Your Heart Belongs to Me

October 27, 2008
After the sophistication and ingenuity of such recent Hitchcockian thrillers as The Husband
and The Good Guy
, bestseller Koontz stumbles in this pallid effort. Ryan Kelly, a 34-year-old Internet entrepreneur, has it all, including an attractive journalist girlfriend he wants to marry, Samantha Reach, and a house in a gated community in Newport Coast, Calif. Harsh reality intrudes when he learns he has a serious heart defect and must get a transplant. Fortunately, a compatible donor turns up in time, but then someone launches a reign of psychological terror that leaves Ryan suspicious of Samantha and his longtime servants. The ultimate plot payoff is unworthy of this gifted author, as are patches of ponderous prose (“With the moon still tethered to the eastern horizon but straining higher, with the giant pepper tree occluding most of the eternally receding stars, the time to talk of death had come”). Koontz fans can only hope for a return to form next time.

November 15, 2008
Self-made dot-com multimillionaire Ryan Perry is a handsome, superbly fit, still-surfing 34. Sudden serious chest pain leads to the diagnosis of an enlarged heart, for which transplantation is the only possible life-sustaining fix. Ryan lets the paranoia he could profitably control while making his fortune run away with him both before and after the successful operation. He cant substantiate his fears beforehand, but a year of new-hearted life later, they physically assault him in the form of a beautiful Chinese woman who says he has her heart. Koontz doesnt start his new thriller auspiciously, bathing his unsympathetic protagonist in tinny metaphors and bland scene-painting. For the first several pages and at times later, you want to toss the book aside because it so resembles ad copy. Mercifully soon it dawns that Ryan is a Hitchcockian antihero, like, say, Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) in North by Northwest. You identify with him despite his shallowness and self-absorption, at first because hes in life-threatening trouble but ultimately because his subsequent ordeal rouses an underlying decency in him that only Samantha, his lover at the books opening (but not ending), sees from the start, and that he must very nearly die, though not from a bad heart, to bring out in himself. This isnt among the most congenial of Koontzs moral thrillers, but it is definitely one of the most thoughtfully developed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)