Customer Reviews

Locked Doors: A Thriller (Andrew Thomas)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Locked Doors picks up seven years after the conclusion of Crouch's debut novel, the compulsively readable Desert Places. Having barely survived the events related in that harrowing thriller, famous writer Andrew Thomas, now one of America's most wanted criminals, has settled in the Yukon after many years on the run. Believing his ordeal over, Thomas is stunned to learn of the murder of a friend's wife and the kidnapping of a former flame. Apparently, someone is trying to send him a message that the trials that commenced seven years prior are not over, and that a reckoning must occur. Thomas travels to North Carolina and the Outerbanks island of Ocracoke to confront his adversary, setting the stage for an epic battle between the author and a man who can only be described as a relentless killing machine.

Crouch's sophomore effort, a tense, violent, fast paced work of suspense, proves the author has not lost his ability to enthrall and surprise his audience-Locked Doors is just as slick and twisted and entertaining as Desert Places, perhaps even more so. What distinguishes it from that novel is Crouch's focus on ancillary characters like homicide detective Violet King and would be true crime writer Horace Boone, which, rather than diverting readers' attention from the main battle, actually intensifies the experience once the blood starts to fly.

Crouch's chief talent lies in dropping his characters into untenable, sanity threatening situations, and then letting all hell break loose. This affinity for mayhem wreaks havoc with the reader's expectations, as neither the heroes nor the villains ever act predictably. The relentless pace of the narrative and Crouch's clean, taut prose allows for a certain suspension of disbelief, making for a book that readers will be loathe to put down once they've begun.

This was a great book. My husband and I read Crouch's first book "Desert Places" and could hardly wait for "Locked Doors" to come out. The day it came out, my husband read it in about 5 hours. I began the next day and life around you just stops while you're reading a Blake Crouch book. Awesome book! I have already re-read "Desert Places" and "Locked Doors" a few times each and I can't wait to read the next one.

LOCKED DOORS is Blake Crouch's second novel; his first, DESERT PLACES, somehow got by me, an error that I will begin correcting later this afternoon. In doing my homework for this review, I noticed that the reviews of his debut novel were mixed. Don't let that keep you from reading this sophomore effort.

I began reading LOCKED DOORS at 10:00 p.m. on a Monday evening, and kept reading until I was too tired to hold the book properly. Crouch quite simply is a marvel. He changes perspective, points of view, and tense at whim, challenging you to hang on and ride with him. And it's easy to do. He's so good you'll want to hug him because you love him or smack him because you're jealous; sometimes you want to do both, simultaneously.

I'll give you an example. LOCKED DOORS involves, among other things, a gentleman named Luther Kite who is as dangerous and fearsome as anyone you could meet. One of the best passages in the book concerns a visit Kite pays to a Waffle House, where he orders pancakes. You know that either it'll turn out okay or he'll be painting the walls, but you're not sure which. I guarantee you though that if you read LOCKED DOORS you'll visit a Waffle House, just once, to see if Luther Kite is there. You won't be able to resist; Crouch's descriptive powers are that finely honed. Then there's another scene, darn near perfect, where Kite goes into a Wal-Mart...

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. LOCKED DOORS nicely summarizes DESERT PLACES, telling the story of bestselling thriller writer Andrew Thomas. Thomas's idyllic existence, consisting of money, a modicum of fame, and a comfortable residence in Davidson, North Carolina, is shattered when he's framed for multiple murders by his fraternal twin brother Orson and the aforementioned Mr. Kite (and yes, if you're a Beatles aficionado, there may be a link), causing him to flee for his life. At the beginning of the novel --- several identity changes and location switches later --- Thomas is living an anonymous, quiet, and isolated life in Haines Junction, Yukon, when Kite begins a horrific killing spree that targets everyone that Thomas ever cared for. Believing that the horror in his life was buried by his new identity, Thomas is drawn back to his old world as he leaves his self-imposed solitude and puts himself onto, and into, Kite's path.

Violet King, a homicide detective of quiet but deep and abiding faith, is put in charge of the investigation of what is believed to be Thomas's new string of murders. She soon finds herself on a collision course with both Thomas and Kite. Meanwhile, a hapless, would-be writer named Horace Boone has stumbled onto Thomas's identity. Boone, who suspects, correctly, that Thomas is going to pursue Kite and bring his insane killing spree to an end, follows Thomas with the hope of turning his eyewitness account into a bestseller. Kite has a plan of his own: luring Thomas out of hiding so that Kite might exact a twisted, long-simmering revenge upon him.

LOCKED DOORS is as good as anything I've read all year, a stay-up-all-night thriller that will have you chewing your fingers down to the nub even as you're reading its last paragraph. Highest possible recommendation.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

In Black Crouch's last novel, DESERT PLACES thriller writer Andrew Thomas had been framed by his fraternal twin brother Orsen and his twin's evil sidekick Luther Kite for a series of murders. This story takes up seven years later. Andrew is living in hiding in Haines Junction up in Canada's Yukon, but Kite is bent on drawing him out for a final battle. He does this by killing off his friends (and fixing it so Andrew gets the blame). Luther Kite is bent on revenge and he'll stop at nothing to get it and since Andrew cannot go on letting his friends die, it looks like Kite is going to get a crack at him.

Homicide detective Violet King is in charge of the investigation and it isn't long before she's drawn into the affairs of Kite and Andrew. Also, a writer wannabe named Horace Boone has figured out Thomas's identity and thinks he'll be buried under a pile of dollars if he can just turn this info into a bestseller. Does Boone write his bestseller, well you'll have to read this bestseller to find out, but I gosh darned gurantee you that you will not be disappointed. Blake Crouch knows how to deliver suspense and then how to rachet it up. Read this one with the lights on.

I was one of the many that had the spit scared out of me by Crouch's first novel, DESERT PLACES. It had horrifying villains, incredible suspense, and a teeth-clenching plot.

LOCKED DOORS is even better.

Crouch's strong suit is to drop characters into hopeless situations and then rachet up the tension until it is unbearable. No one writing today has such a mastery of suspense. I've never read a book faster.

If you like the mainstream thriller writers Jack Kerley, John Sandford, Thomas Harris, or the dark fiction authors Jack Ketchum and Ed Lee, buy this book.

You won't be disappointed.

Blake Crouch, Locked Doors (St. Martin's, 2005)

Locked Doors continues the storyline from Crouch's first novel, Desert Places, and does something I've wanted to see for a very long time: shows you what happens after the pseudo-happy ending where pretty much everyone winds up dead and you end up thinking to yourself, "our hero's got a lot of 'splainin' to do..."

We open seven years after the events in Desert Places. Andrew Z. Thomas, our hero, is a suspected serial killer on the run. He's been living under another identity in a very small town in the Canadian wilderness, working off and on at the town restaurant and writing a book about his experiences (in true meta fashion, the book is entitled Desert Places). He is being tracked by an ex college student, Horace Boone, who recognized him in a bookstore and has aspirations of writing the Great American True-Crime Book. (Yes, American; he spotted Thomas in a bookstore in Alaska.) The problem is-- and this is a spoiler if you haven't read Desert Places, so beware-- Luther Kite, whom Andrew left for dead in Wyoming, is still alive, and determined to settle some old scores. In order to get Andrew's attention, he kidnaps and murders Andrew's ex-girlfriend, as well as kidnapping Andrew's late best friend's wife, Beth, and killing the family next door to Beth's house just for the fun of it. Andrew takes the bait, of course, and heads back to North Carolina to see if Kite's parents can tell him anything-- just as detective Violet King (Viking for short), who believes that Andrew is responsible for the new string of deaths and disappearances, heads from the same place to talk to the same people after a partial fingerprint of Kite's is found at the murder scene.

A lot of people seem to have thought of Locked Doors as being over the top, but then I'm a Cormac McCarthy fan. Over the top doesn't bother me much. I'm pretty much willing to swallow anything as long as I've got some decent characters backing it up and the pages keep turning. And we get that here, though Locked Doors requires even more suspension of disbelief than Desert Places did; this is almost, but not quite, camp. It's Mickey Spillane meets I Dismember Mama with a dash of the aforementioned McCarthy thrown in thanks to Crouch's usually muscular prose. And for most of the book's three-hundred-odd pages, it successfully treads the line between gross and unintentionally funny, because Crouch has a gift with not quite making things ludicrous enough for you to laugh at.

Then comes the ending. Oh, my, the ending.

Without spoiling the book, I hope, I'll say this: Crouch has pulled the same cheap trick on us twice, with no variation whatsoever. While the rest of the book is the cross I described above, the ending is pure B-movie Hollywood thriller junk. You know how, when you watch a movie that's half-decent but still straight Hollywood, you know there's going to be some sort of silly extraneous shot at the end that sets you up for the inevitable sequel? Yeah. That. In book form. It's horribly disappointing.

Still, it's a decent, readable thriller. If you liked the first one, you'll probably get a kick out of the second, as well. ** ½

In Blake Crouch's riveting debut novel Desert Places his protagonist, suspense novelist Andrew Thomas, is framed for a series of gruesome murders committed by a pair of psychopaths, one of them Andrew's twin brother Orson. The physical evidence against Andrew is too strong for him to come forward and explain himself to the authorities. Thus Crouch's sequel to Desert Places, the equally compelling Locked Doors, finds Andrew hiding from civilization seven years after the murders in a remote cabin in the Yukon. He's come to appreciate his solitary life in the wilderness, and he has some small hope of one day clearing his name: he is at least working on an autobiographical manuscript, an account of his brother's killing spree, which turns out to be the text of Crouch's first book. But Andrew's calm is interrupted by a second spate of killings, similar in style to the first, which the press is blaming on Andrew himself: the victims are people he was close to in his past. He is thus lured from his safe haven to reenter the nightmarish world of serial killer Luther Kite, his brother's accomplice, whom Andrew had left for dead at the conclusion of Desert Places.

It takes all of six and a half pages for readers to experience their first jolt of electric fear while reading Crouch's second Andrew Thomas novel. After that the scares come thick and fast. This is a book that will fly by if you let it, its seductively short chapters flashing past in an adrenaline rush of reading. But it's worth slowing down, if you can, to enjoy some of Crouch's prose and the lovely, subtle way he sometimes has of getting information across: "She peered out the window and saw the fog dissolving, the microscopic crawl of traffic now materializing on Broadway through the cloud below."

Well-written, heart-thumpingly exciting, and nearly perfect in its execution, Locked Doors is definitely a worthy successor to Desert Places. It is in fact a little easier to enjoy than its predecessor, which was so steeped in gore as to almost be unpalatable. There is more room this time around to breathe between eviscerations and hanging carcasses. But it'll still scare the pants off you.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

For two years back in 1990s, editor Karen Prescott was suspense writer Andrew Z. Thomas' girlfriend until the murdered bodies were found on his property. He insisted he was innocent, but no one believed him. Seven years since he vanished, his thrillers are being republished.

Hiding in the Yukon, Andrew knows that his twin brother Orson and an associate Luther Kite killed their mother, Walter Lancing, and others. They set up an ironclad case against Andrew ruining his life. Andrew killed Orson and he thought Kite too, but Luther has recovered. Using Andrew's "modus operandi", he tortures Karen and Walter's widow. He commits other vicious crimes that law enforcement and the media blame on Andrew. At the same time Luther terrorizes the East Coast, writer Horace Boone plans a clever plagiarism scheme, but Andrew reluctantly concludes he has to finish the job with Kite before dealing with an amoral author. Police Detective Violet King investigates the homicides she alone believes Luther is the loose cannon because she believes Andrew would never come out of hiding.

This is one of the best and most realistic sequels this reviewer has read in several years as the events of 1996 (see DESERT PLACES) do not suddenly change with Andrew remaining in hiding and accused of heinous crimes. The story line rotates perspectives with Andrew's first hand of how he sees what happened and its haunting repetition. The other chapters are third person, but serve as a chilling enhancement of Andrew's nightmare. With twists that will shock readers just when the plot seems to fall into a complacent norm, Blake Crouch writes a chilling thriller in which readers will consistently check to ensure they LOCKED DOORS.

Harriet Klausner

Luther Kite is back and you'd be hard pressed to find a more vicious, inhuman serial killer between the covers of a book today, well taught by his mentor Orson, twin brother of Andrew Thomas.

But one thing that author Blake Crouch is excellent at showing in his writing is the inhumanity of all of us, given the right incentives. Sometimes that insight can be scarier than the actual serial killers.

Crouch is a superb wordsmith, finding just the right phrases to draw you into his story world, describing everything so you are seeing it way too plainly and concocting characters that have you looking over your shoulder and triple checking the window and door locks, even during the daytime.

I was impressed by Blake's first book DESERT PLACES: A Novel of Terror (Andrew Z. Thomas Thriller), his first in this series, but enjoyed "Locked Doors" even more. I liked the intoduction of character Viking very much; she adds a lot to the storyline. I will think of the Walmart scenes every time I go to that store from now on. And I thought my family was dysfunctional? Crouch has redefined that word with two examples in this series.

The next book in the series (actually novella) is BREAK YOU(Andrew Z. Thomas Thriller). Then the final book in the series is a collaborative effort by Blake Crouch and J.A. Konrath called "Stirred" and due out sometime in 2011. It will also finish Konrath's Detective Jack Daniels series.

Much better than Desert Places. This book is full of action, very "cat and mouse". I cannot make assumptions about what will happen next because nothing about this author's writing is obvious. A definite read!