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Husband by Dean Koontz
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(Mass Market Paperback - Reprint)
- Pub. Date: May 2007
- 448pp
- Sales Rank: 14,075
Reader Rating: (122 ratings)
Detailed Rating: "Rainy Days" See All
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Product Details
- ISBN-13: 9780553589092
- ISBN: 0553589091
- Edition Description: Reprint
Synopsis
With each and every new novel, Dean Koontz raises the stakes -- and the pulse rate -- higher than any other author. Now, in what may be his most suspenseful and heartfelt novel ever, he brings us the story of an ordinary man whose extraordinary commitment to his wife will take him on a harrowing journey of adventure, sacrifice, and redemption to the mystery of love itself -- and to a showdown with the darkness that would destroy it forever.
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.
Publishers Weekly
Koontz's latest thriller, slated for fast track silver screen adaptation in a joint venture between Random House and Focus Features, presents a spellbinding Hitchcock-flavored tale of an innocent, unassuming everyman caught in an intricate web of duplicity. While toiling away in the yard of a client, Orange County landscaper Mitch Rafferty casually answers his cellular phone and learns that his wife, Holly, has been taken hostage; the humble man of the soil must raise a $2 million ransom to prevent the unthinkable from happening. Graham, fresh from such recent audiobook triumphs as John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels and Lisa Gardner's Alone, delivers a smooth single-malt scotch of a performance. Graham brings a straight-arrow, earnest 20-something cadence to Mitch's voice. He also skillfully navigates the diverse cast of Southern California characters-young Holly facing danger with both grace and bravery, a seasoned homicide detective, a sadistic kidnapper obsessed with New Age spirituality, and a high-tech entrepreneur hiding a sinister secret-with masterful use of vocal inflection and carefully timed pauses. Simultaneous release with the Bantam hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 25). (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Amazingly prolific and relentlessly suspenseful, Dean Koontz can be counted on for chilling, sometimes gory stories that occasionally overlap genres. His novels can jump from straightforward crime to sci-fi to horror, but the one thing he's consistent about is delivering nail-biting yarns that have kept fans reading for more than three decades.
More About the AuthorCustomer Reviews
- Reader Rating:
- Ratings: 122Reviews: 87
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Changed premise is its only flaw - 4-1/2 Starsby Book_Reader_222
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November 24, 2009: As you know, I am a big Koontz fan, but the last few novels of his that I've read have failed to dazzle me. I picked up this book on Ebay with high hopes, and I'm pleased to report that most of them were met.
"The Husband" is a fantastic "what would you do?" novel! The title character, Mitch, is out gardening when he gets a phone call; his wife has been kidnapped and the ransom is $2 million. The problem is, Mitch honestly does not have that kind of money, but the kidnappers do not care, and they gun down one of his neighbors just to show how serious they are.What follows is difficult to describe without giving too much away, and I hate spoilers as much as the next guy. Suffice to say that it is very intense in the best nail biting Koontz fashion.I have only one problem with this book, one complaint that prevents me from giving it 5 stars. It's not the fact that, once again, we are treated to the same character types in new situations; I have discussed this before, and have realized that if I'm going to read Koontz's work, I have no choice but to accept that he has a very limited range of character types.My complaint is that the novel does not really unfold as the initial premise suggests. The tag line of, "What would you do for love? Would you die? Would you kill?" suggested a tale along the lines of the Harrison Ford movie "Firewall," with a desperate family man doing whatever it takes to protect his loved ones. What would Mitch do to save his wife? Would he rob a bank? Would he take his own hostage and demand a ransom? Barred from contacting the police for help, how far would this desperate husband go?But in very short order, Mitch turns to his brother for help, and not long after that, it is revealed that Mitch's family tree is not as "average" as the premise suggested. Again, I do not want to give too much away, but let me just say that I thought I would be getting "Firewall," and instead got something more along the lines of a Martin Scorsese mafia story! It was very jarring, and not in a good way.However, that stands alone as my reason for holding back that last 1/2 star. Koontz's prose is top notch, his writing visceral and the tension sky high. If the book ha just been marketed a little differently, this might have ended up as one of my favorite Koontz books yet.Very Slow Readby Kaileigh
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August 05, 2009: This book started off to a decent start, then slowed down A LOT. It finally got good in the last few chapters. I didn't really enjoy this book like I expected to.
Fact File
Name:
Dean Koontz
Also Known As:
David Axton, Brian Coffey, K.R. Dwyer, Deanna Dwyer, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Anthony North, Richard Paige, Owen West, Aaron Wolfe
Current Home:
Newport Beach, California
Date of Birth:
July 09, 1945
Place of Birth:
Everett, Pennsylvania
Education:
B.S. (major in English), Shippensburg University, 1966
Biography
He is one of the most recognized, read, and loved suspense writers of the 20th century. His imagination is a veritable factory of nightmares, conjuring twisted tales of psychological complexity. He even has a fan in Stephen King. For decades, Dean Koontz's name has been synonymous with terror, and his novels never fail to quicken the pulse and set hearts pounding.
Koontz has a lifelong love of writing that led him to spend much of his free time as an adult furiously cultivating his style and voice. However, it was only after his wife Gerda made him an offer he couldn't refuse while he was teaching English at a high school outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that he had a real opportunity to make a living with his avocation. Gerda agreed to support Dean for five years, during which time he could try to get his writing career off the ground. Little did she know that by the end of that five years she would be leaving her own job to handle the financial end of her husband's massively successful writing career.
Koontz first burst into the literary world with 1970's Beastchild, a science fiction novel that appealed to genre fans with its descriptions of aliens and otherworldly wars but also mined deeper themes of friendship and the breakdown of communication. Although it is not usually ranked among his classics, Beastchild provided the first inkling of Koontz's talent for populating even the most fantastical tale with fully human characters. Even at his goriest or most terrifying, he always allows room for redemption.
This complexity is what makes Koontz's work so popular with readers. He has a true gift for tempering horror with humanity, grotesqueries with lyricism. He also has a knack for genre-hopping, inventing Hitchcockian romantic mysteries, crime dramas, supernatural thrillers, science fiction, and psychological suspense with equal deftness and imagination. Perhaps The Times (London) puts it best: "Dean Koontz is not just a master of our darkest dreams, but also a literary juggler."
Good to Know
Shortly after graduating from college, Koontz took a job with the Appalachian Poverty Program where he would tutor and counsel underprivileged kids. However, after finding out that the last person who held his job had been beaten up and hospitalized by some of these kids, Koontz was more motivated than ever to get his writing career going.
When Koontz was a senior in college, he won the Atlantic Monthly fiction competition.
Koontz and Kevin Anderson's novel Frankenstein: The Prodigal Son was slotted to become a television series produced by Martin Scorsese. However, when the pilot failed to sell, the USA Network aired it as a TV movie in 2004. By that time Koontz had removed his name from the project.
Some fun and fascinating outtakes from our interview with Koontz:
"My wife, Gerda, and I took seven years of private ballroom dancing lessons, twice a week, ninety minutes each time. After we had gotten good at everything from swing to the foxtrot, we not only stopped taking lessons, but also stopped going dancing. Learning had been great fun; but for both of us, going out for an evening of dancing proved far less exhilarating than the learning. We both have a low boredom threshold. Now we dance at a wedding or other celebration perhaps once a year, and we're creaky."
"On my desk is a photograph given to me by my mother after Gerda and I were engaged to be married. It shows 23 children at a birthday party. It is neither my party nor Gerda's. I am three years old, going on four. Gerda is three. In that crowd of kids, we are sitting directly across a table from each other. I'm grinning, as if I already know she's my destiny, and Gerda has a serious expression, as if she's worried that I might be her destiny. We never met again until I was a senior in high school and she was a junior. We've been trying to make up for that lost time ever since.
"Gerda and I worked so much for the first two decades of our marriage that we never took a real vacation until our twentieth wedding anniversary. Then we went on a cruise, booking a first-class suite, sparing no expense. For more than half the cruise, the ship was caught in a hurricane. The open decks were closed because waves would have washed passengers overboard. About 90% of the passengers spent day after day in their cabins, projectile vomiting. We discovered that neither of us gets seasick. We had the showrooms, the casino, and the buffets virtually to ourselves. Because the crew had no one to serve, our service was exemplary. The ship dared not try to put into the scheduled ports; it was safer on the open sea. The big windows of the main bar presented a spectacular view of massive waves and lightning strikes that stabbed the sea by the score. Very romantic. We had a grand time.
Feature Interview
In the summer of 2006, Dean Koontz took some time out to talk with us about his favorite books, authors, and interests. What was the book that most influenced your career as a writer?
The high-school grammar textbook with which my teacher, Winona Garbrick, repeatedly rapped my head.
Otherwise, hundreds of books have had an effect on me. Perhaps the book with the most impact on my career, after the aforementioned textbook, was A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, which I did not read until I was in my thirties. The final scene reduced me to tears. More important, I began to think about how modern publishing had compartmentalized fiction into so many narrow genres. A Tale of Two Cities, as a new piece of fiction, would be hard to place on a contemporary publisher's list. It's too much of an adventure story and too much of a love story to win the favor of most editors of "literary" fiction. It is a serious novel of politics and revolution but is also darkly comic in places. Dickens does not shrink from the depiction of evil, and some scenes are horrific, but he also tells a story of redemption and self-sacrifice and hope that some (never me!) would consider almost sentimental.
The more I thought about A Tale of Two Cities, the more determined I became to write novels that bridged genres. This began to bear fruit with Strangers, and to a much greater degree with Watchers. My publisher at the time resisted both the variety I was delivering, book to book, but also the mix of genres within each book. Pressure was exerted to stay within the limits of one label. We had some wonderful rows! In time, readers responded with enthusiasm to my attempts to tell stories with the flavors and the techniques of multiple genres. I doubt I would have had a career half as successful if I had followed another path.
What are your favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
For three decades, I read no fewer than 200 books a year, and I still read a book a week. Out of that volume, choosing eight or ten as my favorites is no easy task, and a final list inevitably has an arbitrary quality dependent on my mood at the moment. In no meaningful order:
The four books I named are radically different from one another, yet you hear the wonderfully assured and ironic Goldman voice unmistakably on the first page of each. The Color of Light is one of the most dead-on portraits of a writer's struggle ever written, hugely entertaining; but if you learn nothing from it other than the mortal danger of taking the write-what-you-know dictum too seriously, it's worth a hundred times its price.
I could go on for pages. So many writers have made my life so much richer than it otherwise would have been.
What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you?
Films do not move me in the same way that novels do because they lack the ability to explore the interior of a character in any depth. Consequently, I tend to find films of high intellectual intent to be empty shells, and the films that burn themselves into my memory are those that deliver sparkling wit or genuine emotion, or logically crafted suspense. I can watch The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, and other screwball comedies every three or four years, and they are fresh to me because the writing crackles. Contemporary comedies seem incapable of the spot-on hilarious dialogue of so many films in the 1930s and '40s.
Two of the most involving and logically tight suspense films I've ever seen are James Cameron's The Terminator and Aliens. And I'm a Hitchcock fan because of the way so many of his movies blended suspense, humor, and love stories. For their ability to convey intense emotion (and a wide variety of emotions) in the service of important themes, I like Schindler's List, A Simple Plan, and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you listen to when you're writing?
I listen to everything from classical to pop, but I particularly favor Big Band, Texas swing, and Zydeco. I've written hundreds of thousands of words listening to Chris Isaac, Paul Simon, and especially Israel Kamakawiwo'ole; Iz, the dynamite Hawaiian singer who died several years ago, had a beautiful voice and the ability to convey longing, joy, and other emotions with an effortlessness that enraptured the listener.
What are your favorite kinds of books to give -- and get -- as gifts?
I give books based on the interests and tastes of the recipients, so I give all kinds of things. What I most like to receive are illustrated books on any period of art or any kind of decorative objects -- by which I mean everything from a book on an artist like Childe Hassam to a full-color book on Art Deco radios or on beautiful engraved rifles.
Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing?
I have to wear a five-point hat with five small bells, each of a different metal from the others, and leather gloves with knuckle spikes. Nothing unique about that. All writers have the five-point hat and the spiked gloves. I like the lighting low, music low, stacks of research surrounding me for easy reference, a bottle of flavored water -- usually cherry -- close at hand, which I'll drink either cold or at room temperature. For at least part of the day, though she might be bored, I like the company of my dog; she is a furry muse.
Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?
I sold the first short story I ever wrote. Then I collected 75 rejections before I sold anything else. I was a part-time writer for two years and a full-time writer for eleven years before I had a paperback bestseller. I wrote for another five years before one of my books appeared on the hardcover bestseller lists. By the time I'd had two hardcover bestsellers, a major national magazine made a snarky remark to the effect that I was an overnight success who had "jumped on the bloody bandwagon of the vampire-novel craze." Because more than 18 years of work seems to stretch the definition of "overnight" a tad too far, and because I'd never written a vampire novel, I figured everything else that I was reading in the magazine must be equally empty of fact, and I canceled my subscription.
What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?
Most of the criticism you receive will be directed at your unique style. You will be pressured to modify your voice, to adopt the attitudes and prejudices of one herd or another. Thriller writers, science fiction writers, mystery writers, writers in every genre are expected to write like the successful models who have gone before them, with just enough exotic spice to intrigue without seeming dauntingly original. Even if you write experimental literary fiction, you will find that people who write and review experimental literary fiction have dogma that they want to enforce, and even out there on the imagined cutting edge, you will be shown the line that you must walk to be considered a serious writer.
Resist. If you conform, you might be granted admittance to the club, you might be "discovered" and acclaimed, but you will not then be the writer you could have been. If you repress your true voice -- and therefore your passion -- long enough, you will burn out. Walker Percy gave the best advice about writing advice that I know: "The best thing to do with advice, even good advice, is to listen as hard as you can, take it to heart, then forget it."
From Barnes & Noble
Would you die for love? Would you steal? Would you kill? These are the questions posed in the masterful Dean Koontz's, taut, electrifying thriller about an ordinary man faced with the abduction of his wife. The Husband will exceed the expectations of even the most ardent Koontz fan.
From the Publisher
With each and every new novel, Dean Koontz raises the stakes -- and the pulse rate -- higher than any other author. Now, in what may be his most suspenseful and heartfelt novel ever, he brings us the story of an ordinary man whose extraordinary commitment to his wife will take him on a harrowing journey of adventure, sacrifice, and redemption to the mystery of love itself -- and to a showdown with the darkness that would destroy it forever.
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.
Publishers Weekly
Koontz's latest thriller, slated for fast track silver screen adaptation in a joint venture between Random House and Focus Features, presents a spellbinding Hitchcock-flavored tale of an innocent, unassuming everyman caught in an intricate web of duplicity. While toiling away in the yard of a client, Orange County landscaper Mitch Rafferty casually answers his cellular phone and learns that his wife, Holly, has been taken hostage; the humble man of the soil must raise a $2 million ransom to prevent the unthinkable from happening. Graham, fresh from such recent audiobook triumphs as John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels and Lisa Gardner's Alone, delivers a smooth single-malt scotch of a performance. Graham brings a straight-arrow, earnest 20-something cadence to Mitch's voice. He also skillfully navigates the diverse cast of Southern California characters-young Holly facing danger with both grace and bravery, a seasoned homicide detective, a sadistic kidnapper obsessed with New Age spirituality, and a high-tech entrepreneur hiding a sinister secret-with masterful use of vocal inflection and carefully timed pauses. Simultaneous release with the Bantam hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 25). (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
VOYA
It is just a typical hot, boring day at work when landscape gardener Mitch Rafferty receives an unexpected call on his cell phone from his wife, Holly. She does not sound like herself, an impression reinforced when a man's voice interrupts to tell Mitch that Holly has been kidnapped and that he has only sixty hours in which to raise two million dollars to ransom her. He allows no questions, offers no explanations, and most important, demands no police involvement or Holly will die. Just to be sure that Mitch gets the point, the caller directs Mitch's attention to a man walking a dog across the street, and Mitch watches in horror as the dog walker is shot by a sniper. Mitch is now a believer, but where in the world is a gardener supposed to come up with that kind of cash? The story proceeds at a breakneck pace, piling twists upon twists as Koontz shows why Mitch and Holly have been chosen for this extortion, how Mitch's family background and history has influenced the kidnapping, and movingly the growing determination and outrage of a good, ordinary man pushed too far. Fans of Koontz's Odd Thomas (Bantam, 2004/VOYA February 2005) will appreciate the supernatural slant to Mitch and Holly's relationship, and readers of thrillers will find this novel a genuine page-turner.
Library Journal
Many of the elements that denote a Koontz work are here: mystery, suspense, violence, and tropical suburban California. When landscaper Mitch Rafferty receives a call from his wife, Holly, she announces that she's been abducted; her kidnappers demand a $2 million ransom. Mitch, an ordinary working Joe, doesn't have that kind of money, but the kidnappers know how he can get it. Listeners root for Mitch, who wants nothing more than to live with Holly and raise a family in safe seclusion behind their rose-entwined white picket fence. He won't employ the same questionable methods to rear rational-materialist children as his egg-head parents did, methods that employed sensory deprivation, semistarvation, nudity, and severe verbal analysis. Holter Graham is an excellent narrator, with an interesting ability with accents, but he does not develop enough distinction between his male and female voices. Recommended only for libraries that have either a large budget or a very small audio collection of Koontz titles. David Faucheux, Louisiana Audio Information & Reading Svc., Lafayette Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
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- ISBN-13: 9780553589092
- ISBN: 0553589091
- Edition Description: Reprint
Read an Excerpt
Chapter OneA man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most people live in denial of Death’s patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.
Eventually, Mitchell Rafferty would be able to cite the minute that he began to recognize the inevitability of his death: Monday, May 14, 11:43 in the morning–three weeks short of his twenty-eighth birthday.
Until then, he had rarely thought of dying. A born optimist, charmed by nature’s beauty and amused by humanity, he had no cause or inclination to wonder when and how his mortality would be proven.
When the call came, he was on his knees.
Thirty flats of red and purple impatiens remained to be planted. The flowers produced no fragrance, but the fertile smell of the soil pleased him.
His clients, these particular homeowners, liked saturated colors: red, purple, deep yellow, hot pink. They would not accept white blooms or pastels.
Mitch understood them. Raised poor, they had built a successful business by working hard and taking risks. To them, life was intense, and saturated colors reflected the truth of nature’s vehemence.
This apparently ordinary but in fact momentous morning, the California sun was a buttery ball. The sky had a basted sheen.
Pleasantly warm, not searing, the day nevertheless left a greasy sweat on Ignatius Barnes. His brow glistened. His chin dripped.
At work in the same bed of flowers, ten feet from Mitch, Iggy looked boiled. From May until July, his skin responded to the sun not with melanin but with a fierce blush. For one-sixth of the year, beforehe finally tanned, he appeared to be perpetually embarrassed.
Iggy did not possess an understanding of symmetry and harmony in landscape design, and he couldn’t be trusted to trim roses properly. He was a hard worker, however, and good if not intellectually bracing company.
“You hear what happened to Ralph Gandhi?” Iggy asked.
“Who’s Ralph Gandhi?”
“Mickey’s brother.”
“Mickey Gandhi? I don’t know him, either.”
“Sure you do,” Iggy said. “Mickey, he hangs out sometimes at Rolling Thunder.”
Rolling Thunder was a surfers’ bar.
“I haven’t been there in years,” Mitch said.
“Years? Are you serious?”
“Entirely.”
“I thought you still dropped in sometimes.”
“So I’ve really been missed, huh?”
“I’ll admit, nobody’s named a bar stool after you. What–did you find someplace better than Rolling Thunder?”
“Remember coming to my wedding three years ago?” Mitch asked.
“Sure. You had great seafood tacos, but the band was woofy.”
“They weren’t woofy.”
“Man, they had tambourines.”
“We were on a budget. At least they didn’t have an accordion.”
“Because playing an accordion exceeded their skill level.”
Mitch troweled a cavity in the loose soil. “They didn’t have finger bells, either.”
Wiping his brow with one forearm, Iggy complained: “I must have Eskimo genes. I break a sweat at fifty degrees.”
Mitch said, “I don’t do bars anymore. I do marriage.”
“Yeah, but can’t you do marriage and Rolling Thunder?”
“I’d just rather be home than anywhere else.”
“Oh, boss, that’s sad,” said Iggy.
“It’s not sad. It’s the best.”
“If you put a lion in a zoo three years, six years, he never forgets what freedom was like.”
Planting purple impatiens, Mitch said, “How would you know? You ever asked a lion?”
“I don’t have to ask one. I am a lion.”
“You’re a hopeless boardhead.”
“And proud of it. I’m glad you found Holly. She’s a great lady. But I’ve got my freedom.”
“Good for you, Iggy. And what do you do with it?”
“Do with what?”
“Your freedom. What do you do with your freedom?”
“Anything I want.”
“Like, for example?”
“Anything. Like, if I want sausage pizza for dinner, I don’t have to ask anyone what she wants.”
“Radical.”
“If I want to go to Rolling Thunder for a few beers, there’s nobody to bitch at me.”
“Holly doesn’t bitch.”
“I can get beer-slammed every night if I want, and nobody’s gonna be calling to ask when am I coming home.”
Mitch began to whistle “Born Free.”
“Some wahine comes on to me,” Iggy said, “I’m free to rock and roll.”
“They’re coming on to you all the time–are they?–those sexy wahines?”
“Women are bold these days, boss. They see what they want, they just take it.”
Mitch said, “Iggy, the last time you got laid, John Kerry thought he was going to be president.”
“That’s not so long ago.”
“So what happened to Ralph?”
“Ralph who?”
“Mickey Gandhi’s brother.”
“Oh, yeah. An iguana bit off his nose.”
“Nasty.”
“Some fully macking ten-footers were breaking, so Ralph and some guys went night-riding at the Wedge.”
The Wedge was a famous surfing spot at the end of the Balboa Peninsula, in Newport Beach.
Iggy said, “They packed coolers full of submarine sandwiches and beer, and one of them brought Ming.”
“Ming?”
“That’s the iguana.”
“So it was a pet?”
“Ming, he’d always been sweet before.”
“I’d expect iguanas to be moody.”
“No, they’re affectionate. What happened was some wanker, not even a surfer, just a wannabe tag-along, slipped Ming a quarter-dose of meth in a piece of salami.”
“Reptiles on speed,” Mitch said, “is a bad idea.”
“Meth Ming was a whole different animal from clean-and-sober Ming,” Iggy confirmed.
Putting down his trowel, sitting back on the heels of his work shoes, Mitch said, “So now Ralph Gandhi is noseless?”
“Ming didn’t eat the nose. He just bit it off and spit it out.”
“Maybe he didn’t like Indian food.”
“They had a big cooler full of ice water and beer. They put the nose in the cooler and rushed it to the hospital.”
“Did they take Ralph, too?”
“They had to take Ralph. It was his nose.”
“Well,” Mitch said, “we are talking about boardheads.”
“They said it was kinda blue when they fished it out of the ice water, but a plastic surgeon sewed it back on, and now it’s not blue anymore.”
“What happened to Ming?”
“He crashed. He was totally amped-out for a day. Now he’s his old self.”
“That’s good. It’s probably hard to find a clinic that’ll do iguana rehab.”
Mitch got to his feet and retrieved three dozen empty plastic plant pots. He carried them to his extended-bed pickup.
The truck stood at the curb, in the shade of an Indian laurel. Although the neighborhood had been built-out only five years earlier, the big tree had already lifted the sidewalk. Eventually the insistent roots would block lawn drains and invade the sewer system.
The developer’s decision to save one hundred dollars by not installing a root barrier would produce tens of thousands in repair work for plumbers, landscapers, and concrete contractors.
When Mitch planted an Indian laurel, he always used a root barrier. He didn’t need to make future work for himself. Green growing Nature would keep him busy.
The street lay silent, without traffic. Not the barest breath of a breeze stirred the trees.
From a block away, on the farther side of the street, a man and a dog approached. The dog, a retriever, spent less time walking than it did sniffing messages left by others of its kind.
The stillness pooled so deep that Mitch almost believed he could hear the panting of the distant canine.
Golden: the sun and the dog, the air and the promise of the day, the beautiful houses behind deep lawns.
Mitch Rafferty could not afford a home in this neighborhood. He was satisfied just to be able to work here.
You could love great art but have no desire to live in a museum.
He noticed a damaged sprinkler head where lawn met sidewalk. He got his tools from the truck and knelt on the grass, taking a break from the impatiens.
His cell phone rang. He unclipped it from his belt, flipped it open. The time was displayed–11:43–but no caller’s number showed on the screen. He took the call anyway.
“Big Green,” he said, which was the name he’d given his two-man business nine years ago, though he no longer remembered why.
“Mitch, I love you,” Holly said.
“Hey, sweetie.”
“Whatever happens, I love you.”
She cried out in pain. A clatter and crash suggested a struggle.
Alarmed, Mitch rose to his feet. “Holly?”
Some guy said something, some guy who now had the phone. Mitch didn’t hear the words because he was focused on the background noise.
Holly squealed. He’d never heard such a sound from her, such fear.
“Sonofabitch,” she said, and was silenced by a sharp crack, as though she’d been slapped.
The stranger on the phone said, “You hear me, Rafferty?”
“Holly? Where’s Holly?”
Now the guy was talking away from the phone, not to Mitch: “Don’t be stupid. Stay on the floor.”
Another man spoke in the background, his words unclear.
The one with the phone said, “She gets up, punch her. You want to lose some teeth, honey?”
She was with two men. One of them had hit her. Hit her.
Mitch couldn’t get his mind around the situation. Reality suddenly seemed as slippery as the narrative of a nightmare.
A meth-crazed iguana was more real than this.
Near the house, Iggy planted impatiens. Sweating, red from the sun, as solid as ever.
“That’s better, honey. That’s a good girl.”
Mitch couldn’t draw breath. A great weight pressed on his lungs. He tried to speak but couldn’t find his voice, didn know what to say. Here in bright sun, he felt casketed, buried alive.
“We have your wife,” said the guy on the phone.
Mitch heard himself ask, “Why?”
“Why do you think, asshole?”
Mitch didn’t know why. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to reason through to an answer because every possible answer would be a horror.
“I’m planting flowers.”
“What’s wrong with you, Rafferty?”
“That’s what I do. Plant flowers. Repair sprinklers.”
“Are you buzzed or something?”
“I’m just a gardener.”
“So we have your wife. You get her back for two million cash.”
Mitch knew it wasn’t a joke. If it were a joke, Holly would have to be in on it, but her sense of humor was not cruel.
“You’ve made a mistake.”
“You hear what I said? Two million.”
“Man, you aren’t listening. I’m a gardener.”
“We know.”
“I have like eleven thousand bucks in the bank.”
“We know.”
Brimming with fear and confusion, Mitch had no room for anger. Compelled to clarify, perhaps more for himself than for the caller, he said, “I just run a little two-man operation.”
“You’ve got until midnight Wednesday. Sixty hours. We’ll be in touch about the details.”
Mitch was sweating. “This is nuts. Where would I get two million bucks?”
“You’ll find a way.”
The stranger’s voice was hard, implacable. In a movie, Death might sound like this.
“It isn’t possible,” Mitch said.
“You want to hear her scream again?”
“No. Don’t.”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes.”
“Really love her?”
“She’s everything to me.”
How peculiar, that he should be sweating yet feel so cold.
“If she’s everything to you,” said the stranger, “then you’ll find a way.”
“There isn’t a way.”
“If you go to the cops, we’ll cut her fingers off one by one, and cauterize them as we go. We’ll cut her tongue out. And her eyes. Then we’ll leave her alone to die as fast or slow as she wants.”
The stranger spoke without menace, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if he were not making a threat but were instead merely explaining the details of his business model.
Mitchell Rafferty had no experience of such men. He might as well have been talking to a visitor from the far end of the galaxy.
He could not speak because suddenly it seemed that he might so easily, unwittingly say the wrong thing and ensure Holly’s death sooner rather than later.
The kidnapper said, “Just so you’ll know we’re serious . . .”
After a silence, Mitch asked, “What?”
“See that guy across the street?”
Mitch turned and saw a single pedestrian, the man walking the slow dog. They had progressed half a block.
The sunny day had a porcelain glaze. Rifle fire shattered the stillness, and the dogwalker went down, shot in the head.
“Midnight Wednesday,” said the man on the phone. “We’re damn serious.”
From the Hardcover edition.
Read a Sample Chapter
The Husband
By Dean Koontz
Random House
Dean KoontzAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0553804790
Chapter One
1
A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most
people live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.
Eventually, Mitchell Rafferty would be able to cite the minute that he began to recognize the inevitability of his death: Monday, May 14, 11:43 in the morning--three weeks short of his twenty-eighth birthday.
Until then, he had rarely thought of dying. A born optimist, charmed by nature's beauty and amused by humanity, he had no cause or inclination to wonder when and how his mortality would be proven.
When the call came, he was on his knees.
Thirty flats of red and purple impatiens remained to be planted. The flowers produced no fragrance, but the fertile smell of the soil pleased him.
His clients, these particular homeowners, liked saturated colors: red, purple, deep yellow, hot pink. They would not accept white blooms or pastels.
Mitch understood them. Raised poor, they had built a
successful business by working hard and taking risks. To them, life was intense, and saturated colors reflected the truth of nature's vehemence.
This apparently ordinary but in fact momentous morning, the California sun was a buttery ball. The sky had a basted sheen.
Pleasantly warm, not searing, the daynevertheless left a greasy sweat on Ignatius Barnes. His brow glistened. His chin dripped.
At work in the same bed of flowers, ten feet from Mitch, Iggy looked boiled. From May until July, his skin responded to the sun not with melanin but with a fierce blush. For one-sixth of the year, before he finally tanned, he appeared to be perpetually embarrassed.
Iggy did not possess an understanding of symmetry and harmony in landscape design, and he couldn't be trusted to trim roses properly. He was a hard worker, however, and good if not intellectually bracing company.
"You hear what happened to Ralph Gandhi?" Iggy asked.
"Who's Ralph Gandhi?"
"Mickey's brother."
"Mickey Gandhi? I don't know him, either."
"Sure you do," Iggy said. "Mickey, he hangs out sometimes at Rolling Thunder."
Rolling Thunder was a surfers' bar.
"I haven't been there in years," Mitch said.
"Years? Are you serious?"
"Entirely."
"I thought you still dropped in sometimes."
"So I've really been missed, huh?"
"I'll admit, nobody's named a bar stool after you. What--did you find someplace better than Rolling Thunder?"
"Remember coming to my wedding three years ago?" Mitch asked.
"Sure. You had great seafood tacos, but the band was woofy."
"They weren't woofy."
"Man, they had tambourines."
"We were on a budget. At least they didn't have an accordion."
"Because playing an accordion exceeded their skill level."
Mitch troweled a cavity in the loose soil. "They didn't have finger bells, either."
Wiping his brow with one forearm, Iggy complained: "I must have Eskimo genes. I break a sweat at fifty degrees."
Mitch said, "I don't do bars anymore. I do marriage."
"Yeah, but can't you do marriage and Rolling Thunder?"
"I'd just rather be home than anywhere else."
"Oh, boss, that's sad," said Iggy.
"It's not sad. It's the best."
"If you put a lion in a zoo three years, six years, he never forgets what freedom was like."
Planting purple impatiens, Mitch said, "How would you know? You ever asked a lion?"
"I don't have to ask one. I am a lion."
"You're a hopeless boardhead."
"And proud of it. I'm glad you found Holly. She's a great lady. But I've got my freedom."
"Good for you, Iggy. And what do you do with it?"
"Do with what?"
"Your freedom. What do you do with your freedom?"
"Anything I want."
"Like, for example?"
"Anything. Like, if I want sausage pizza for dinner, I don't have to ask anyone what she wants."
"Radical."
"If I want to go to Rolling Thunder for a few beers, there's nobody to bitch at me."
"Holly doesn't bitch."
"I can get beer-slammed every night if I want, and nobody's gonna be calling to ask when am I coming home."
Mitch began to whistle "Born Free."
"Some wahine comes on to me," Iggy said, "I'm free to rock and roll."
"They're coming on to you all the time--are they?--those sexy wahines?"
"Women are bold these days, boss. They see what they want, they just take it."
Mitch said, "Iggy, the last time you got laid, John Kerry thought he was going to be president."
"That's not so long ago."
"So what happened to Ralph?"
"Ralph who?"
"Mickey Gandhi's brother."
"Oh, yeah. An iguana bit off his nose."
"Nasty."
"Some fully macking ten-footers were breaking, so Ralph and some guys went night-riding at the Wedge."
The Wedge was a famous surfing spot at the end of the Balboa Peninsula, in Newport Beach.
Iggy said, "They packed coolers full of submarine sandwiches and beer, and one of them brought Ming."
"Ming?"
"That's the iguana."
"So it was a pet?"
"Ming, he'd always been sweet before."
"I'd expect iguanas to be moody."
"No, they're affectionate. What happened was some wanker, not even a surfer, just a wannabe tag-along, slipped Ming a quarter-dose of meth in a piece of salami."
"Reptiles on speed," Mitch said, "is a bad idea."
"Meth Ming was a whole different animal from clean-and-sober Ming," Iggy confirmed.
Putting down his trowel, sitting back on the heels of his work shoes, Mitch said, "So now Ralph Gandhi is noseless?"
"Ming didn't eat the nose. He just bit it off and spit it out."
"Maybe he didn't like Indian food."
"They had a big cooler full of ice water and beer. They put the nose in the cooler and rushed it to the hospital."
"Did they take Ralph, too?"
"They had to take Ralph. It was his nose."
"Well," Mitch said, "we are talking about boardheads."
"They said it was kinda blue when they fished it out of the ice water, but a plastic surgeon sewed it back on, and now it's not blue anymore."
"What happened to Ming?"
"He crashed. He was totally amped-out for a day. Now he's his old self."
"That's good. It's probably hard to find a clinic that'll do iguana rehab."
Mitch got to his feet and retrieved three dozen empty plastic plant pots. He carried them to his extended-bed pickup.
The truck stood at the curb, in the shade of an Indian laurel. Although the neighborhood had been built-out only five years earlier, the big tree had already lifted the sidewalk. Eventually the insistent roots would block lawn drains and invade the sewer system.
The developer's decision to save one hundred dollars by
not installing a root barrier would produce tens of thousands
in repair work for plumbers, landscapers, and concrete contractors.
When Mitch planted an Indian laurel, he always used a root barrier. He didn't need to make future work for himself. Green growing Nature would keep him busy.
The street lay silent, without traffic. Not the barest breath of a breeze stirred the trees.
From a block away, on the farther side of the street, a man and a dog approached. The dog, a retriever, spent less time walking than it did sniffing messages left by others of its kind.
The stillness pooled so deep that Mitch almost believed he could hear the panting of the distant canine.
Golden: the sun and the dog, the air and the promise of the day, the beautiful houses behind deep lawns.
Mitch Rafferty could not afford a home in this neighborhood. He was satisfied just to be able to work here.
You could love great art but have no desire to live in a museum.
He noticed a damaged sprinkler head where lawn met sidewalk. He got his tools from the truck and knelt on the grass, taking a break from the impatiens.
His cell phone rang. He unclipped it from his belt, flipped it open. The time was displayed--11:43--but no caller's number showed on the screen. He took the call anyway.
"Big Green," he said, which was the name he'd given his
two-man business nine years ago, though he no longer remembered why.
"Mitch, I love you," Holly said.
"Hey, sweetie."
"Whatever happens, I love you."
She cried out in pain. A clatter and crash suggested a struggle.
Alarmed, Mitch rose to his feet. "Holly?"
Some guy said something, some guy who now had the phone. Mitch didn't hear the words because he was focused on the background noise.
Holly squealed. He'd never heard such a sound from her, such fear.
"Sonofabitch," she said, and was silenced by a sharp crack, as though she'd been slapped.
The stranger on the phone said, "You hear me, Rafferty?"
"Holly? Where's Holly?"
Now the guy was talking away from the phone, not to Mitch: "Don't be stupid. Stay on the floor."
Another man spoke in the background, his words unclear.
The one with the phone said, "She gets up, punch her. You want to lose some teeth, honey?"
She was with two men. One of them had hit her. Hit her.
Mitch couldn't get his mind around the situation. Reality suddenly seemed as slippery as the narrative of a nightmare.
A meth-crazed iguana was more real than this.
Near the house, Iggy planted impatiens. Sweating, red from the sun, as solid as ever.
"That's better, honey. That's a good girl."
Mitch couldn't draw breath. A great weight pressed on his lungs. He tried to speak but couldn't find his voice, didn't know what to say. Here in bright sun, he felt casketed, buried alive.
"We have your wife," said the guy on the phone.
Mitch heard himself ask, "Why?"
"Why do you think, asshole?"
Mitch didn't know why. He didn't want to know. He didn't want to reason through to an answer because every possible answer would be a horror.
"I'm planting flowers."
"What's wrong with you, Rafferty?"
"That's what I do. Plant flowers. Repair sprinklers."
"Are you buzzed or something?"
"I'm just a gardener."
"So we have your wife. You get her back for two million cash."
Mitch knew it wasn't a joke. If it were a joke, Holly would have to be in on it, but her sense of humor was not cruel.
"You've made a mistake."
"You hear what I said? Two million."
"Man, you aren't listening. I'm a gardener."
"We know."
"I have like eleven thousand bucks in the bank."
"We know."
Brimming with fear and confusion, Mitch had no room for anger. Compelled to clarify, perhaps more for himself than for the caller, he said, "I just run a little two-man operation."
"You've got until midnight Wednesday. Sixty hours. We'll be in touch about the details."
Mitch was sweating. "This is nuts. Where would I get two million bucks?"
"You'll find a way."
The stranger's voice was hard, implacable. In a movie, Death might sound like this.
"It isn't possible," Mitch said.
"You want to hear her scream again?"
"No. Don't."
"Do you love her?"
"Yes."
"Really love her?"
"She's everything to me."
How peculiar, that he should be sweating yet feel so cold.
"If she's everything to you," said the stranger, "then you'll find a way."
"There isn't a way."
"If you go to the cops, we'll cut her fingers off one by one, and cauterize them as we go. We'll cut her tongue out. And her eyes. Then we'll leave her alone to die as fast or slow as she wants."
The stranger spoke without menace, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if he were not making a threat but were instead merely explaining the details of his business model.
Mitchell Rafferty had no experience of such men. He might as well have been talking to a visitor from the far end of the galaxy.
He could not speak because suddenly it seemed that he might so easily, unwittingly say the wrong thing and ensure Holly's death sooner rather than later.
The kidnapper said, "Just so you'll know we're serious . . ."
After a silence, Mitch asked, "What?"
"See that guy across the street?"
Mitch turned and saw a single pedestrian, the man walking the slow dog. They had progressed half a block.
The sunny day had a porcelain glaze. Rifle fire shattered the stillness, and the dogwalker went down, shot in the head.
"Midnight Wednesday," said the man on the phone. "We're damn serious."
Excerpted from The Husband by Dean Koontz Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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