The Taking - Tapa dura

‘Dean Koontz straddles the genres, and pretty successfully, too ... Odd Thomas is a short-order cook in a restaurant in Pico Mundo, a small town in the Mohave Desert. He also has an instinct for people who are going to cause mayhem. And when one of them turns up and orders breakfast, the novel kicks into gear ... Odd Thomas is certainly a page-turner – this is a read-at-a-sitting novel – with a terrific final twist’ The Observer on Odd Thomas

'Dean Koontz is not just a master of our darkest dreams, but also a literary juggler' The Times

'Koontz has near-Dickensian powers of description, and an ability to yank us from one page to the next that few novelists can match' Los Angeles Times

The new thriller from Dean Koontz is a novel of stunning suspense and visceral terror as doomsday dawns.

On the morning that will mark the end of the world they have known, Molly and Niel Sloan awaken to the drumbeat of rain. It has haunted their dreams through the night, and now they find an eerily luminous and silver downpour that drenches their small Californian mountain town.

As hours pass they hear news of extreme weather phenomena across the globe. An obscuring fog turns once familiar streets into a ghostly labyrinth. By evening, the town has lost all communication with the outside world. First TV and radio go dead, then the Internet and phone lines. The young couple gathers together with some neighbours, sensing a threat they cannot identify or even imagine.

The night brings strange noises, and mysterious lights drift among the trees. The rain diminishes with the dawn but a moody grey-purple twilight prevails. Within the misty gloom the small band will encounter something that reveals in a terrifying instant what is happening to the world – something that is hunting them with ruthless efficiency.

Epic in scope, searingly intimate and immediate in its perspective, The Taking is a story of a strangely changed and changing world as apocalypse comes to Main Street.