It starts with rain. Actually, it starts with a torrential downpour that comes out of nowhere, late one night. Molly, a writer, happens to be awake when the rain starts. She notices that the rain glows, and smells funny, and comes with an ominous and disturbing feeling about it.

Molly decides to do what one would expect the heroine of a horror novel to do: she goes outside to investigate. A large group of silent and nervous looking coyotes have gathered on her porch. They seem to be afraid of the bizarre rain, or, possibly, some evil force that Molly can sense in the nearby woods. Amazingly, the coyotes have no problem with Molly when she impulsively decides to step out on the porch, and stand among them. This short scene feels very mystical, and is my favorite part of the book.

Molly’s husband, Neil, a former priest, also feels an ominous presence coming from the rain. He starts murmuring strange statements while he is still asleep, somehow.

From here, things get really freaky. Molly and Neil experience some seemingly impossible things. Molly’s collection of music boxes spontaneously go off all at once. They both start to see a shadowy form that appears to be right behind them when they look in the mirror, but does not seem to be in the room with them.

They turn on the television and learn that this strange rain is happening pretty much all over the world. There are many floods. A strange typhoon has appeared in the ocean. In some places, it is snowing, and children are playing in the odd glowing snow. No one knows what is causing it. One of the live newscasts ends with a camera man dropping the camera, and half of the reporters severed head landing on the ground. Whatever is going on, it’s not good.

Conveniently, both Molly and Neil not only have a gun, a rifle, and plenty of ammo for each, but are both skilled with using these weapons. They take these with them when they decide to drive to the center of town, believing that gathering with other people will be safer then staying by themselves.

A radio broadcast plays audio from the Space Station, which seems to currently staffed by half the countries in the UN, based on the quick glimpse we get. Molly and Neil listen as unexplained alien invaders phase through the doors of the station, and slaughter the astronauts.

Who are these alien invaders, and what do they want? This is unexplained for most of the book, which adds to the tension in the story. I give Koontz credit for creating an extremely creepy setting. It seems that these aliens have come to Earth to take it, in every sense of the word. The description of the alien looking landscape, and the creatures that come out of it, is vivid enough to make my skin crawl.

Unfortunately, I had a lot of problems with this book. So many things are just too convenient. Molly and Neil just happen to have guns and ammo lying around the house, and both are trained to use them. Molly has a nearly photographic memory for phrases and words, and this ability makes her able to instantly recognize when other characters start quoting poetry. She even knows what poet wrote it, and what poem the quote is from. Despite the horrible things happening around her, she manages to memorize a phrase that appears to be gibberish that was said by the alien that invaded the space station….. and decode it later on!

Molly’s past includes a traumatic event that happened when she was a child, which (not to give too much away), involved her protecting some other children that her father was trying to kill. Later, she and Neil become protectors of stray children.

Neil just so happens to have once been a priest, in a book filled with biblical references, few of which come from him. If you are not a person who is familiar with the Old Testament part of the bible, or someone who doesn’t happen to belong to a faith that believes in it, much of this book is going to have little meaning for you. I was not impressed by this. I like my horror stories to be scary, creepy, and even a bit disgusting at times. I don’t want to get to the end of the book only to learn that the events that happened were because the God of the Old Testament wanted them to happen. Such a disappointment! Why did all this destruction and horrible things happen? Why did so many people die? Because it was God’s plan. This is not an ending, it is a cop out.

The invading aliens are vicious and violent. To me, the inclusion of aliens in this book appeared to be specifically so the author could create new and incredibly disturbing ways to torture people. Now, I understand that there are a lot of people who enjoy books and/or movies that involve graphic scenes of torture. I am not among them. To me, this was overkill, and largely unnecessary. It especially bothers me that tons of people got tortured in this story not because of a war, or because of insanity, or even because someone was possessed by a demon or other evil force. It was because God said so. Oh really? So, for no reason then. Great.

This was not my favorite Koontz book, by far.

Robert B. Parker, who died in January of this year, had two successful series of books. He wrote the Spencer For Hire series and the Jessie Stone series of books which have had several CBS TV movies made based on the character. Tom Selleck plays Jessie Stone in the TV movies and does quite a good job. My wife and I have seen all of the TV movies either on Netflix or when they aired on TV. So it was a natural for us to want to listen to one of the books in the series on our most recent vacation.

Jessie Stone is a former LA cop who loses his job due to excess drinking, gets divorced, and moves to Paradise, Massachusetts. He becomes the police chief in Paradise. At the beginning of this story a teenage girl is found dead in a local lake from a gunshot wound to her head. Jessie and the other two major characters in the police force of maybe 5 try to solve the murder.

Jessie is still friends with his ex-wife and either talks to her or sees her regularly. She talks him into seeing a psychologist about his drinking and Stone and the shrink start talking about the marriage and whatever other struggles Jessie may be having to lead him to drink. This is probably 20% of the book.

Discovering the murderer isn’t the only case in the book as there is a domestic violence dispute and other smaller crimes. The murder investigation is the crux of the story, though, and it is surprising to learn what Jessie uncovers the more he looks into the case. The people he talks to in the course of the investigation are interesting as well such as the gay mobster Gino Fish.

The book was enjoyable to listen to and it came to me while listening to the story that several aspects were familiar and I had watched the TV movie based on this book. The one thing that kind of bothered me in the narration was how many “saids” there were as in Jessie said blah blah blah. I kind of prefer, especially in audio books, that the dialogue just flows between characters. That is a minor squabble with the book and on the whole I really enjoyed it.