CLIFFHANGIN' WITH KOONTZ.......BQ FALLS DOWN "THE CROOKED STAIRCASE"

The Crooked Staircase by Dean Koontz (2018)   We've always gobbled up Dean Koontz thrillers.......but we get the distinct, uneasy feeling he's testing his readers' loyalty and patience with his 'Jane Hawk' series........of which this is the third book.....(with a fourth soon on the way)......

            Jane's a kickass FBI agent forced to go rogue......she's battling a vast, evil conspiracy of the 'Techno-Arcadians' (no, they're not an old 90's electronic dance group...).....a cabal of upper-echelon one per-centers determined to create their own Utopia by enslaving the unworthy lowerclasses with injections of brain-controlling nano-bots.

               In other words,"The Manchurian Candidate" on steroids......on a national scale.

               Ridiculous? Impossible?  You might think so.......until you watch footage of the redhats at a Trump rally........(you have to wonder if Trump's slipping nano-bots into their Mountain Dew...)

               After two books worth of Jane's perilous adventures ("The Silent Corner" and "The Whispering Room"), this one reads more like a long, long place-marker.........(sorry, but for us, it carried the stink of those stretched out,  cash-grabbing 'next-to-last' movies in the 'Twilight' and 'Hunger Games' series.........)

               There's a drawn out subplot that parallels Jane's efforts to capture and interrogate a Techno-Arcadian bigshot.........but it stops two-thirds into the book and never seems anything more than a depressing page-filler to bulk up novel's physical weight.

               A few pluses to report,though, especially for any readers following this series.......the introduction of 'Anabel', a new supremely odious villain......in her brief appearance, she makes Angela Lansbury's 'Manchurian Candidate' mom look like Glinda The Good Witch......

                We can only hope and pray for a Sigourney-Weaver-Vs.-Alien-Queen future smackdown between Jane and this vile Medusa.........(and we even loved our heroine's descent into Anabel's lair, the titular 'Crooked Staircase', something straight out of "Indiana Jones And the Temple Of Doom".....)

                Big minus.......not even much of an expected cliffhanger. The book just abruptly stops.....and the next page you turn to is a lengthy excerpt from the the fourth book.

                Note to Dean Koontz:   Not cool, Dean-o........we don't much mind that you're dragging this tale out in multiple novels........but stop finishing them in a way that reads like the book wasn't completed by you, but rather by some sleazy, greedy marketing executive, taking us for suckers.

               For that reason, we're dropping this one down to 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).......the publishers should go sit on a nano-bot filled hypodermic......and Koontz needs to work on better closure for each succeeding chapter.....