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.