The Good Guy is thrilling, and you can feel the adrenaline coursing through your veins. The anticipation, the fear, it is all a heady mix that bubbles up to a conclusion. It’s a novel that I’m surprised hasn’t been adapted for the screen – suited to the Jason Stratham type actors. It was a fun read that passed the hours quickly; was it Koontz’s best novel, not by far but it was fun for what it was. A lot of stuff didn’t add up for me and I’ll get into that soon.

The Good Guy centres around the event of a stranger walking into a bar and mistakes our protagonist, Tim Carrier as a for hire killer. He’s given a package with a bucketload of money and the picture of his target, a woman called Linda Pacquette with instructions on how to kill her. Before he can say anything the actual killer walks in and Time hastily tells him he’s changed his mind and offers the money as a “sorry I’ve wasted your time” severance. (Yeah, right.) The killer leaves, Tim follows him out, he gets into a cop car and off he pops. Intriguing premise, right? Well from here in out it gets zany, quickly.

The Good Guy had a storyline that should have blown me away but ended up just being a kind of meh-ish read. From this point forward the intriguing storyline just paled due to substandard narrative and things that just didn’t ring true. Linda Paquette is the targeted woman who says things like she loves action movies but doesn’t own a TV?? After mere hours together they are talking about living with each other?? Although I did really enjoy the wit that they shared together. They seemed to hit it off quickly and they propped each up during a very traumatic situation.

The Good Guy has a villainous villain. The guy has a serious god complex and seems extremely unhinged. Was he always like that? He can’t recall any memories before his eighteenth birthday so assumes that he came from another realm…the mirror realm. I would have thought, considering he was working for some elite, hugely secret government organisation that they would have at least performed a psych evaluation. He kills people left, right and centre and that’s not even the contracted kill, he calls them collateral damage. It all draws to a final confrontation in one of the most underwhelming endings ever.

The back story of Tim Carrier interested me the most and it did have a great payoff. He’s tortured by events in his past and it all makes sense how he could do the things he did as no normal civilian would have the courage to do. Overall, it was an okay read but it definitely wasn’t the best Koontz novel I have read.