Hardly the poster child for serendipity and good fortune, Laura Shane has had a life filled with both tragedy realized and tragedy narrowly averted. She also has a very special guardian angel, someone watching over her at her darkest moments, someone who appears amidst awesome displays of lightning, someone who has changed the course of her life time and time again.

Laura Shane is, of course, the heroine of "Lightning," and though published way back in the recesses of 1988, "Lightning" remains one of my favorite Koontz novels.

Suspenseful and moody, "Lightning" is Dean Koontz at his best. Koontz is an erratic writer, sometimes spinning incredibly complex and rich tales, and sometimes falling just short of the hoped-for result. "Lightning" struck its mark.

In "Lightning," Koontz tackles the well-worn concept of time travel with imagination. Koontz maneuvers through a potentially hazardous subject with panache and much-needed reflection.

Though Koontz so often pens intricately woven, multi-peopled stories with criss-crossing plotlines, "Lightning" is a simpler story, and it owes much of its success to this. Instead of see-sawing back and forth amongst half a dozen characters, "Lightning" concentrates on just two: Laura Shane, our ill-fortuned heroine, and Stefan, her special albeit mysterious guardian.

This works for one main reason. Though Koontz excels at creating fulfilling primary characters -- characters that are multidimensional, quirky, and human -- he often has difficulty constructing equally realistic and well-defined secondary and tertiary characters. In "Lightning," the Ackerman twins are the perfect example of failed secondary characters. With just two focal characters, however, Koontz puts the focus on "people" we can get to know, people for whose ultimate fate, the reader will grow to care deeply about.

And fate is a major theme in "Lightning" -- both the perceived inevitability of fate and the defiance of that fate. Consequently, "Lightning," thematically, is an ambitious work for Koontz as he layers the concepts of time travel paradox, predestination, and human connection.

But "Lightning," much to its credit, doesn't linger too long in some philosophical netherworld. Instead, "Lightning" is packed with action, and characteristic of Koontz's better work, "Lightning" brings a dizzying sense of momentum -- of propulsion toward a foregone but unknown conclusion.

And that is probably the most commendable part of "Lightning" (and many of Koontz's novels). Never feeling forced or contrived, the endings are right -- somehow, someway, irrevocably right.

If Koontz could bear to part with a few adjectives and adverbs, and perhaps pare down often overblown description, this novel would be near perfect. Still, "Lightning" is, for all functional purposes, a beautifully crafted novel, and my complaint admittedly could be dismissed as nitpicking. This is, after all, Dean Koontz's style, and it has obviously worked for him thus far.

"Lightning" is marked by masterful storytelling by a master storyteller. Koontz's magical, mysterious time traveling tale about two strangers will compel you and hold you spellbound. Reading it, perhaps, you will feel the way a child feels when first he looks to the skies and sees, streaking toward the tree tops, that first, awesome bolt of lightning.