The Good Guy

The Good Guy is a thriller by the American writer Dean Koontz, published in 2007. It begins with a case of mistaken identity in a bar and runs from there at speed.

Timothy Carrier is a stonemason who spends his evenings at a friend's tavern, where he has a habit of drawing strangers into conversation. The first man who sits down beside him is jumpy, hands over ten thousand dollars and a photograph of a woman, and leaves before Tim has worked out what he has been given.

The second man is the man who has been hired to do the killing, and Tim realises that the only way to prevent the murder is to keep up the pretence for a little longer, which he does by claiming to have changed his mind and paying the man not to act. When he follows him out of the bar he sees something that makes the situation much worse, and the rest of the novel is Tim trying to reach the woman in the photograph before the man he has just paid off, or the people behind him, do.