'THE WHISPERING ROOM'........."PLAY MANCHURIAN WITH ME"..........

The Whispering Room by Dean Koontz  (2017)    We can admire and praise serious novelists gifted with high literary style..........but when you really crave the reading equivalent of a Big Mac and Large Fries......Dean Koontz is our go-to guy.

            Not that Koontz isn't capable of taking a break from the breathless pace of his thrillers for a little reflective thought on his characters and life in general.   He's clearly a liberal, compassionate humanist and these passages make you ache and worry even more for his deeply sympathetic characters...... outnumbered.people who find themselves pitted against vast, unspeakable evil.

             "The Whispering Room", after "The Silent Corner" is the second entry in the saga of Jane Hawk, an ultra-resourceful rogue FBI agent.  She's both hunted fugitive and avenging angel as she battles a secret cabal of Elites who've turned thousands of Americans into zombie-slaves, injecting them with microscopic nano-bots that build a controlling web around their brains.

              Once infected, all you need say to command these poor souls to do your bidding are the magic words "play Manchurian with me"........(Koontz's loving, playful tribute to Richard Condon's "Manchurian Candidate" and its iconic film version)

               So basically Jane Hawk faces a hidden army of people with no mind or will of their own, who blindly follow remote-control instructions no matter how inhuman.........

               ........very much like a brain-dead force of Trump supporters.......the only thing they're missing are the MAGA red baseball caps..

              All manner of violent encounters, escapes and twists pop up, none of which we'd dare reveal here.  Other than to say you'll want to simultaneously bite your nails and swiftly turn the pages as Jane and a new ally launch a major offensive on the conspirators........taking place in a picture-postcard perfect little Kentucky town that's a "Stepford Wives" honeytrap, used by the Cabal to infect more victims.

               Yes, there's a third book coming this May and yes, Koontz does drop a staggering twist at the end of "The Whispering Room" to leave you salivating for the next chapter. But we don't mind this kind of shameless manipulation as long the books give us an entertaining, thrill-a-minute ride.

               And this book did it for us big time. BQ says stop what you're doing, dive into these books and join up with Jane's crusade to Make America Free Again.......(just like in real life.....)

               4 stars (****).....Koontz won't even have to say "play Manchurian with me" to get us to snap up the next one.