The third installment of Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas series, Brother Odd, is the dullest book referencing nuns driving monster trucks that I’ve ever read.
“Moving the kids was not a good idea, but I sure wanted to see nuns in monster trucks plowing their way through a blizzard.”
Yeah, me too, Odd. Instead, I got 500 pages of musings on good and evil, while a crazy Russian dude cracked jokes about being a librarian in the background.
Okay, so in this book, Odd has left Pico Mundo for the (relative) quiet of a monastery somewhere cold. Of course, being Odd, he sees the ghost of a brother who killed himself wandering the grounds, and one day he begins to see bodachs swarming the children’s quarters, where special needs orphans are cared for by the brothers and the nuns of the convent. There’s also a recluse brother who used to be a wealthy tech dude, and a suspicious Russian guy that Odd doesn’t trust. Stuff starts going wrong, and Odd tries to fix that stuff.
This book draaaagggggeeeedddd. I figured out the “twists” early on (say what you will about the original Odd Thomas, but the ending to that book — both the identity of the bad guys and the fate of Stormy — blindsided me) and the rest of the book is just Odd (read: Koontz) babbling about the state of the world and religion and morality and oh my good god get on with it already.
I have some hope for the next book based on how this one ends. Odd has a couple new sidekicks, and hopefully a new outlook on life. Here’s hoping book four gets back to the attitude (and quality) of the first.
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