I loved the beginning. Dean Koontz writing has always been pretty good and that alone can get someone hooked into a story. The dream of hers, sounded interesting, that and the fact that she felt like everything that had happened in it would happen there. That she expected to see the strange man at the table but he wasn't. I love the way her dog is. It sounds terribly cute and definitely helps make the beginning a little funny, how the dog interrupts her dreams, because she's right, the dog doesn't care about dreams. The winter scenes described sound nice, because I've always loved how snow looks on trees and everywhere when it's fresh and no one's touched it quite yet. She sounds like she loves her job, enough that she had gotten teacher of the year, a few years before.