Breathless: A Novel of Suspense

In the stillness of a golden September afternoon, deep in the wilderness of the Rockies, a solitary craftsman, Grady Adams, and his magnificent Irish wolfhound, Merlin, step from shadow into light . . . and into an encounter with mystery. That night, a pair of singular animals will watch Grady’s isolated home, waiting to make their approach.

A few miles away, Camillia Rivers, a local veterinarian, begins to unravel the threads of a puzzle that will bring to her door all the forces of a governmen

In the stillness of a golden September afternoon, deep in the wilderness of the Rockies, a solitary craftsman, Grady Adams, and his magnificent Irish wolfhound, Merlin, step from shadow into light . . . and into an encounter with mystery. That night, a pair of singular animals will watch Grady’s isolated home, waiting to make their approach.

A few miles away, Camillia Rivers, a local veterinarian, begins to unravel the threads of a puzzle that will bring to her door all the forces of a government in peril.

At a nearby farm, long-estranged identical twins come together to begin a descent into darkness. . . . In Las Vegas, a specialist in chaos theory probes the boundaries of the unknowable. . . . On a Seattle golf course, two men make matter-of-fact arrangements for murder. . . . Along a highway by the sea, a vagrant scarred by the past begins a trek toward his destiny.

In a novel that is at once wholly of our time and timeless, fearless and funny, Dean Koontz takes readers into the moment between one turn of the world and the next, across the border between knowing and mystery. It is a journey that will leave all who take it Breathless.

Bestseller Koontz (Relentless) delivers a hard-to-classify stand-alone set near the Rocky Mountains that will appeal more to fans of his Odd Thomas books than those partial to his Hitchcockian thrillers. While out for a walk, reclusive Grady Adams and his wolfhound, Merlin, spot two white furry animals as large as midsize dogs and as quick and limber as cats that aren't like anything previously known to science. The sudden arrival of these mysterious creatures out of the blue appears to be linked to several other baffling phenomena. Meanwhile, a sadist, Henry Rouvroy, tracks down his identical twin, James, and kills him and James's wife in order to assume his brother's identity. After the murders, Rouvroy is unsettled by evidence that the dead have not stayed dead. Koontz's cryptic dedication to Aesop (twenty-six centuries late and with apologies for the length) may hold the key to what's going on, but readers are likely to find the moral of this peculiar tale, if there is one, obscure. (Dec.)
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The endearing golden retriever heroine of The Darkest Evening of the Year (2007) and the real-life golden retriever star of A Big Little Life (2009) acquire a male peer in Koontz’s new novel, an Irish wolfhound named Merlin despite the fact that, unlike his female colleagues, he does nothing magical. He’s also not one of the protagonists, though he’s the faithful friend of four of them: his master, his vet, and two creatures entirely new under the sun, who, adorably child-sized, big-eyed, and furry, seem at first closer akin to him than to humans but turn out to be genetically indistinguishable from Homo sapiens. The pair, dubbed Puzzle and Riddle by Merlin’s people, arrive simultaneously with thousands more pairs of their kind all over the globe—and just in time. For, in Breathless, as in many previous Koontz novels, this old world’s in a helluva fix. But this time, Puzzle, Riddle, and their kin may set things right. At any rate, the creatures’ arrival immediately triggers one outstandingly good development: an angry drunk sobers up and lightens up enough to seek out the parents he’s long been estranged from; en route, he thwarts a heinous criminal. Furthermore, because the newcomers are considerably more than they initially seem, they effect more good, including their own escape from Department of Homeland Security detention. A first-rate first-alien-encounter yarn. --Ray Olson