Abandoned by Booklikes

Apologies on all of the Dean Koontz reviews today. I am just reading books as I find them in my messy under construction house. This has led me to re-read some Koontz books (really just skim since I have read them before). I forgot how much I disliked "Your Heart Belongs to Me" until my re-read of it. A main character who I didn't care for and a BS ending just made me roll my eyes. Koontz for once didn't have a HEA ending, but the whole book felt seriously out of sync.

A rich man named Ryan Perry has the whole world in his pocket. He has a woman he loves (Samantha) and can do anything he wants. Then he gets sick and gets diagnosed with something that is damaging his heart. If he doesn't get a heart transplant, he is going to die. Then Ryan starts to investigate how something could have caused him to get sick and then starts running scared from an unseen enemy. When Ryan meets with a doctor who promises he can get him on the top of a heart transplant list and damn the cost, the book goes sideways from there.

Ryan sucks. I really didn't like him and when we figure out as readers what happens and how Ryan was "saved" I really despised the guy. I can't recall Koontz ever writing a main character this way before. Ryan and Samantha are finished after his heart transplant and you are left wondering what the hell happened. When the book skips a year later we find out what Ryan has been up to and how he wants to reach out to Samantha again. When someone starts stalking Ryan and telling him that his heart belongs to her I maybe laughed a few times. The woman and the fear that Ryan has is not scary at all. I just felt bored and hoped that the woman ended up killing Ryan so something interesting would happen.

Samantha is perfection in literary form. Does Koontz know how to write women any other way these days? She is also a writer so when she and Ryan ends things, he spends a lot of time dissecting her work in order to read about the subtext behind her words. I hope you like the word subtext. I think it appeared like a billion times (sarcasm).

There are secondary characters I can't even recall or care about too much since in the end they don't matter. We have a red herring character who was just freaking odd and terrible. A mysterious nurse whose name I am blanking on.

I think the biggest issue I have with this book is that I don't think Koontz knows what it wanted it to be. We have Ryan who goes from being happy and in love with Samantha to then thinking she is all femme fatale. It doesn't ring true based on what Koontz shows us and we have to wade through a ridiculous amount of red herrings to figure out what is going on. The book was overly descriptive about things I did not give a damn about. At one point I wondered did I wander into a James Patterson novel (I stopped reading that guy years ago because I don't care to read about the thread count of people's fucking bedsheets) and felt really annoyed.

The dialogue was painful as hell to wade through. No one talks like this and stop it!

The flow was awful too. We just skipped a ton of stuff that I think was necessary to even get a gleam of figuring out what could possibly be happening.

As I said the ending was terrible. Koontz should have just went dark with things and been done with it. Also there are dogs and I maybe screamed a bit about that.