Book Review: What the Night Knows

I’m a Dean Koontz fan. I have been a Dean Koontz fan since the first time I picked up one of his novels and read it. After reading three of his novels, Midnight, Lightning and Watchers, I was hooked.

I have always felt that Lightning was one of the better novels in that genre. That book was one of the books that made me to write and to -- “write like that.” It fascinates me how Koontz can paint picture with words. His descriptions are vivid and the excitement in the story begins with a bang, sometimes in the first sentence.

What the Night Knows is a newer Koontz novel, published in 2010.

The story began when a stranger arrived in a small town. His appearance marked the beginning of a four month killing spree. The killing ended only when the killer himself was killed by a fourteen year old boy, the sole survivor of the last murdered family in the killing spree.

Advance twenty years. In another small town, that fourteen-year boy has grown up to be John Calvino, a homicide detective in that town’s police force. Calvino’s family is killed in a manner which is shockingly similar to the way his family was killed, raped and tortured, twenty years earlier. Calvino arrests a young boy for the new killing spree. As he questions the young boy about the murders, the boy reveals to Calvino details and information about the earlier murders which only the killer from so long ago could have known.

Has the spirit of the long-ago killer come back to get its revenge on the person who killed him before? Is death really the end or do spirits live on past death? The questions and implications are staggering.

The descriptions and images in the novel are classic Koontzian in both style and quality. As with all book reviews I write, I will not give away any details beyond those which I have given so far. I recommend What the Night Knows.

For Koontz fans, it will not disappoint.