Madness (novel)

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Irrsinn (original title: Velocity , German: speed ) is a novel by the American bestselling author Dean Koontz , which was first published in the USA in 2005 . The German translation by Bernhard Kleinschmidt was first published in 2007.

action

Since the fiancée of the bartender Billy Wiles has been in a vegetative state after being poisoned , he has led a simple and boring life. Although he is financially secure through compensation, he works in a pub during the day.

One day after work, Billy discovers a note on his windshield asking him to decide whether a “pretty blonde teacher” or an “older woman” will be killed. The author of the message announces that he will make the decision of who will be killed depend on whether Billy goes to the police with the message or not.

Billy decides to ask the police officer Lanny Olsen for advice, which one of his few friends belongs to.

Indeed, the following day, word spread that a young teacher was brutally killed. Billy also receives another message. Again he should decide the life or death of two people.

Lanny Olson requests time to consider the case. When Billy realizes that the description of one of the potential victims fits his friend, the killer has already killed Lanny Olsen.

The two victims are not the only ones. The perpetrator now makes personal contact with Billy. He frequently gets into his home and ambushes him in his car, seriously injuring him.

Now Billy even moves into the field of vision of the police, whom he does not confide in the whole time because he had to cope with a traumatic experience in his youth. After surprising his parents in a heated argument in which his father seriously injured his mother, he killed his father in self-defense. He then shot his mother to free her from her suffering. Subsequently, a young policeman wanted to convict him as a perpetrator who had maliciously murdered his parents.

Billy gets closer and closer to the perpetrator. In his search, Billy has to keep disappearing corpses, traces and other clues in order not to draw the police's attention to himself.

Eventually, Billy can find out the psychopath's identity in the end . It is about the famous artist Valis, who erects a sculpture on the scene and understands his murders as a kind of art . An accomplice is Billy's colleague Steve Zillis from the bar, whom the main character had previously suspected and brutally questioned. Billy succeeds in preventing Zillis from kidnapping his fiancee Barbara and then kills him.

Ultimately, Billy manages to overpower Valis and kills Valis too.

particularities

Again and again, profound words come to Billy's mind in difficult situations. These come entirely from the work of TS Eliot .

In the course of the story, Billy picks up fragments of sentences from his fiancée, who is in a coma. He suspects this is an important message. In reality, they are quotations from the work Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens , whose stories Barbara read a lot and loved.

literature