She was in that highest rank of beauties that inspired stupid men to commit foolish acts and made wiser men despair for their inadequacies.

One storytelling element I like very much is the book that opens with an impossibility. Dean Koontz’s latest novel, The Other Emily, is such a book. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with all of it, but it led me a merry chase up to the end.

David Thorne is a bestselling author, and very wealthy. But he lives a distanced life, ever since the loss of his girlfriend Emily. She disappeared on a California highway one rainy night ten years ago, when her car broke down. She is assumed to be one of the victims of a serial killer active at the time. David actually pays the man to visit him periodically in prison, in the hope of gleaning a clue to Emily’s fate. He’s grieving, of course, but also racked with guilt, because he should have been with her that night.

Then one evening, in a bar in Newport Beach, he spies a woman who looks exactly like Emily. Not similar to her, but precisely like her in every detail. She even talks like Emily, and seems to know things only she would know. Except that she’s the age Emily was when she disappeared, not the age she’d be today.

David plunges into a passionate affair with this mysterious woman, meanwhile embarking on an obsessive investigation to discover who she really is, where she comes from, and what she’s here for. The secret, when he learns it, will be almost unbelievable and very likely deadly.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the conclusion of The Other Emily. I thought it contrived and implausible, even on science fiction/horror terms. However, the process of reading the book provided a persistent sense of dread all along its length, and I found that very stimulating.

Cautions for language and disturbing subject matter.