After the Last Race

Rating:
Summary: Horrible book!
Review: By far Koontz's worst book! Unless you are one of those fans who has to read everything that he's wrote, don't waste your money. Instead spend it on his IMHO best book Strangers.

Rating:
Summary: Above-average early stuff
Review: Dean Koontz, After the Last Race (Fawcett Crest, 1974)

availability: bookfinder.com

Well, if you're going to write genre novels, you might
as well cover every genre. This is Koontz' first, and
really only, attempt at a straight hardboiled-style
thriller. A loose-knit gang of would-be thieves have a
plan to hold up a racetrack on a day when there will
be at least two million dollars on the premises.
Simple, easy to understand, with some nice plot twists
and excellent characterization. Koontz takes a
jaundiced look at the excesses of the seventies and
the excesses of thriller writers like Spillane all in
one gulp.

This is one of the longest novels Koontz wrote before
becoming a superstar, and one gets the feeling he was
testing his expansiveness legs, as it were.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work quite as well here as
it does in much longer books (e.g. Whispers or The
House of Thunder); the first fifty pages, especially,
are slow as molasses. Once it picks up, though, it
picks up fast.

This may well be the hardest Dean Koontz novel on the
planet to find. It's worth searching out, but the
prices will probably scare you more than most of his
later novels. ***

Rating:
Summary: early writings
Review: For all you regular Dean Koontz fans who don't recognize this title, it is because it was one of his very early books. Originally published back in 1974! That may be the reason some people might not enjoy this writing.

Rating:
Summary: Very different from newer Koontz
Review: This book starts out slow, but picks up toward the end. It is very un-Koontz-like. It's not a horror or even a suspense novel. If you're a Koontz fan you may want to read it just to say you've read it.