Koontz has written another stellar tale with Hawk. She’s easy to root for, and The Crooked Staircase is a gripping read for almost 500 pages, though in retrospect, not much really happens to propel the story too far forward. With at least two more novels coming with Hawk, hopefully Koontz will give this saga closure soon while pursuing other potential opportunities for her to shine under different circumstances. The story line does veer a bit into the torture realm this time around, bringing up some disturbing images to go with her crusade. Even with all of this in mind, The Crooked Staircase is a page-turner to dive into this summer.
For those who’ve played the Splinter Cell games, Jane Hawke is sort of like a female version of Sam Fisher. She’s great at a lot of things, and very good at everything else. There’s no obstacle she can’t climb, no bad guy she can’t take out, and no technology she can’t crack. She’s a well-rounded heroine who will stop at nothing to meet her objective. . . and for what it’s worth, it’s a heck of a lot of fun watching her do her thing. Koontz understands how to play up the suspense and balance that with a quick-moving plot. The Crooked Staircase is well-written and fun, though the overall story itself does require readers to suspend their disbelief at times.
This book is pretty thick and now and then did I feel that the pacing slowed down. Not that the book was bad ... Dean Koontz doesn't hold back the punches and one can't be sure in this book who will live and who will die. Then, came the ending. BAM! I mean it, it's a bloody annoying cliffhanger ending. When the story started to really pick up the pace and be really interesting, then it ended. Yes, I will definitely read the next book!
How does one review a book with no ending? The answer, as it works out, is 'Not positively.' There are other fairly egregious missteps ... wide-eyed action scenes...thankfully, carry the latter half of the book as it rushes along to its conclusion. Or it might be better to say that it rushes along until the reader runs out of pages. The book ends not with a bang but a whimper ... Other issues with the book include Koontz’s literary pretensions and his need to constantly tell the reader how they should be feeling with every new scene. As to the first, he seems to not have seen a metaphor he couldn’t fall in love with ... Hopefully the climax of the story, when it arrives, will make the preceding thousands of pages worthwhile to the Koontz faithful.
Like its predecessors, this volume boasts an unrelenting plot that continues to reveal new information about these sinister players ... thriller aficionados who appreciate a fierce female protagonist and have not yet done so should be urged to meet Jane Hawk.
It works just fine as a stand-alone...as Koontz allows Jane to bring the reader up to speed in a way that doesn’t feel shoehorned into the story. Koontz has had a long and consistently best-selling career ... The Hawk series—there’s a fourth one scheduled to be published in October 2018—is among his best work.
With many pages devoted to a less compelling parallel mind-scrubbing story about brilliant young fraternal twins, the book sometimes bogs down in the padding. But writing his unusual heroine, Koontz keeps the pages alive with attitude as well as action. The third book in Koontz's lively series tends to rehash scenes from the first two, but it's still an absorbing thriller full of fresh touches.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
