and just wanting them story to finish up when I was about 20 pages from the end point. But overall it was good. Nothing great, but good.

The problem is that I know Koontz is capable of more, where he ensnares the reader from the get go and you really don’t see any of the twists coming. So this was only an average outing for a Koontz novel. A good book to pass the time with but nothing more really.

One good thing about this that I can share is that the wife, Holly, is a pretty good heroine. She doesn't play the victim and is a thinker. The whole time while she is kidnapped she isn't thinking "oh, poor me," she's trying to analyze the situation and get herself out of there. She uses her brain and cunning and shows that even though she's a technically a victim she's not in fact helpless. I liked that part a lot.

P.S. Blogger won't let me upload pics right now so no pic of the cover for you :(