Diane F. (lorieles) reviewed on 5/30/2010

This is the start of a great Koontz series. Odd Thomas can see (but not speak to) the dead, and he sometimes just KNOWS the right thing to do. He's a young man who has given himself over to just that, doing the right thing to help both the living and the dead. His particularly endearing character is funny, self-critical, and spiritual in a sort of down-to-earth way; after all, the dead are just people that aren't alive anymore, to him. If you like anti-heroes, he's not it. He's a kind of old-fashioned hero we don't see that much anymore. Any moral ambiguities are more in his head, due to his self-questioning, than actual. Two scenes that stuck in my head may give you a nice sample: Thomas, hard at work as a fry cook in a popular diner, trying to get his orders straight while not betraying the fact that the diner is suddenly swarming with evil shadows that followed a customer in - because if they realize he can see them he'll have a fatal accident within seconds. Later in the book, Thomas chooses a baseball bat as his weapon and goes striding off without hesitation to try to stop several gunmen. I immediately ordered the next two books after I read this one.

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