Watchers by Dean Koontz

One of Koontz's most beloved books, this horror/suspense tale of two lonely people and the genetically-enhanced Golden retriever with human intellect that brings them together has at its roots a message about the healing power of love. Travis is an ex-U.S. Special Forces recluse who seems to be cursed to lose everyone he has cared for. Nora is a 30-year-old who has been kept secluded and convinced that she is ugly and incompetent by her Aunt, whose recent death has left Nora vulnerable to the outside world. Einstein is the hyper-intelligent dog that was part of a government experiment to create a canine spy, and finds Travis following an escape from his lab. He is followed by The Outsider, another experiment in recombinant DNA built to be a heartless but cunning super soldier. Travis and Nora are eventually brought together by Einstein and must prepare to battle the Outsider and keep the government from finding Einstein, whose intelligence and "soul" convince the couple that to return him to a lab would be unthinkable.

This book works well as a suspense novel, and has several scenes involving the Outsider that create a disturbing and tense atmosphere. However, there are numerous unneeded plot lines, such as a deluded mob hitman on the trail of the dog, and an initial introduction to the mousy Nora as she is being stalked by a serial rapist that makes her "rescue" and "reeducation" by the oh-so-competent Travis (and a dog, nonetheless!) seem highly chauvinistic. Koontz message of the love's transformative power is a good one, but would have been much stronger had both Nora and Travis been developed as characters with more realistic and equal backgrounds. Furthermore, Koontz has an irritating habit of injecting his political and ethical beliefs about the virtues of small government and the positive future of technology into the story in a ham-handed manner. The former is clumsy and detracts from the flow of the story. The latter seems outdated and plain wrong twenty years later as concerns about genetically-modified food and governmental and corporate control of new technology are increasingly at issue.

In the end, however, readers who enjoy horror-suspense and/or love dogs will like this book, especially the comic moments involving every dog-lover's dream of a pet that can not only communicate its love with a sense of humor, but occasionally beat his master at a game of Scrabble. Graphic violence and explicit language, discussions of rape and sex, a moderate sex scene.