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Cold Fire
by Dean Koontz (Illustrator: Don Brautigan) (Illustrator: Phil Parks)
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Putnam Adult (1991-02-13)
ISBN: 039913591X
EAN: 9780399135910
Hardcover: 382 pages
Edition: Limited
SKU: 23935
Condition: New
Comments: THE HARDBACK BOOK! PUTNAM, 1991. THE UNABRIDGED 1ST EDITION. HARDCOVER W/GILT LETTERING, DUST JACKET and pages are NEW! Rapid shipping w/FREE tracking, AIR MAIL.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
A popular best-selling thriller follows the events surrounding a quiet and reclusive man who emerges as a guardian angel for those in need, but who also warns of an impending evil. Reissue.
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Customer Reviews
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Not up to expectatins
Rating  (2)
Date: 2008-05-12
I don't usually read Koontz because the stories are usually too gross. Although it has been many years since I read it, I absolutely loved Watchers.
Cold Fire is inferior. It is a 382 page book that could have and SHOULD have been edited to a 182 page novella. It killed some beach time for me, but I'm glad I paid $2.00 for it at the used section at the local library.
You can find much better reads than this....like ANYTHING by Ken Follett....or watchers.
Sorry Dean, I'm a OC guy too and I enjoy reading about the local settings, but this one doesn't do you justice...but I see it WAS written in 1991...
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A Must-Read for Koontz Fans
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-12-07
This book has all the qualities I love in a Dean Koontz novel: suspense, science fiction, and believable people. I was not expecting it to end the way it did, but I was very pleased. Throughout the story, I laughed a little, I cried a little, and I enjoyed myself the entire time.
If you enjoyed Watchers, you have to read this book!
This is one of my favorite Koontz books of all time.
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Repressed memories lead to a terrifying ordeal for a man with supernatural abilities
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-09-18
Dean Koontz is without question one of the modern world's most prolific fiction writers, and few outside the world of professional literary criticism would question his credentials as an entertainer. His books contain stories that sometimes horrify and often inspire; his characters prompt readers to examine their own lives and motivations; his plots keep his fans turning pages late into the night.
In recent years, Koontz has drifted away from the pure thriller, striking a more introspectively humorous tone. The Odd Thomas series, for example, along with standalone novels like Life Expectancy and The Husband, present philosophical explorations of things like relationships and fate. Cold Fire is not such a book. Though it certainly contains philosophical and even theological elements, it is first and foremost a thriller.
Jim Ironheart is grocery shopping when he feels a sudden, inexplicable--though not unfamiliar--call. "Life line," he says to a woman standing next to him, and then his life changes.
Jim, for reasons he can't begin to understand and by means he can't even dream of, has become something of a superhero, feeling drawn to seemingly random places at seemingly random times, arriving often with only seconds to spare before he finds himself in a position to save a life. He attributes this strange ability to the call of God in his life, and though he doesn't understand it and doesn't even always appreciate it, he accepts it.
Holly Thorne is a reporter who witnesses one of Jim's acts of unwitting heroism. Intrigued by his uncanny ability to always be in the right place at exactly the right time, she opens an investigation into his history. What she finds draws her and Jim together as they uncover secrets long buried and face a danger more sinister than anything either of them could have imagined.
The book's action is nonstop from virtually the first page, as readers are drawn into Jim's unique life and Holly's determined quest. As the story progresses, Koontz takes very little time out for deep questions, but several interesting issues come up in dialog between Jim and Holly. The most compelling of these has to do with the nature and identity of God, whom Jim credits with having called him to his extraordinary life.
The book--the first two-thirds of it, anyway--is therefore profoundly religious, though not in the typical Protestant, Evangelical sense. God is undeniably present, but his nature is not always kind. The basic religious worldview of the characters can be summed up in this excerpt: "Adam disobeyed and ate the apple, gobbled up the fruit of knowledge, so God decided to let him know all sorts of things, both light and dark. Adam's children learned to hunt, to farm, to thwart the winter and cook their food with fire, make tools, build shelters. And God . . . let them learn, oh, maybe a million ways to suffer and die. He encouraged them to learn language, reading and writing, biology, chemistry, physics, the secrets of the genetic code. And He taught them the exquisite horrors of brain tumors, muscular dystrophy, bubonic plague, cancer run amok in their bodies--and not least of all airplane crashes."
Later, a character says, "I've met up with some people who're such walking scum, it'd be an insult to animals to call them animals. If I thought God always dealt mercifully with their kind, I wouldn't want anything to do with God."
The story is certainly exciting--breathtakingly so at times. One of the highlights (though not the ultimate climax) is a plane-crash scene that typifies Koontz's bare-knuckle writing style that puts the reader right in the middle of the kind of chair-grabbing suspense largely missing from his more recent works.
Cold Fire contains little foul language, though there are a few fairly tame sex scene and several passages containing violence. Some readers may object to Koontz's depiction of God as a largely unknowable mystery, but for those who appreciate the idea that God works in mysterious ways and enjoy the fact that things aren't always what they seem, this is Dean Koontz at his best.
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Lacking.
Rating  (3)
Date: 2007-09-11
Well developed characters, a good story line, and some exciting sequences, however, it loses steam about half way, and although Mr. Koontz tries to recover going into the ending it just doesn't happen. A dissappointment, and not really worthy of three stars.
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This time, Koontz tries too hard but fails.
Rating (2)
Date: 2007-07-17
You can usually count on Koontz to deliver a suspenseful novel with well written, three dimensional characters. But in "Cold Fire" the suspense is lacking. There are some pretty spectacular sequences but they're not integreted into the story in a way that makes them suspenseful.
Koontz creates characters with depth, that are psychologically believable, and this is one of the things that sets him apart from many other suspense novelists and is one of the things I used to like him for. But this time, he's taking it way too far, and combines it with some supernatural elements that never feels believable.
"Cold Fire" is a disappointment pretty much from the beginning. It feels like Koontz tried too hard on the psychological part and forgot the suspense. And to add insult to injury it ends up in an anticlimax that feels like a half hearted attempt to copy Stephen King's "The Dark Half". Not recommended.
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