The Husband by Dean Koontz

What would you do for love? Would you die? Would you kill? 

We have your wife. You can get her back for two million cash. Landscaper Mitchell Rafferty thinks it must be some kind of joke. He was in the middle of planting impatiens in the yard of one of his clients when his cell phone rang. Now he’s standing in a normal suburban neighborhood on a bright summer day, having a phone conversation out of his darkest nightmare.

Whoever is on the other end of the line is dead serious. He has Mitch’s wife and he’s named the price for her safe return. The caller doesn’t care that Mitch runs a small two-man landscaping operation and has no way of raising such a vast sum. He’s confident that Mitch will find a way. 

If he loves his wife enough. . . Mitch does love her enough. He loves her more than life itself. He’s got seventy-two hours to prove it. He has to find the two million by then. But he’ll pay a lot more. He’ll pay anything.

From its tense opening to its shattering climax, The Husband is a thriller that will hold you in its relentless grip for every twist, every shock, every revelation…until it lets you go, unmistakably changed. This is a Dean Koontz novel, after all. And there’s no other experience quite like it.

This is the first Koontz book I have read, and second time I have tried to read this particular book - the first time I only got a few chapters in before something else caught my attention, and now a few years later I was ready to try again. 

I'm so undecided about how I feel now I have finished this novel. I liked the story line and the pace of the book with its plot twists and turns, I think it was Koontz's writing style that has confused me. He was very detailed with his descriptions, but I felt maybe too much so. When he was describing a scene of thought of the character there was so many unnecessary words that I tended to skip over half of them until I got just enough detail that I needed to keep going on to the next paragraph.

I also didn't really enjoy the way the dialogue between characters was written, and preferred to read the inner thinking instead.

Overall I enjoyed the story but probably won't be in a hurry to read another Koontz book.

My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson

Who were the greatest loves of your life? The ones that awakened every sense? The ones that you still dream about from time to time, fantasise about? The ones that you could encounter after years of absence and still get a tingle in the pit of your stomach? Did you appreciate that distinct buzz of a special love at the time you had it in your life, or is the memory perhaps sweeter than the reality?

A woman, on the eve of her fiftieth birthday, reflects on one hundred moments from a lifetime's sensual adventures. After the love, hatred and despair are done with, the great and trivial acts of her bodily life reveal an imperfect, yet whole self. By turns humorous, sharp, haunting and wise, this is an original and exhilarating novel from one of Australia's premier writers.
Lyrical and exquisite, My Hundred Lovers captures the sheer wonder of life, desire and love.

I loved the idea of this book, what a fantastic way to remember various parts of your life, like random snapshots of yourself shown haphazardly in no real order.

It was a sensory experience reading this "That afternoon in the small bedroom the light was blue. The curtains were cream and blew softly in the wind. There was a cry, far off, almost out of earshot. There was a man in my bed and I did not know how he got there." and we were shown a glimpse in to the life that belonged to Deborah, a normal 'young girl' who wasn't shown how to value herself other than through her body. 

It is a work of fiction but Johnson writes so honestly and with so much personality that for the first part of the book I thought it was a memoir - It felt like I was reading her private diary, lyrical and poetically written mini memories, sometime sweet, sometimes surprisingly bitter. 

A book most would enjoy and gain something from on an individual level, especially if you like looking in through the window into other peoples lives.

Wallbanger by Alice Clayton

Caroline Reynolds has a fantastic new apartment in San Francisco, a KitchenAid mixer, and no O (and we’re not talking Oprah here, folks). She has a flourishing design career, an office overlooking the bay, a killer zucchini bread recipe, and no O. She has Clive (the best cat ever), great friends, a great rack, and no O.

Adding insult to O-less, since her move, she has an oversexed neighbor with the loudest late-night wallbanging she’s ever heard. Each moan, spank, and–was that a meow?–punctuates the fact that not only is she losing sleep, she still has, yep, you guessed it, no O.

Enter Simon Parker. (No, really, Simon, please enter.) When the wallbanging threatens to literally bounce her out of bed, Caroline, clad in sexual frustration and a pink baby-doll nightie, confronts her heard-but-never-seen neighbor. Their late-night hallway encounter has, well, mixed results. Ahem. With walls this thin, the tension’s gonna be thick…

In her third novel, Alice Clayton returns to dish her trademark mix of silly and steamy. Banter, barbs, and strutting pussycats, plus the sexiest apple pie ever made, are dunked in a hot tub and set against the gorgeous San Francisco skyline in this hot and hilarious tale of exasperation at first sight.

This book  definitely had its funny moments and plenty of witty banter.

The main characters, Simon and Caroline, were a lot of fun, but at times I found parts of the book a little immature - like it didn't know whether to be a young adult book or an adult 'romance' novel. But it was refreshing that the main characters didn't have major 'issues' and dark pasts like some books from the same genre, it made it feel a little more realistic.