Customer Reviews

Key to Midnight

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a first class page-turner with non-stop action...unpredictable, psychological, and traumatic on your nerves. Although this is one of Dean Koontz's first books, it doesn't lack the suspense which he weaves into every page of his writing. From the very first page, his characters, Joanna Rand and Alex Hunter, took an almost tangible form in an exotic setting that was very realistically painted.

The plot was enhanced by being set in Japan. Joanna Rand, a successful business owner, is plagued by crippling phobias that prevent her from leading a normal life. Alex Hunter crosses paths with her during his visit to Japan and finds her situation intruiging. Since he is a detective, he recalls her as a missing person he had been looking for many years earlier. While trying to uncover her story, he discovers that there's a deeper and more frightening dimension to her history.

The story is so gripping that I was reading like a machine. At one point I almost got hypnotized myself while reading a scene where the character is hypnotized. The reason I give it 4 stars instead of 5 is because the book took a political twist at the end. I must admit, though, that I was gritting my teeth down to the very last word. Very intense and well worth reading.

Joanna Rand left America ten years ago, and is now the owner of a nightclub in Kyoto, Japan. The one thing that she could not leave behind however, is a terrifying nightmare that she has on a nightly basis involving a man with steel fingers. When Joanna wakes up, she feels physically violated and terrified beyond comprehension. A private detective named Alex Hunter is vacationing in Kyoto and becomes instantly captivated with Joanna. However, he also knew that he had seen Joanna before in news photographs of a senator's daughter who had dissapeared 10 years ago. Alex becomes determined to help awaken Joanna to the fact that she is not who she thinks she is, and that her life, her memories, and her mind had been created for her.

The Key to Midnight is definately a different type of Koontz novel. He usually specializes in horror and suspense. That is why I was very unsure about reading this book. However, as soon as I began, I knew that it would turn out to be one of the best Koontz books that I ever read. The book is an extremely well written and action packed chase novel. The story is paced extremely well because you learn about Joanna's past and why her life was messed with, slowly over the course of the story. You are also kept on the edge of your seat, because there are many different people who do not want Joanna to discover the truth. This book really emphasizes the phrase "trust no one" because anybody could be in on it. Koontz also does a wonderful job of illustrating the different countries that the story takes place in.

Overall, The Key to Midnight is one of Koontz's best books. It is an action packed chase novel filled with paranoia, conspiracies, and many great characters.

This is an interesting book becouse it shows Koontz going off in a different direction. As he states in the books Afterword, this is his only novel in the Acion/suspence/romance genre. Actually I thought it was trying to be in the same genre of most of James Patterson books. The probem I found with the book was that it developed too slowly. We have the same unanswered questions on page 360 as we had in the beginning. It's not until the book has as few as 50 pages left does it really get going. Descriptions of mundane activities is fine. It ads color and depth to the charactors but I thought it was excessive here. They got out of the cab, went to the museaum, checked into a hotel, made a phone call, blah blah blah. Thankfully the whole story gets turned around and it reallly has a stunning conclusion, but it was hard for me to get there. Interesting read, but I found books like Intensity, and Sole Survivor much more interesting.

Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, Dean Koontz was a struggling writer of paperback novels. In order to make a living, he wrote under a variety of names that was not his own. Koontz's most successful pseudonym was "Leigh Nichols" -- under this name, he wrote five bestselling romantic suspense novels. THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT is the first of these books, and was re-released in the 1990s under Koontz' own name.

THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT is a highly enjoyable romantic thriller. It mainly takes place in Japan, and Koontz does a great job of describing Japanese culture, which he obviously has a lot of respect for. The two main characters are likable and complex, and the plot is fast-paced and interesting.

This is not a horror novel at all, although there are a few graphic violent and sexual scenes. Still, there is very little in this book that is truly gross or disturbing.

THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT isn't a masterpiece, but it's a fine entertainment by one the best genre writers working today. This book is easy to read and is a nice way to spend an afternoon. If you're looking for classic Koontz, though, my advice is to try one of his later novels, such as WATCHERS, LIGHTNING, INTENSITY or ODD THOMAS.

This is one of Koontz's better mysteries. I like all of his books, but not all of them leave you on the edge of your seat trying to figure out a secret. The best part- it's about the main character in this book!

Can you imagine how scary it would be to question & doubt who you are? That's the one thing we all think we at least know, if you don't know that- who can you trust?

This is one of my favorite books of his. Go out & get it!

Mr. Koontz originally wrote this book under the pseudonym of Leigh Nichols (I didn't even know he had one). As Mr. Koontz explains at the end of the book, he spent quite a lot of time editing this book prior to re-releasing it under his name.

This book was definitely Koontz at his best. Though not your typical Dean Koontz plot, he did a wonderful job crossing in the the Spy Novel Genre. I read this book in one day on the beach. I found it to be wonderfully written, and I really liked the characters. I was certainly surprised to find out who was and wan not one of the bad guys. Boy did it fool me. Some of the characters I expected to be corrupt wern't and some that I expected not to be were.

The plot unfolds in Japan, and ends in Switzerland. Mr. Koontz does a great job of describing these locations without getting lengthy and boring yet making them colorful.

If you like Dean Koontz, don't leave this book off of your must read list.

I have read many of Mr. Koontz's novels and I rank this as one of his best.

The rich and successful private eye Alex Hunter, who doesn't yet know what love is, visits a night club in Kyoto, starts to fall for the Anglo proprietor/singer Joanne Reed, and then realizes she is the daughter of a U.S. Senator, abducted 12 years ago, whom he was unable to locate back then.

Reed is really someone quite different, as far as she knows. But then why does she have creepy nightmares every night about a guy with metal fingers and a hypodermic needle? And why is Kyoto all of a sudden the site of the world burglars, sneaks, and thugs convention, all of whom are practicing on Alex?

We learn two things about the senator very quickly: (a) while serving in Viet Nam he was held prisoner by the Reds and then miraculously escaped, and (b) Alex doesn't like him. This will start off some trains of thought if you are like me, and the words "Manchurian Candidate" may even come to mind. I should point out, though, that Koontz (as he points out in an afterword) has extensively rewritten this book for the post-Soviet era, so it's not going to be quite that simple. If "House of Thunder" is an example of what his old Cold War pseudonymous novels were like before he rewrote them, it's probably good he did.

On the con side, the writing tends to be a big clunky and non-atmospheric, and some of the action sequences read like they are verbal descriptions of what he was hoping the movie would be like, which is not the same as good writing even if it would be a good movie. Also, some of the plot devices are implausible, while the motives of some of the characters are hard to explain: in particular there are several people who have every chance to just kill off Alex before he causes any trouble, and I don't know why they don't. And there is some "talking villain" stuff.

Back on the pro side, there are enough plot twists to keep you somewhat fooled until pretty late in the game. The love story is a lot like 15 other Koontz love stories, but it has its sweet side. And he writes about Kyoto as if he knew the place, at least from the viewpoint of someone like me who doesn't.

When all is said and done, despite its flaws, and despite the fact that I hate Koontz's politics as much as he hates mine, I have to give it three stars, which is not a bad rating coming from me. Actually it's a better 3-star volume than Darkfall. I won't reread it, and I'm glad I didn't pay money for it, but I don't feel as if reading it was an unenjoyable waste.

I have only been reading DK for about three year now. So I am more familiar with his newer work. I have been trying to read the old stuff and this was pretty good. I thought the twists and turns were almost hard to keep track of, but for the most part "classic" Koontz.

The Key to Midnight was the first Dean Koontz book I have ever read and I chose it out of the his dozens of titles because it was well-reviewed on Amazon and elsewhere. Perhaps I should re-read it again (a depressing thought) to see what I missed the first time around because this was beyond bad.

The story centers on a private detective from the United States, Alex Hunter, who while on a vacation in Japan comes to believe that a Kyoto night club owner/singer, Joanna, is the daughter of a U.S. Senator who mysteriously disappeared a decade before. Of course they quickly begin falling for each other and both Joanna Alex starts to try and uncover the repressed memories of Joanna's past life that were apparently silenced by a mad scientist with a metal hand. The latter portion of the book is a story of international intrigue, as Joanna and Alex jet from Asia to Europe, eating at snazzy restaurants and seeking answers about the coterie of spies and mad scientists who muddled with her memories a decade before.

The main reason that the book is so absurd is that that the international intrigue back story--that a U.S. Senator is a puppet of neo-Soviet forces in Russia--is laughable. On one level, I want to say that merely means that the book is dated and that this plot would have been more interested before 1989. But then I take a step back and realize, no, it would be just as absurd then as it seems today. (Koontz apparently updated the book in 1995 to alter some details in light of the dissolution of the Soviet Union earlier in the decade; instead of being a puppet for the Soviets, the senator is now apparently a puppet for a faction inside Russia.)

The book does not make up for its comical storyline in other ways, either. The relationship between Alex and Joanna reads like a hackneyed supermarket pulp romance novel. The prose is often clunky and uninteresting. And instead of showing us what happens, Koontz feels the need to "tell" us everything about what Alex and Joanna are thinking.

One final point: as he does in other reissues of novels that he wrote under pen names in the '70s and '80s, Koontz includes an afterword. I read it, hoping to perhaps figure out what I had missed in the previous overwrought 475 pages. Instead, I was treated to more passive aggressive and sarcastic bloviation by Koontz.

I am open to suggestions for which Koontz book I should read next. But if you are either new to Koontz or a long-time fan, skip over The Key to Midnight.

This is standard Koontz fare, elevated by wonderful local color in Kyoto. It reads very much like a Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn intrigue/love story, the sort of thing Stanley Donen or Alfred Hitchcock would direct: the heroine is suffering from inexplicable amnesia, and the hero is a spy whose loyalties are in doubt. There's just enough suggestion of kinky weirdness to float it through - a bizarre character with metal hands, for instance. It's a bit long for what it is, but it satisfies.