The Forbidden Door is the fourth novel by Dean Koontz to feature renegade FBI agent Jane Hawk as she continues her fight to be reunited with her young son while evading capture from a group known as Arcadians. Her latest caper started with the inexplicable suicide of her husband. Jane Hawk sent her son off to hiding and started a campaign to discover the cause of her husband’s death. She has learned through the previous novels of a group within the government who have been using nanotechnology to control people’s minds. The Arcadians are just not nice people, but they are powerful and seemingly ubiquitous. The are all sorts of psychotic, nihilistic characters on the look-out for the elusive Mrs. Hawk.
Koontz has been writing of these shadowy rogue government agencies for some time. In some ways, this is more of the same. Not much new goes on here, but Jane Hawk is still a fairly interesting heroine. Koontz still has a pretty distinctive prose style that makes the repetition bearable. The story was still somewhat engaging. Much of the familiar elements were present. We still had the child who was much more insightful and wiser than his peers. Eccentric allies and clever canines were also there. Koontz continues to be fascinated by people who are not merely evil but completely disconnected from most societal norms.
I think I continued to read these novels more out of tradition than actual enthrallment. I believe there is only one more novel in particular series, but I shall defer the reading of that for a while.
Time to shift gears a bit in my literary journey and check out Death Comes For The Archbishop by Willa Cather
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