I was quite surprised and disappointed with this book. It is not at all a horror story, not at all mysterious, really it was very boring. Normally I enjoy Koontz books.

I was hooked into this story of Sole Survivor...the story was chilling and weird things started to happen. Halfway through the book Im thinking, " How is Dean Koontz gonna tie this all together"? Sadly, as the answers unfold (DNA experiments, Secret government Labs, Genetic mutations) the story and momentum collapses. Talk about fumbling the ball in the fourth quarter with seconds to spare. Still, great read..bad ending.

Joe Carpenter lost his wife and two daughters when the plane they were traveling in crashed. A year later Joe is still grieving, he quit his job, sold his house and is thinking of suicide.

He visits the graves of his wife and daughters to find a woman taking pictures of the graves. He wants to know what she is doing, she says she was on the plane and survived. Men start shooting at her and then start following Joe. He wonders how anyone could have survived the crash.

Joe goes back to visit some of the people who lost love ones in the crash. The greiving family members are happy now that a woman named Rose has visited them. Joe can't figure why they would be so happy. Then the family members start commiting suicide.

Joe decides to go back to the place where is plane crashed since he has not been able to face it before now. He meets a family at a ranch near the crash site. They tell him a woman and small girl visited them the night of the crash and her name was Rose, and she had a small girl with her named Nina. The same name and description of Joe's youngest dead daughter. Could Rose and his daughter be the sole survivors of the crash?

Joe finally meets Rose and she tells him that his daughter is alive, then she tells him the story behind her surviving.

Enter the twilight zone!!!!



I thought that this was one of the worst books that I have ever read. I started to quit reading so many times, but I figured the story would get better. But instead of better with a ray of hope, it got weird, unbelievable, and down right dumb.

The story could have been so much better with a different ending. Most of the things Rose talked about were so out there you had to be a scientist to even comprehend them.

First the book was sad, depressing, hopeful, then weird.

This is the first book of Dean Koontz I have read, I know a lot of people like his books, but I will not read another one.

Having read innumerable Dean Koontz books over many years, I became somewhat "Koontz'd" out about 5 years ago. I was given both The Husband and Sole Survivor as gifts by my husband, who was unaware I had decided to (temporarily or permanently) take a break from the standard Koontz-world inhabitants - nice but troubled guy, great wife/girlfriend, cute kid & wonderful dog. However, the old attraction held and I did read both books. As for Sole Survivor, I must say I enjoyed this book alot more than I thought I would. The protagonist, Joe Carpenter, has lost his wife and daughters in a horrific plane crash. A year later, he is still not coping and is just basically bitterly existing his way through his isolated life. At a one-year anniversary visit to the cemetery, he meets the mysterious Rose, and the story begins. What follows is a definitely exciting chase-and-run story, with plenty of horrific events and revelations, and there are definitely some edge-of-the-seat situations. As in alot of Koontz novels, the good guy is kind of bad, and the bad guys are REALLY bad. Amazingly, all the action takes place in the space of a few short days. Admittedly, the final explanation is somewhat far-fetched and stretching, but it does accomplish the purpose of tying everything together at the end. The epilogue section is also a nice touch. I'm not saying I will instantly buy every book the incredibly prolific Koontz puts out, but this book was definitely a nice return from my Koontz-hiatus.

For the first 15 or 16 chapters of Sole Survivor, I was intrigued and interested. I found myself, as I usually do, trying to visualize where the story was going and continuing to read to confirm what I was feeling. When the story finally got to the point of enlightening the reader about the engineered children at Technologik, I found myself thinking, "I didn't think of that one." The main part of the story that disappointed me was the last couple of chapters. The story just ended when I felt the was more that needed to be explained. There were too many gaps from being chased out of the cabin through the woods and then all of a sudden on the beach when the story ended. It left me wanting to know more.....