Deeply Odd

Deeply Odd is the sixth novel in Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas series, published in 2013. Its narrator is a young man who can see the dead and has learned to expect that almost nobody will believe him.

About a month after the events of the previous book, Odd meets a truck driver and, when he touches him, receives a vision of three children being burned alive by somebody wearing a red suit, a black shirt and a black mask. The driver has seen exactly the same thing, because he is the man in the mask, and he immediately tries to kill Odd, who has to follow him anyway if the children are to have any chance. Odd steals an SUV, wrecks it, and is then picked up by an elderly woman driving a limousine, who asks him a few sharp questions and offers him work as her chauffeur. The trail leads to an isolated mansion guarded by vicious dogs, and the people who use it for sacrifice.

Koontz writes the series as horror softened by comedy, with a narrator whose decency is the point of the books, and this instalment surrounds him with a new set of eccentric helpers.