A waste of a good premise: Your Heart Belongs to Me

First line:

"Ryan Perry did not know that something in him was broken."

I really, really wanted to love this book. Normally I'm a huge fan of Dean Koontz's work. But this book, Your Heart Belongs to Me: A Novel, loses its way from the very page.


[***SPOILER ALERT***] 
The story has a torn-from-the-headlines subplot (the "bad guy" is the avenging sister of a Chinese political prisoner whose heart was harvested and sold on the black market by the Communist Chinese government); it could have been extremely compelling. But the story is hampered by the lack of appeal of the protagonist, Ryan Perry, a self-centered--and completely uninteresting--software tycoon. After suffering from a heart attack, Ryan becomes impatient with the length of the wait for organ transplants; he opts to pay mondo bucks to receive  a new heart on the black market. It turns out that his heart "donor" was Lily, a beautiful young Chinese political prisoner. She was a member of the Falun Gong movement, executed by the Chinese government. By the time Lily's sister comes along and tries to impale Ryan with a lancet-laced bouquet of lilies, I was rooting for him to die. He's that insufferable. 


This story could have been a taut, medical/political thriller in the tradition of Robin Cook. Imagine a secret cell composed of the relatives of executed political prisoners, all working together to exact revenge for the harvested organs of their loved ones--by killing the flabby. narcissistic organ recipients. It coulda been a great story. It coulda been a contender.

Instead, we're left with a muddled mess. The story's problems are compounded by the addition of typical Dean Koontz ghost-story elements, which only serve to make a confusing story incomprehensible.

Dean Koontz is a talented writer, but honestly, he must have phoned this one in. If you've read it, do you agree?