Book Review - Velocity (2005)

Dean Koontz' Velocity. Book review. Velocity manages to keep the flow of events in the book live up to its title. It's fast-paced action, with some expected (or not) twists and turns around the way. The thriller was on a personal-level and the whole prominent events in the book were happened in no more than 48 hours time.

Meet Billy, an aspiring writer and a bartender who just did his job on a perfect monotonous routine. His wife was in her fourth year of coma, and his life is pretty much ceased when he got home either from his job or from the Nursery house where his wife laid in comatose. One day, he found a typewritten note on his windshield. It reads as follows If you don't take this note to the police... I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher... If you do... I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have six hours to decide. The chooice is yours. His first initial thought was of course that the note is no more than just a sick joke. A very very unfunny joke. But of course, as the first victim fell, and the note was only the first of many, things become serious to this one particular civilian.

I've always wonder in amazement that somehow most thriller books which examines the thrill on a personal level always seems to evolve around writers. Check many Stephen King's books. It would seems to me that the real writers behind these thrillers felt that their life was too bland and decides to put some thrill to theirs, imagining all nasty things, and poured it to written words.

Velocity is a fun reading, well at least, to me, for two-third of its portion. It has violence, it has puzzles, and it has disturbing images (which of course, entirely up to your imagination on how disturbing the images really were). However, my only problem with the book is that i couldn't sympathize with the main character at all. And not because he has a disturbing past, no, not that at all. Even before i had suspected that he is not what he appears to be, i found little love toward him. Sure, he is a good-natured home boy, sure, he loved his wife to a point where his insistence of keeping her alive, should be saddening. I was using the word 'should' because frankly, i don't feel anything which i pretty much suspected due to my inability to sympathize with the main dude. It's just nothing really special with this Billy, nothing that could reach out from the pages toward me.

All in all, the book wasn't too shabby at all and i would think that it won't disappoint Koontz' long-time fan. It was a light reading anyway. An avid reader should be able to read it through and through in a night. I've read better, though.