Selected Product:
| Cold Fire
Paperback
Author: Dean Koontz
Publisher: Berkley
Release Date: 2004-12-07
ISBN-10: 0425199584
ISBN-13: 9780425199589
List Price: $7.99
Average Customer Rating:
  | |
Lightning
ISBN-10: 0425192032
ISBN-13: 9780425192030
List Price:$7.99
Hideaway
ISBN-10: 0425203891
ISBN-13: 9780425203897
List Price:$7.99
Shadowfires
ISBN-10: 042522385X
ISBN-13: 9780425223857
List Price:$7.99
The Bad Place
ISBN-10: 0425195481
ISBN-13: 9780425195482
List Price:$7.99
Dragon Tears
ISBN-10: 0425208435
ISBN-13: 9780425208434
List Price:$7.99
|
To use our price comparison to get the cheapest price, please click on the "Find the Cheapest Price" button located above for Cold Fire by Dean Koontz (ISBN-10: 0425199584, ISBN-13: 9780425199589).
At this time we have not yet written a review for Cold Fire by Dean Koontz (ISBN-10: 0425199584, ISBN-13: 9780425199589). Please continue to keep checking back to this page as we are constantly adding reviews.
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
A popular best-selling thriller follows the events surrounding a quiet and reclusive man who emerges as a guardian angel for those in need, but who also warns of an impending evil. Reissue.
Great and Unassuming, Like the Main Character
| Customer Rating: | In a quest to continue reading most of Dean Koontz' early novels, this one was written in 1991, I picked up Cold Fire.
Jim Ironheart is a very unique person; A voice drives him to save people. He doesn't know when the voice will move him, but when he hears it, he is single minded in his desire to get to a specific place to rescue someone. The introductory act of heroism is the saving of a child from being killed by a drunk driver in Portland, Oregon. It is during this action that a reporter, Holly Thorne (Koontz provides an excellent scene involving her name), witnesses the event. Holly is motivated to find out more about Jim, as he is very unassuming and not one for the limelight. While researching Jim, which motivates Holly to be the reporter she always had hoped to be, she discovers that the boy wasn't the first person he has rescued. There have been others, many others. But not everything that Jim "sees" is good; There is evil coming and it seems that he is the only one that can stop it.
Even though this is only the third Koontz novel I have read, it isn't anything like the other two (Watchers and Darkfall). Cold Fire is a novel that centers on Jim and Holly, their relationship, and the support that Holly provides to Jim to understand his gift and help with the dark times. Koontz keeps the suspense level high as the voice guides Jim through a few rescues, and when "The Enemy" makes its appearance. From that point, it is a testament to Holly's strength and love for Jim that they are able to battle The Enemy. After finishing the book, I felt a little disappointed with the climax and subsequent ending, but, later, as I turned the story over in my head, I realized that this was an outstanding novel. It seems like a very unassuming book, but, much like the characters and ending, it grows on you as you review what it is that you have read. Even now, as I write this review, I realize that I have been witness to another facet of Koontz' excellent writing ability. While not in the "horror/thriller" genre, this book should not be discounted solely on what you read on the jacket. Cold Fire will stay with you long after you have turned the last page.
And what a great last page it is, too. |
Not up to expectatins
| Customer Rating: | I don't usually read Koontz because the stories are usually too gross. Although it has been many years since I read it, I absolutely loved Watchers.
Cold Fire is inferior. It is a 382 page book that could have and SHOULD have been edited to a 182 page novella. It killed some beach time for me, but I'm glad I paid $2.00 for it at the used section at the local library.
You can find much better reads than this....like ANYTHING by Ken Follett....or watchers.
Sorry Dean, I'm a OC guy too and I enjoy reading about the local settings, but this one doesn't do you justice...but I see it WAS written in 1991... |
A Must-Read for Koontz Fans
| Customer Rating: | This book has all the qualities I love in a Dean Koontz novel: suspense, science fiction, and believable people. I was not expecting it to end the way it did, but I was very pleased. Throughout the story, I laughed a little, I cried a little, and I enjoyed myself the entire time.
If you enjoyed Watchers, you have to read this book!
This is one of my favorite Koontz books of all time. |
Repressed memories lead to a terrifying ordeal for a man with supernatural abilities
| Customer Rating: | Dean Koontz is without question one of the modern world's most prolific fiction writers, and few outside the world of professional literary criticism would question his credentials as an entertainer. His books contain stories that sometimes horrify and often inspire; his characters prompt readers to examine their own lives and motivations; his plots keep his fans turning pages late into the night.
In recent years, Koontz has drifted away from the pure thriller, striking a more introspectively humorous tone. The Odd Thomas series, for example, along with standalone novels like Life Expectancy and The Husband, present philosophical explorations of things like relationships and fate. Cold Fire is not such a book. Though it certainly contains philosophical and even theological elements, it is first and foremost a thriller.
Jim Ironheart is grocery shopping when he feels a sudden, inexplicable--though not unfamiliar--call. "Life line," he says to a woman standing next to him, and then his life changes.
Jim, for reasons he can't begin to understand and by means he can't even dream of, has become something of a superhero, feeling drawn to seemingly random places at seemingly random times, arriving often with only seconds to spare before he finds himself in a position to save a life. He attributes this strange ability to the call of God in his life, and though he doesn't understand it and doesn't even always appreciate it, he accepts it.
Holly Thorne is a reporter who witnesses one of Jim's acts of unwitting heroism. Intrigued by his uncanny ability to always be in the right place at exactly the right time, she opens an investigation into his history. What she finds draws her and Jim together as they uncover secrets long buried and face a danger more sinister than anything either of them could have imagined.
The book's action is nonstop from virtually the first page, as readers are drawn into Jim's unique life and Holly's determined quest. As the story progresses, Koontz takes very little time out for deep questions, but several interesting issues come up in dialog between Jim and Holly. The most compelling of these has to do with the nature and identity of God, whom Jim credits with having called him to his extraordinary life.
The book--the first two-thirds of it, anyway--is therefore profoundly religious, though not in the typical Protestant, Evangelical sense. God is undeniably present, but his nature is not always kind. The basic religious worldview of the characters can be summed up in this excerpt: "Adam disobeyed and ate the apple, gobbled up the fruit of knowledge, so God decided to let him know all sorts of things, both light and dark. Adam's children learned to hunt, to farm, to thwart the winter and cook their food with fire, make tools, build shelters. And God . . . let them learn, oh, maybe a million ways to suffer and die. He encouraged them to learn language, reading and writing, biology, chemistry, physics, the secrets of the genetic code. And He taught them the exquisite horrors of brain tumors, muscular dystrophy, bubonic plague, cancer run amok in their bodies--and not least of all airplane crashes."
Later, a character says, "I've met up with some people who're such walking scum, it'd be an insult to animals to call them animals. If I thought God always dealt mercifully with their kind, I wouldn't want anything to do with God."
The story is certainly exciting--breathtakingly so at times. One of the highlights (though not the ultimate climax) is a plane-crash scene that typifies Koontz's bare-knuckle writing style that puts the reader right in the middle of the kind of chair-grabbing suspense largely missing from his more recent works.
Cold Fire contains little foul language, though there are a few fairly tame sex scene and several passages containing violence. Some readers may object to Koontz's depiction of God as a largely unknowable mystery, but for those who appreciate the idea that God works in mysterious ways and enjoy the fact that things aren't always what they seem, this is Dean Koontz at his best. |
Lacking.
| Customer Rating: | | Well developed characters, a good story line, and some exciting sequences, however, it loses steam about half way, and although Mr. Koontz tries to recover going into the ending it just doesn't happen. A dissappointment, and not really worthy of three stars. |
|
