Best I've read by this author. Not monster story, but about secret govt agency after two people in chase across country.

The best part of this book is the conspiracy theory theme. The characters are annoying, with the attractive female characters far over-described and the male characters left almost blank, as if the reader need not know what the protagonist and his arch enemy look like. There is a lot of filler- unnecessary detail, wordy and momentum-killing descriptions of every scene, and too little plot structure, so that one might easily miss the central plotline and get bogged down in the rest of the dead-weight bulk of this novel.
In this book, a man becomes obsessed with a woman he met at a bar, and begins stalking her, finding her address, going to her apartment and breaking in. When bad guys attack her apartment while the man is still inside, he escapes and goes off in search of the woman. The bad guys begin stalking him, and the rest of the book is a mad chase in which the man hunts the woman, the bad guys hunt the man, and eventually a cop and his family are framed in a phony drug bust and forced to go on the run. The bad guys are some super-secret agency that is run out of the Department of Justice, though what their mandate is remains a bit unclear even by the end of the book. It does provide a convenient screen for the chief bad guy, though, and an unlimited budget for him to use while hunting his targets.
( )

A re-read for me, but one I quickly scanned through when I remembered I found it rather draining the first time. I quickly recollected much of the story which says something not having read it for many years, though not necessarily for the right reasons. With some interesting characters and a wonderful dog, this novel lacks the supernatural elements of so many of this author’s books. One for those into secret government agencies, but the reason the protagonist wants to track down an unknown woman is tenuous. The biggest fault of the book is over padding. I’m sure it could have lost 200 pages and been better for it. So many sequences seem never-ending. It’s a hard one to review, as many like it. Maybe one to read once, but not a keeper for me. The best thing about it for me was the dog, Rocky. ( )

This book was originally published in 1995, I am revisiting it in 2021 and That really changes things. This is really science fiction in so many ways. In 1995 computer technology for us was completely far less advanced, but he seemed to see the future with this.

Narration was basically good.

FROM PUBLISHER: Do you dare step through the red door? Spencer Grant had no idea what drew him to the bar with the red door. He thought he would just sit down, have a slow beer or two, and talk to a stranger. He couldn’t know that it would lead to a narrow escape from a bungalow targeted by a SWAT team. Or that it would leave him a wanted man.

But now Spencer is on the run from mysterious and ruthless men. He is in love with a woman he knows next to nothing about. And he is hiding from a past he can’t fully remember. On his trail is a shadowy security agency that answers to no one - including the U.S. government - and a man who considers himself a compassionate Angel of Death. But worst of all, Spencer Grant is on a collision course with inner demons he thought he’d buried years ago - inner demons that could destroy him if his enemies don’t first. ( )

One of my favourite reads of 2019!

Full review over on my blog @ https://kymisanreads.blogspot.com/2019/09/book-review-dark-rivers-of-heart.html ( )