Book Review: Phantoms

Snowfield - 3 miles, the sign read. Jennifer Paige, M.D. was bringing her fourteen year-old sister home to live with her after their mother's death. Snowfield, a busy seasonal ski town and an off-season great place to live. Jenny was happy and Lisa was excited.

But what they found in Jenny's kitchen turned the world upside down for them and for many more unsuspecting people.

Dean Koontz gives us Phantoms, a scary trip through Dreamland. It is one of his best books and keeps the reader on the proverbial edge of their seat.

Snowfield is peaceful on that Sunday afternoon as Jenny and Lisa arrive. In fact there isn't a person or a car in sight. When Jenny goes into her kitchen to find Hilda Beck, her housekeeper, she finds the woman - dead. Hilda is discolored, bruised looking, but has no wounds or open lesions. Her supper is still cooking on the stove and the pans have burned to a odious mess, with a stench that is dangerous to breath.

The two women run next door to a neighbor's to use the phone, only to find the neighbors very dead. A man and wife, he caught by surprise and dead in front of the refrigerator, and his wife dead with a look of sheer horror on her pretty features.

The county Sheriff, Bryce Hammond is called to Snowfield to investigate. Bryce has just tightened the noose around the neck of Fletcher Kale, who had killed his wife and young son.

Hammond, his deputies Geordie Brogan, Jake Johnson, Frank Autry, Tall Whitman and obese, lecherous Stud Waggle arrive in Snowfield. Jennifer and Lisa go with the deputy to search the town, to see if anyone is left alive. What they find stuns every one of them.

Something

Timothy Flute is a fussy little man who has written a book called, "The Ancient Enemy", it didn't even sell many copies, but now it appears that Flute's hypotheses might be valid. He tells the group about massive, unexplainable disappearances through history. Roanoke Island among others. The Incas and the Mayans, who disappeared en masse. Even the Bermuda Triangle might be part of some fantastic, but very real scenario.

Koontz is a writer who keeps you guessing and sets up scenes that are ripe with anticipation. There are theories on what the killer might be or who. . . did the Devil come calling? To find out, read this captivating and intriguing novel.is in Snowfield, but it didn't come to ski. They find the name "Timothy Flute" scrawled in eyebrow pencil on a bathroom mirror. Then they find the severed hand holding the pencil on a table, where it had not been previously.