Starting the fourth Odd Thomas book "Odd Hours" by Dean Koontz.
The fourth adventure of Odd Thomas, the young man haunted by the deceased who can also foresee potential murderous disaster, may not be the best—his eponymous initial outing is—but darned if it isn’t the most purely entertaining. Observing Koontz’s SOP, it starts with a bang and goes like a house afire straight through to the penultimate chapter (the last chapter cleans up). Odd goes out for a walk on the boardwalk to find the Lady of the Bell, a pregnant girl roughly his own age (21), who has appeared to him in a troubling dream. He succeeds, but then a blond gorilla and two skinny redheaded guys packing heat show up. When Odd touches the gorilla, he gets a flash of the dream. So does the gorilla, who is immediately, murderously suspicious, so Odd, after sending the girl packing, takes a header off the boardwalk. For most of the rest of the book, Odd flees the three baddies, discovering that the local police chief and a liberal minister are in cahoots with them, until he reverses the procedure to prevent very serious destruction, indeed, aimed at regime change in America. Choosing so grandiose an objective for Odd, Koontz forges the kind of sweeping melodrama, complete with screwball laughs, nail-biting moments, and surprises, that is the bedrock of American narrative entertainment.
