From the Inside Flap
Dean Koontz’s unique talent for writing terrifying thrillers with a heart and soul is nowhere more evident than in this latest suspense masterpiece that pits one man against the ultimate deadline. If there were speed limits for the sheer pulse-racing excitement allowed in one novel, Velocity would break them all. Get ready for the ride of your life.…
VELOCITY
Bill Wile is an easygoing, hardworking guy who leads a quiet, ordinary life. But that is about to change. One evening, after his usual eight-hour bartending shift, he finds a typewritten note under the windshield wiper of his car. If you don’t take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have four hours to decide. The choice is yours.
It seems like a sick joke, and Bill’s friend on the police force, Lanny Olson, thinks so too. His advice to Bill is to go home and forget about it. Besides, what could they do even if they took the note seriously? No crime has actually been committed. But less than twenty-four hours later, a young blond schoolteacher is found murdered, and it’s Bill’s fault: he didn’t convince the police
to get involved. Now he’s got another note, another deadline, another ultimatum…and two new lives hanging in the balance.
Suddenly Bill’s average, seemingly innocuous life takes on the dimensions and speed of an accelerating nightmare. Because the notes are coming faster, the deadlines growing tighter, and the killer becoming bolder and crueler with every communication–until Bill is isolated with the terrifying knowledge that he alone has the power of life and death over a psychopath’s innocent victims. Until the struggle between good and evil is intensely personal. Until the most chilling words of all are: The choice is yours.
From the Hardcover edition.
Velocity FROM THE PUBLISHER
Dean Koontz's unique talent for writing terrifying thrillers with a heart and soul is nowhere more evident than in this latest suspense masterpiece that pits one man against the ultimate deadline. If there were speed limits for the sheer pulse-racing excitement allowed in one novel, Velocity would break them all. Get ready for the ride of your life. . . .
Velocity
Bill Wile is an easygoing, hardworking guy who leads a quiet, ordinary life. But that is about to change. One evening, after his usual eight-hour bartending shift, he finds a typewritten note under the windshield wiper of his car. If you don't take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have four hours to decide. The choice is yours.
It seems like a sick joke, and Bill's friend on the police force, Lanny Olson, thinks so too. His advice to Bill is to go home and forget about it. Besides, what could they do even if they took the note seriously? No crime has actually been committed. But less than twenty-four hours later, a young blond schoolteacher is found murdered, and it's Bill's fault: he didn't convince the police
to get involved. Now he's got another note, another deadline, another ultimatum. . . and two new lives hanging in the balance.
Suddenly Bill's average, seemingly innocuous life takes on the dimensions and speed of an accelerating nightmare. Because the notes are coming faster, the deadlines growing tighter, and the killer becoming bolder and crueler with every communication-until Bill is isolated with the terrifyingknowledge that he alone has the power of life and death over a psychopath's innocent victims. Until the struggle between good and evil is intensely personal. Until the most chilling words of all are: The choice is yours.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Bill Wile's nightmare begins when he discovers a note on his windshield demanding that he choose between the murder of a young schoolteacher and a charitable old lady. A companion to the author's Intensity. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Companion to 1996's Intensity: a spiritedly deft set of plates kept twirling in the air as Koontz takes on himself all the weight of his speed-driven suspense. Quiet Billy Wiles, a lapsed novelist with writer's block who at 14 killed both his parents, tends bar and has visited his fiancee, Barbara, daily since she fell into a botulism coma nearly four years before. Here and there, Barbara says something, but she never awakes. Then there's a note on Billy's windshield: If you don't take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher somewhere in Napa County. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have six hours to decide. Since Billy doesn't officially go the police but rather to his cop buddy Lanny Olsen, the freak batters to death a lovely blond schoolteacher. Other notes appear, offering ambiguous moral choices based on Billy's inaction. Then the grisly notes ask for an action from him, with the freak demanding that Billy choose between a fast or slow death for the victim. Waste the bitch or torture her at length? Does all this have something to do with Dardre, Barbara's addicted fraternal twin sister who lusts for the $3 million now gathering interest in Barbara's trust fund from a legal suit for damages? Latest threat: Barbara's death at Whispering Pines Convalescent Home, followed by Billy's suicide. The velocity mounts and builds chapter by chapter to dazzling-devil thunderbolts. Though T.S. Eliot meets Charles Dickens in these pages (yes!), will Koontz, like Graham Greene risen from Brighton Rock to The Human Factor, at last apply his genius not just to tasty seasonal sproutsof suspense, but to something sustaining and memorable?
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