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Dean Koontz, Your Heart Belongs to Me

(Harper Collins; 336pp paperback; $32.99)

If suspense in a novel is created by not knowing the answer to a difficult puzzle, but being teased with lots of possible explanations — right up to the very last pages — then Dean Koontz may well be described as a master at the art.

In Your Heart Belongs To Me, 34 year old Ryan Perry has it all — wealth and all its trappings, career success, and an intelligent, beautiful woman, Samantha Reach — until his body lets him down. His heart is failing, and he needs a transplant — fast. He's the kind of man who needs to take control, a characteristic which in this circumstance sends him off on some quirky tangents to explain and treat his condition.

He does find a donor match, and has a successful transplant, but somehow all is not well. There is something that he has to discover, has to work out, and it is something deeply, humanly important. He gets hints from unlikely sources — Samantha, a private investigator, a dead woman, and a demented killer.

Eventually the puzzle is resolved, albeit in a rather unbelievable way, and Ryan finally gets his answers.

Koontz has again written a tale which engages and amazes.