Dark Rivers of the Heart

"But if the guy didn't already know her, why had he been at her bungalow that rainy night, and why had he made it his personal crusade to find her?

Umm... exactly! The author himself asks the same questions that kept running through my head as I read this book! And those above events, in all their unlikely hood, start this book! The meat of this story is strong, but the fat around it is much too thick! Events, like walking down a stairway to a barn, take up so many pages that I found myself not caring about what happened when he finally made it there! I bet 150-175 pages could be cut from this and nothing would be lost! In fact, it'd probably be a kick-ass story!

Much like another Koontz book that I read, "The Good Guy", I really liked show more the bad guy in here (Roy) much more than the good guy! Heck, I even liked the good guy's serial killing father better than I liked the good guy! Makes me wonder...

On a final note, the story-within-a-story about asset forfeiture laws seems entirely misplaced here. It seems like a personal/political view of the author's, perhaps at the time of writing this, that he had to include someway, somehow. Again, hacking that entire issue/sub-plot would have made this a much better read! In my opinion. show less

This book was 578 pages of just nonsense and also excuses for why a man decided he had a connection with a waitress and then proceeded to stalk her. I was literally throwing up my hands at some point. Koontz maybe had an interesting idea about how the government uses asset forfeiture to go after people, but this was 100 percent not the book for that conversation. This was written in 1994 and I felt like the fall of Koontz from my auto buy list to borrow only from the library came much later. There are some of the same themes in this one, former special operations (dude), dog, and a woman that defies beauty or some such crap who is also in expert in IT/cyber-warfare or something. I don't know. My brain started to fog over while reading show more this one.

"Dark Rivers of the Heart" follows Spencer Grant who returns to a hole in the wall place to seek out the waitress he met the other night that he felt a connection to. When the waitress, Valerie Keene doesn't show for her shift, Spencer decides he will figure out what is going on. So he goes to her place (where he followed her the night before we find out) and realizes that something is wrong at Valerie's place. When a bunch of armed men come out of nowhere and start shooting into her place Spencer returns to his own home and starts doing research into Valerie in order to see what is happening and if he can save her. The book then switches gears to follow our main antagonist named Roy Miro who apparently thinks he's a nicer version of the Angel of Death cause he's all about perfect people being killed by him to go onto something better? The book then jumps to a former colleague of Spencer's from the police force (yes he is an ex-cop) who Roy takes an interest in cause he doesn't like how he spoke to him. This book is just a lot of back and forth and Roy trying to figure out who Spencer really is cause of course Spencer has a mysterious past.

Look Spencer is a stalker. I really wish that Koontz had gone even deeper with this mess when he does eventually meet up with Valerie again cause she rightfully points out what he did and why it is not okay. And then we find out about Spencer's family and I went, yeah nope. No spoilers, but seriously Koontz crammed too much "crap" into this one. We have a dark secret government agency. A mysterious woman on the run. A secret resistance group. At one point I kept wondering how all of this was supposedly happening and no one knew and realized I didn't care.

Valerie is not well developed. She's just a cipher for Spencer and honestly the book gets even more bogged down when she is reintroduced back into the book.

Roy. Ugh. No. He reminds me honestly of other Koontz villains, but somehow he is dumber. There's a whole action that this guy takes for no reason except Koontz wanted to have a big showdown that didn't work. Once again, think that different plots were force fit together in this one and it didn't work.

The writing was long winded as anything. Koontz also keeps throwing in flashbacks via Spencer that added nothing and I absolutely started to get sick of.

The flow was just bad. Some other reviewer noted this could have been shaved down to 350 pages without losing anything and they were right.

The ending just made my eye twitch. show less

Pretty bad and frankly real sexist. No female character is introduced without alot of discussion about how hot they are. The main character, the protagonist I guess, starts the story stalking a woman. My first attempt to read Koontz and it’s not looking good.

A re-read for me, but one I quickly scanned through when I remembered I found it rather draining the first time. I quickly recollected much of the story which says something not having read it for many years, though not necessarily for the right reasons. With some interesting characters and a wonderful dog, this novel lacks the supernatural elements of so many of this author’s books. One for those into secret government agencies, but the reason the protagonist wants to track down an unknown woman is tenuous. The biggest fault of the book is over padding. I’m sure it could have lost 200 pages and been better for it. So many sequences seem never-ending. It’s a hard one to review, as many like it. Maybe one to read once, but not a show more keeper for me. The best thing about it for me was the dog, Rocky. show less

Probably the best thing I've read by Koontz. Based on reality rather than fantasy, the story was riveting, the characters were well drawn and interesting, the "romance" was a little slower than most in developing to fruition, mainly because the female protagonist doesn't show up until the second half of the book. The suspense worked better, overall, when the bad guys are real instead of phantoms. Quite a good read.

The best part of this book is the conspiracy theory theme. The characters are annoying, with the attractive female characters far over-described and the male characters left almost blank, as if the reader need not know what the protagonist and his arch enemy look like. There is a lot of filler- unnecessary detail, wordy and momentum-killing descriptions of every scene, and too little plot structure, so that one might easily miss the central plotline and get bogged down in the rest of the dead-weight bulk of this novel.
In this book, a man becomes obsessed with a woman he met at a bar, and begins stalking her, finding her address, going to her apartment and breaking in. When bad guys attack her apartment while the man is still inside, he show more escapes and goes off in search of the woman. The bad guys begin stalking him, and the rest of the book is a mad chase in which the man hunts the woman, the bad guys hunt the man, and eventually a cop and his family are framed in a phony drug bust and forced to go on the run. The bad guys are some super-secret agency that is run out of the Department of Justice, though what their mandate is remains a bit unclear even by the end of the book. It does provide a convenient screen for the chief bad guy, though, and an unlimited budget for him to use while hunting his targets. show less

I have mixed feelings on this particular Koontz novel. On the positive side it's actually a decent read (when compared to newer Koontz novels) and has a nice pace.

The negative aspects I noticed:
a) Cliche' cat and mouse chase
b) Heroes characters that are all good
c) Villain characters that are all bad
d) Repetition in novels of plot devices (i.e- a major plot element in this novel I can list about 7 other Koontz novels that use the same device)

I think that Koontz tends to lend his main characters either too good or too bad. I like a nice blend that blurs the lines of morality. I also sometimes like to root for the bad guy but the main villain in this one (as most of Koontz novels) is utterly despicable. I did enjoy reading this but the show more same ole same ole stories after numerous DK books is wearing thin and I will at some point give up completely on him as he seems to have run out of new ideas. show less