Your Heart Belongs to Me

After his last two books failed to impress all that much, Dean Koontz has a near-return to the form of his high-velocity thrillers with YOUR HEART BELONGS TO ME. The rather insipid cover and title suggest some dark romance, but it really plays in the league of THE GOOD GUY and THE HUSBAND, even if the insta-plot that propelled those reads from virtually page 1 doesn’t appear here until about halfway.

Ryan “Dotcom” Perry is a self-made software multimillionaire whose life is not only sweet, but “buttered and sliced.” He lives in a spacious mansion and is madly in love with Samantha, an aspiring novelist who has yet to accept his sincere proposal of marriage. Yes, sir, he has it all … including strange seizures and inexplicable heart pain.

A trip to the doctor reveals the culprit could be heredity or perhaps poisoning. Considering his parents have no history of heart trouble, Ryan suspects the latter. And why not? People do awfully stupid things for the kind of money he has, so paranoia festers within him, to the point where he starts to suspect Samantha’s estranged mother, whom he’s never met and isn’t likely to, given her daughter’s “dead-to-me” attitude, stemming from an accident years earlier that cost Sam’s twin sister her life.

Secretly, Ryan jets over to Las Vegas and peruses the contents of the woman’s home while she is out, thanks to hiring a super-secret security team. Clues lead him to another person’s house, where a gruesome discovery is made. But all that is put on hold when Ryan is given roughly a year to live. If he can’t get a donated heart before then, he’ll die.

As happens often in his life, luck shines upon him. Then the book jumps ahead for some time, where things have changed — Koontz won’t tell us exactly what or why for several chapters — and the narrative amps up to its peak. To discuss it wouldn’t be fair, but part of it’s right there in the title.

I wish Koontz would turn out more thrillers like these, featuring a likable protagonist to whom really bad things happen, and the cruelty of ticking-down time plays against him. He excels at this kind of plot, even if HEART’s introduction of a supernatural element doesn’t fit well, and likely could be excised with little damage to the story’s structure.

Following another poor ODD THOMAS sequel and a thriller that seemed to exist only as a love letter to man’s best friend, having Koontz take up the reins of steering an Everyman toward a brick wall is a ride I was ready to take. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• BROTHER ODD by Dean Koontz
• THE DARKEST EVENING OF THE YEAR by Dean Koontz
• DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN: BOOK ONE – PRODIGAL SON by Dean Koontz and Kevin J. Anderson
• DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN: BOOK TWO – CITY OF NIGHT by Dean Koontz and Ed Gorman
• DEMON SEED by Dean Koontz
• THE FACE OF FEAR by Dean Koontz
• FOREVER ODD by Dean Koontz
• THE GOOD GUY by Dean Koontz
• THE HUSBAND by Dean Koontz
• IN ODD WE TRUST by Dean Koontz and Queenie Chan
• ODD HOURS by Dean Koontz
• ODD THOMAS by Dean Koontz
• VELOCITY by Dean Koontz

Related posts:

1. In Odd We Trust
2. The Husband
3. The Darkest Evening of the Year
4. O, BROTHER, where ODD thou?, asks Koontz
5. The Good Guy