Praise for Dean Koontz
“Koontz's latest thriller is superbly narrated by Edoardo Ballerini.… Narrating largely from Mace's point of view, Ballerini portrays him as an unflappable, stoic loner who helps a single mother and her son escape the grasp of the boy's father, a vicious L.A. gangbanger…. Ballerini's performance of the cat-and-mouse game between Mace and Calaphas is riveting.” —AudioFile Magazine, Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award
#1 New York Times Bestseller
“A master of the suspense thriller genre, After Death is still another brilliant, original, memorable, and entertaining novel [from] master storyteller Dean Koontz. Deftly narrated by voice actor Edoardo Ballierini, …[this] will have a special appeal for fans of conspiracy thrillers and science fiction adventures.” —Midwest Book Review
“America’s most popular suspense novelist.” —Rolling Stone
“Koontz has always had near-Dickensian powers of description and an ability to yank us from one page to the next that few novelists can match.” —Los Angeles Times
“Tumbling, hallucinogenic prose.” —New York Times Book Review
“Dean Koontz is not just a master of our darkest dreams but also a literary juggler.” —The Times (London)
“Dean Koontz writes page-turners, middle-of-the-night-sneak-up-behind-you suspense thrillers. He touches our hearts and tingles our spines.” —Washington Post Book World
“Koontz has a knack for making the bizarre and uncanny seem as commonplace as a sunrise. Bottom line: the Dean of Suspense.” —People magazine
“Positively twitching with suspense. Another sure-fire hit from a thriller master.” —Booklist (starred review)
“If Stephen King is the Rolling Stones of novels, Koontz is the Beatles.” —Playboy
“A superb plotter and wordsmith. He chronicles the hopes and fears of our time in broad strokes and fine detail, using popular fiction to explore the human condition [and] demonstrating that the real horror of life is found not in monsters but within the human psyche.” —USA Today
“Far more than a genre writer. Characters and the search for meaning, exquisitely crafted, are the soul of his work. This is why his novels will be read long after the ghosts and monsters of most genre writers have been consigned to the attic. One of the master storytellers of this or any age.” —Tampa Tribune
“Dean Koontz almost occupies a genre of his own. He is a master at building suspense and holding the reader spellbound.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Demanding much of itself, Koontz’s style bleaches out clichés while showing a genius for details. He leaves his competitors buried in the dust.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Another A-plus thriller from a writer on a serious winning streak.” —Booklist (starred review)
2023-05-09
A self-described research wizard turns out to be a wizard in more ways than one.
To hear Michael Mace tell it, he’s just “a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time when, in the midst of catastrophe, one thing went right.” The catastrophe was a government-sponsored microbial infection that swept through the headquarters of the Beautification Research Project, killing 55 people—no, make that 54, since Michael, the BRP security chief, somehow came back to life. And that’s not all, for now Michael’s acquired the power to tap into all sorts of chip-driven objects, from cellphones to supercomputers. He can read their data instantly and alter their records from far away. In short, he’s the perfect savior for accountant Nina Dozier. Michael’s best friend, genius immunologist Shelby Shrewsberry, had hired Nina away from her old job so she could work on BRP’s books, but before he could confess his love for her, he was killed in the outbreak. Now Nina’s menaced by Aleem Sutter, the gangbanger who abandoned her years ago after getting her pregnant but now wants back into her life so he can make sure that John, her 13-year-old, maintains his father’s reputation by joining a gang himself. As it happens, Aleem is no match for Michael, who faces an altogether more powerful adversary: Durand Calaphas, another genius who works for the Internal Security Agency, knows all about that microbial catastrophe and still smarts from the episode years ago that branded his older brother, virologist Dr. Gifford Calaphas, a traitor. Koontz shines in providing downscale dialogue for Aleem and his peeps and brisk, memorable portraits of the many walk-on characters. The actual plot is another matter.
Heaven-storming piffle.