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(3.6) | 59 | Bill Wile is an easygoing, hardworking guy who leads a quiet, ordinary life. 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.… (more) |
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| Epigraph |
A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
-Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea  And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour
Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.
-T.S. Elliot
Choruses from "The Rock" | |
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| Dedication |
This book is dedicated to Donna and Steve Dunio, Vito and Lynn Cerra, Ross and Rosemary Cerra. I'll Never figure out why Gerda said yes to me. But now your family has a crazy wing. | |
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With draft beer and a smile, Ned Pearsall raised a toast to his deceased neighbor, Henry Friddle, whose death greatly pleased him. | |
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| Disambiguation notice |
Worldcat has ISBN 2253023531 assigned to two different books:
One by Dean Koontz and one by Benjamin Constant. | |
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Information from the German Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (1)
▾Book descriptions Bill Wile is an easygoing, hardworking guy who leads a quiet, ordinary life. 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. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
| Book description |
Billy Wiles leads a simple life of solidarity, a former writer now working as a bartender in his small hometown in California, his fiancée lies in a comatose state in a nursing home, his hopes that one day she will awake. His simple life gets turned upside down when he leaves work to find a note on the windshield of his car. The note gives Billy the ultimate ultimatum, choices no one should have to make, the choice of life or death. The notes continue, the choices more difficult - then to make matters even worse Billy realizes he is being set up for the deaths the crazed mad man is committing in this horrific game of cat and mouse. | |
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3
There were some details I found a bit distracting, like the fact that keeping a body rolled in plastic for a full day, when the weather is warm enough to make air conditioning desirable, would definitely make the house smell like there is a corpse inside. Mostly this story was well thought out though, and while I had worked out who the bad guys were (and weren't) before the MC figured it out, it took me long enough that I was not just waiting for him to catch up for half the book. As suspense novels go, this one was fairly good.
Don't expect finely crafted characters, but if you want fast-reading suspense, this is a decent option.
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