Author(s): Dean Koontz

Horror

The new fast-moving thriller from Dean Koontz is the story of an innocent man forced by a serial killer to choose who will be murdered next.

William Wiles is an easygoing thirty-something, a bartender who lives a quiet life alone until a serial killer singles him out - not to kill him, but to force him to decide who the next victim will be. On his SUV Billy finds the first note, which requires him to 'choose' a victim: a lovely blonde schoolteacher, or an elderly woman?

Billy pays an informal visit to an acquaintance, Lanny Olson, who is a policeman, and who thinks the note is a prank. The schoolteacher dies. The next note offers more choices. Lanny has to take this note seriously, but the deadline runs out before he can decide how to make his involvement official. Billy doesn't hear from him again, because Lanny himself has become the next victim.

There will be more communications from the killer, more hideous choices, with ever tighter decision times, and with each choice Billy is drawn deeper into an accelerating nightmare which steadily becomes more personal, more confrontational, until he is isolated, with no-one to turn to and no-one to rely on but himself. Finally he must risk everything to save the intended victims ...