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Amy Redwing has many secrets in her life but there is one part that is open to everyone. Amy loves golden retrievers and spends all her time and money rescuing these dogs from abusive families. She takes them away from their horrible lives, sometimes by buying them from their owners, and with help of her organization, she places the dogs with loving families. Just recently Amy and her boyfriend Brian McCarthy rescued a golden retriever named Nicki, and to Amy's own surprise she decides to keep Nicki with her and her two other golden retrievers, Fred and Ethel. Nicki is a very special dog who knows quite a bit about Amy and Brian's life. Brian finds himself very involved in drawing pictures of Nicki, especially her eyes, because she seems to be trying to tell Amy something. The fact that the name Nicki has a very special meaning for her just adds to Amy's feeling that the dog has always been around her in some form or another. Ten years earlier, Brian made his then girlfriend pregnant and even though he wanted to be a father the girlfriend kept the baby, a girl, away. Brian has heard from his old girlfriend many times and knows that she is a dangerous woman and has done what he can to get his daughter, who was named Piggy, away from her. She always refused. Suddenly his old girlfriend emails Brian and tells him that he can get Piggy back but only under her terms. With the help of Amy and Nicki, Brian is determined to find his child and save her. You can tell that Dean Koontz, the author of THE DARKEST EVENING OF THE YEAR, loves golden retrievers. This is not the first book where he has written about a heroic dog who is much more like an angel than an animal. This dog, Nicki, is a mesmerizing character and knows more about things, including life itself, than her human friends. It is Nicki's character that makes this book flow and without her the novel would fall to pieces. The rest of the characters are typical of Koontz. We have bad guys who do some terrible things, including torture, to others without any real reason except for the fact that they want to. Amy Redwing is hiding lots of secrets about her past that finally come out towards the end, which explains a lot about the story. Amy is not the most likeable of characters – she seems little too sanctimonious to me. The book also goes on too long. Koontz loves to write about nature and what flowers and mountains and the sky looks like. I've always had problems with this aspect of his books. I'm waiting for the action to resume and he's off undercutting the tension of the story by describing the area while there are bad guys roaming around about to do terrible things. There are a couple of characters in the book who are interesting enough but there is no reason for them to be there and soon they just aren't around any longer. What these characters added to the story could have been explained in a few paragraphs without going into their histories and adding too many pages to the book. I am a fan of Koontz, but in the long run THE DARKEST EVENING OF THE YEAR is a letdown. Except for the parts about Nicki, the golden retriever, the rest of it is a bore.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, December 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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