From best-selling author Dean Koontz, a trilogy of original novellas, Last Light, Final Hour, and Troubled Times, about an extraordinary heroine – Makani Hisoka-O’Brien – a Southern California surfer and clairvoyant. This is a collection of three short stories about a character that was introduced in the novel Ashley Bell and is a prequel to it. In this one, we get to see the adventures of Makani. She has a power that when she touches someone, she instantly knows their darkest secret. This leads to knowing some deep dark desires of evil people.

Last Light

Makani is a young woman with a good heart and the gift of touch – a troubling gift, and sometime curse, that separates her from others, from her family, friends, and lovers – a gift that makes her wary of casual contact. For when Makani touches others, their darkest thoughts and secret deeds are revealed to her. It’s like that dude from The Dead Zone * Stephen King

But her exile from the world at large comes to an end when she meets a “gifted” man with a talent of his own – a talent guided by a twisted soul. In a war of wills, only one will survive. This was quite interesting as the bad guy could make himself invisible by removing his “signature” from other people’s perception – leaving him to enter undetected in places and commit horrible things un-notticed.

Final Hour

Makani saves a stranger from an accident in the park and experiences a most disturbing vision. The stranger was a gorgeous white woman, long legs and blonde hair, looked like she had everything in life. When Makani touches her, she has a vision of this woman’s twin, chained up in a cellar somewhere, starving and nearly dead. With her friend Pogo, her dog Bob, and mere traces of information to guide her, Makani must track down two mysterious sisters – one of them innocent, one not. Half way through the audio-book, I realised I’d heard this story before – the two sisters, both rich, both gorgeous, one holding the other captive for crimes imagined. She wanted to be the only one so she took and took away from her sister. Family dead in mysterious circumstances, husbands divorced with their fortunes stolen, a car for every day of the week, an obsession with the body similar to American Psycho * Bret Easton Ellis – 1991. And then I realised I had read this ages ago, back in 2017. Dean Koontz’ The Final Hour

Troubled Times

A friend reveals that he is under attack from a man with supernatural talents – a malevolent man with the power to manipulate time. The power was meant for good – to save humanity – but it was usurped by this man of insatiable greed and lust. The billionaire received his this ability from people from the future who have experienced a Terminator-like future. This is where I was just hoping for the story to end, because whenever an author tries to explain the paradoxes of time-travel, I mentally check out.

Makani must use her gift, yet again, not only to save her friend, but the world as well. Has Makani finally met her match? Can her good heart stand up to such evil? Someone’s time is up, and only time will tell whose time that is.

Good bits: the stories were nice and it was good to get a bit of Hawaiian slang here and there. Pogo, the sexy well-read recluse is definitely a rarity nowadays and Makani and Pogo definitely have a one-kind of attraction going on. Loved the dog, Bob.

Bad Bits: If you wanted to listen to something new, you would have had to skip to Troubled times as the first two novels had been released before. The sadism in the stories was a bit over the top, even with the twists – so not for the squeamish. And Makani and Pogo should have named their dog “Scooby” as the stories definitely felt like something “The Scooby Gang” would touch on.