What The Night Knows

What The Night Knows
Dean Koontz
462 pgs
Bantam












Amazon Blurb -

In the late summer of a long ago year, a killer arrived in a small city. His name was Alton Turner Blackwood, and in the space of a few months he brutally murdered four families. His savage spree ended only when he himself was killed by the last survivor of the last family, a fourteen-year-old boy.

Half a continent away and two decades later, someone is murdering families again, recreating
in detail Blackwood’s crimes. Homicide detective John Calvino is certain that his own family—his wife and three children—will be targets in the fourth crime, just as his parents and sisters were victims on that distant night when he was fourteen and killed their slayer.

As a detective, John is a man of reason who deals in cold facts. But an extraordinary experience convinces him that sometimes death is not a one-way journey, that sometimes the dead return.

Here is ghost story like no other you have read. In the Calvinos, Dean Koontz brings to life a family that might be your own, in a war for their survival against an adversary more malevolent than any he has yet created, with their own home the battleground. Of all his acclaimed novels, none exceeds What the Night Knows in power, in chilling suspense, and in sheer mesmerizing storytelling. 
*****

"One day you'll be a Daddy and I'll come back and ride your wife and kids harder than I did your slutty sisters."

Homicide Detective John Calvino is the sole family member to survive a horrid homicide when he was 14 1/2 that took his parents and his two younger sisters.  The killer Alton Turner Blackwood uttered those words to John right before John shot and killed him.  The crime took place 20 years ago, and Calvino's family was the last of a killing spree that took 3 other families as well.  The killer was sick and twisted and tortured and raped the young girls of the family before killing them.

Present time and John has a beautiful artist wife, a son and two daughters, they live very comfortably in a gorgeous home with a husband and wife who oversee the care of the family.  Not all is perfect though, there is a copy cat killer out there mimicking the very murders that took his family and he is now afraid that his will be the final target.

Something eerie is involved and as a cop who deals in hard facts, he is having a hard time accepting this, but those words of Blackwood keep coming back to haunt him....

I liked this book.  The reason I got it was my hubs co-worker told him about it and my hubs name is John and was a cop and the last name is just so darn similar I thought lets see what it's about.  There was only one problem, it took 250 pgs before the pace finally got to nail biting speed!  I had a hard time feeling any attachment to the family, other than the youngest, Minnie, she was just to cute.  I think the very perfectness of them, homeschooled, smart, no conflict made it a bit hard to believe.  I do recommend this book though.  Once it took off I was just at the edge of my seat.  My rating would have been higher if it would have grabbed me quicker.




3 1/2 cannolis