Time Thieves by Dean Koontz

Peter Mullion woke up in his garage not knowing what had happened to him in the past few weeks. His wife and the doctor think he has amnesia. Yet he feels it's more than amnesia and so he began to search for clues. When he and his wife went out to eat, he saw a man he thought he recognized but he doesn't have a clue where he had seen him. And as he and his wife Della made their way to their resthouse, he began to feel that his mysterious disappearance was somehow connected to his trip there. He began to feel too that he was being watched. He saw the man again at the restaurant watching him from outside his home.

Things went from bad to worse as he had an episode of time-space distortion. He could not count and recognize numbers and he did not know where he was supposed to go. The trip to his office became a challenge. He passed out, then when he came to his senses, his wife told him he disappeared again for 3 days.

Was the man who had been watching him had something to do with his inability to remember the events in the past few weeks? Not only did he have to find an answer to that but he was also starting to 'hear' other people's thoughts.

This Dean Koontz novel takes the reader to the mysteries and power of the human mind as Peter sought to understand and control his newfound powers. It's fast-paced and Koontz's descriptive skills is impressive as usual. It reads like most of his suspense/sci-i novels but is much shorter.

Spoiler Alert! Skip to the next paragraph.


The ending however was something I did not expect. I can't be certain if Koontz's justification of Peter's choice to retain his telepathic ability was something he really believed was a good choice. It might also be an attempt to show that something as noble a motivation as love can be corrupted. Peter appears to be a contented man who does not wish to have something beyond his grasp. And yet he did not show any remorse for killing the beings who had given him back his life. It seems ironic that he kept saying that he did it for his love of Della and yet he seems to have forgotten that he would not be with her anymore if the Politins did not save him in the first place. He knew too that the Politins did not mean him harm and his death was an accident. But maybe Koontz did write it up that way so the reader can decide about it for himself.

I recommend this to any Koontz fan who wants to read his early novels. I'm giving this book a 7 out of 10 rating.

This book was published as an Ace Double in 1977.