Caveat Emptor

Today I got an alert in email to several deeply discounted books by Dean Koontz. I never read anything by him, but was kind of curious about the guy. With so many #1 spots on this bestseller list or that, he can't be entirely bad, can he, his hyperproduction notwithstanding? (BTW, do be suspicious when a popular author increases their publishing cadence substantially. For example, Tom Clancy's techno-thriller/military/spy novels were quite good while they were still been written by Clancy; when his "workshop" took over, they got something in the range of total garbage to on the low side of mediocre.)

What additionally piqued my curiosity was that the book was advertised as containing "Kindle in Motion" features - I never saw those before. Moreover, the Audible version was also deeply discounted - I never used those, either.

To make a long story short, I succumbed. I still don't know is the novel any good (the first few pages seem a bit pretentious in tone, but it is too early to tell; the book got back to the end of the reading queue to be read by some future incarnation of myself.) Audiobook version, though, is pretty terrible. It sounds as if it was read by a very competent text to speech program, rather than an actor. The whole sentence intonation, speech cadence, stresses, all is based only on punctuation, not on the meaning of what is being read. Every comma brings a pause, each one the same, for example. Perhaps Koontz overuses commas, but the reader should have compensated for that.

So, that's the actual topic of this post: there is a "download sample" feature on Amazon for narrated versions of the books, too. Use it!

And, BTW, that "Kindle in motion" "feature" announced garishly on the novel's product page is totally useless in this book: it consists of slightly distorting cover and animated author's signature. Oh, miracle!