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Double Image
After a harrowing experience in Bosnia, war photographer Mitch Coltrane makes a vow. From now on, he will only take those pictures that celebrate life; that document hope instead of despair. Still, wartorn images continue to haunt him. He learns to shield himself by fixating on a beautiful woman in an old photograph. But slowly he grows obsessed. Who is she? He must know. And as Coltrane searches for answers, he falls hopelessly in love, forgetting that the past can sometimes intrude on the present, with terrifying consequences.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
27 people are currently reading
456 people want to read
About the author
David Morrell
217 books1,671 followersDavid Morrell is a Canadian novelist from Kitchener, Ontario, who has been living in the United States for a number of years. He is best known for his debut 1972 novel First Blood, which would later become a successful film franchise starring Sylvester Stallone. More recently, he has been writing the Captain America comic books limited-series The Chosen.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews
December 4, 2022
Sadly needing to Goodreads' review this book 18 years after I read it, the fact is that I can't remember diddly squat about this book!
I gave it this one a Three Star, 7 out of 12. The premise is of a writer being stalked by the Bosnian War Crimes criminal he exposed as he himself 'stalks' the 40s debutante actress from a collection of photos he's researching seems a tad interesting to say the least, as in can Morel make this work? He evidently to, to a degree based on my rating?
2004 read
I gave it this one a Three Star, 7 out of 12. The premise is of a writer being stalked by the Bosnian War Crimes criminal he exposed as he himself 'stalks' the 40s debutante actress from a collection of photos he's researching seems a tad interesting to say the least, as in can Morel make this work? He evidently to, to a degree based on my rating?
2004 read
August 21, 2015
Most (that's "most") of David Morrell's books are what I'd call good to excellent. Like everyone he has a false note how and then, it happens to the best. Of course we actually don't all agree on which of his books ARE the false notes.
Anyway...this isn't one of the false notes, it is however a little different from Morrell's usual fare. Most of his books are excellent action thrillers. First Blood, The Brotherhood of the Rose, The Fraternity Of The Stone and others are fast moving, involving action thrillers. This is a yak of a seperate species.
A photographer (our hero Mitch Coltrane we're talking about here) gets a chance to meet a famous photographer from the past decades (Randolph Packard). Coltrane is disillusioned with what he's become. He no longer sees "LIFE" when he takes photos. He's a war photographer having just returned from photographing atrocities in an assignment in Bosnia.
Meeting Packard and seeing in him some of the same disillusionment he begins a friendship...until his new friend dies. BUT Packard has asked Coltrane to follow the path of his most famous series of photographs, the houses of famous people in Hollywood. Coltrane will follow the same path and photograph those same houses from the locations at the same angles as the originals...changes.
He also get's the house Packard lived in "back then". In that house, in a secret room he discovers a stash of photographs. There are hundreds and hundreds of photos all of the same incredibly beautiful woman.
AND this launches him into an obsessive quest that get's deeper, stranger and more deadly as it goes...
Good book. I can recommend this one and think most will enjoy it. it is a more psychological thrill and not so much built around action but Morrell shows us he can handle both.
Enjoy.
Anyway...this isn't one of the false notes, it is however a little different from Morrell's usual fare. Most of his books are excellent action thrillers. First Blood, The Brotherhood of the Rose, The Fraternity Of The Stone and others are fast moving, involving action thrillers. This is a yak of a seperate species.
A photographer (our hero Mitch Coltrane we're talking about here) gets a chance to meet a famous photographer from the past decades (Randolph Packard). Coltrane is disillusioned with what he's become. He no longer sees "LIFE" when he takes photos. He's a war photographer having just returned from photographing atrocities in an assignment in Bosnia.
Meeting Packard and seeing in him some of the same disillusionment he begins a friendship...until his new friend dies. BUT Packard has asked Coltrane to follow the path of his most famous series of photographs, the houses of famous people in Hollywood. Coltrane will follow the same path and photograph those same houses from the locations at the same angles as the originals...changes.
He also get's the house Packard lived in "back then". In that house, in a secret room he discovers a stash of photographs. There are hundreds and hundreds of photos all of the same incredibly beautiful woman.
AND this launches him into an obsessive quest that get's deeper, stranger and more deadly as it goes...
Good book. I can recommend this one and think most will enjoy it. it is a more psychological thrill and not so much built around action but Morrell shows us he can handle both.
Enjoy.
January 15, 2015
A well-written but oddly disjointed plot. It almost seems like the author had two shorter novella-length stories that he combined into one because his editor wanted just one long book. I liked the first part (Serbian war criminal) better than the second part (femme fatale). The second part read like the plot of Basic Instinct, which had been released a few years before this book was published. I saw the "twist" way before the end. I was actually hoping the woman in the second part of the novel was the daughter of the Serbian war criminal from the first part. But it didn't turn out that way. This was a fast-paced read, but it had the potential for being alot better.
September 14, 2016
this one's the real thing
p503: "not yet !" tash said.
p503: "not yet !" tash said.
June 11, 2022
The book title refers to a character looking like a picture the protagonist comes across, but it also could be a play on the book itself as there were two complete stories here, done in a strange way to me. The first half of the book mostly deals with a combat photographer who's last in the field mission follows him home where's he looking to make a new kind of life. The weird part is that story, which was interesting and had a very suspense-action plot going, ends around the middle of the book. For a few pages I thought may there was a red-herring or something but nope - outside of some psychological impacts and characters from that sticking around, story 1 over, on to story two now, which was a bit of a crazy love/insane person thing that just didn't land with me.
Overall not a bad read but not one of Morrell's better works.
Overall not a bad read but not one of Morrell's better works.
November 25, 2025
Дейвид Морел демонстрира пълната си писателска мощ в този роман. Роман, който спокойно можеше да бъде разделен и издаден като две отделни книги, но вместо това Морел вплита няколко истории в една с умелост и майсторски усет.
Всичко започва като екшън трилър: Мич Колтрейн е фотограф, който е в Югославия, за да документира зверствата, когато се забърква с един от главните военни престъпници. Колтрейн оцелява суровите условия, престрелката и гонитбата, връща се обратно в Щатите, Илкович (престъпникът от Югославия) започва да го преследва и подслушва, в историята се намесва полицията, близки на Колтрейн са изтезавани и зверски убити... всичко това преди да сме преполовили романа.
А след това историята се заплита с един световноизвестен фотограф, едно предизвикателство, няколко любовни триъгълника, съспенс, обрати, напрежение, романтика, еротика, тъга, екшън... Дейвид Морел в пълния му блясък.
Всичко започва като екшън трилър: Мич Колтрейн е фотограф, който е в Югославия, за да документира зверствата, когато се забърква с един от главните военни престъпници. Колтрейн оцелява суровите условия, престрелката и гонитбата, връща се обратно в Щатите, Илкович (престъпникът от Югославия) започва да го преследва и подслушва, в историята се намесва полицията, близки на Колтрейн са изтезавани и зверски убити... всичко това преди да сме преполовили романа.
А след това историята се заплита с един световноизвестен фотограф, едно предизвикателство, няколко любовни триъгълника, съспенс, обрати, напрежение, романтика, еротика, тъга, екшън... Дейвид Морел в пълния му блясък.
July 27, 2022
She belongs to the streets.
October 2, 2025
(2.10.2025- Another re-read for the who-knows-how-many-times now, but it never, ever, fails. Some books are joy to re-read).
Fire purifies, but how, Coltrane wondered, can you incinerate your mind?
War photographer Mitchell Coltrane, narrowly escapes a horrible experience in Bosnia, in which he almost lost his life. When he goes back to Los Angeles, he realizes that he spent too much time depicting the darker side of humanity, immortalizing inhumanity instead of taking photographs that convey hope and beauty. When he meets the world renowned photographer Randolph Packard , an opportunity arises for Coltrane to change direction and finally do some beautiful, meaningful work. But his experience is Bosnia comes back to haunt him, when Dragan Ilkovic, a ruthless war-criminal, arrives in LA and goes after everyone Coltrane cares about in order to make him suffer. As Coltrane and his on-and-off girlfriend, Jennifer, fight to survive, he sinks deep into Packard's world and stumbles upon a photograph of a stunning woman who haunts his thoughts. As Coltrane sets out to discover who she is and why Packard was so obsessed with her, Coltrane becomes obsessed himself with the woman, not realizing that past and present are colliding. As he starts to piece together the mysteries of the past, he meets a woman who looks exactly like the one in the photograph, and their meeting is a catalyst for events to would spiral Coltrane's life completely out of control, as he realizes that he sees through the lens of the camera doesn't reflect reality at all, and that obsessions come with a high price.
It's been 26 years since I've first read "Double Image". I was always interested in photography, and even went to a few courses, and that was part of the attraction for this novel when I picked it up back then (The other was the masterpiece of a TV show called “Nowhere Man”, that chronicled the life of Thomas Vale, a successful photographer, whose life is turned upside down in one night when suddenly no one recognizes him, no one knows who he is, his entire identity has been erased and he’s being chased by people who would do anything to put their hands on the negatives of a photo he took- one to leads to a sinister, complex conspiracy. Much like “Double Image”, the series also uses in a very intelligent way, the photography world, implementing them into the plot brilliantly, while exploring what it means to be you, what is an identity, and who are you when you don’t have one anymore. These same topics were also explored thoroughly in another novel by Morrell, “The Fifth Profession”, which is another masterpiece in itself). Being 13 at the time (yes, 13, though for someone who always read books, and started reading serious novels like "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" at age 7, it's not really early), I wasn't sure what to expect from this novel, but what I did discover stayed with me from that day forward (It was also my first David Morrell novel, and since then he became a mainstay in my library).
"Double Image" is not only an intelligent psychological thriller (an ACTUAL psychological thriller), it also contains many insights about the human psyche that still ring true. It's a story about obsessed people, and how these obsession cost them their lives and their sanity. It's a story about people who, in the aftermath of tragedy, want to change and find a new direction, and cling to anything they can find that they think make them feel good, but they are looking for these changes in all the wrong places. It's a story of hope and despair, of how we perceive reality and how easy it is to manipulate it. It's a story of doing everything you can to cling on to life and its beauty, of trying to remain sane in an insane world, where hate, lies, illusions, deceptions and distortions are part of our daily routines. A story about survival, and being human, and seeing the world for what it is, instead of painting it the way we want it to be. A story about identity- what it means to have one, and hat is an identity- is it really ours alone or is a mirror of other people’s perceptions? Are we really who we are and what we present to the world? And how many masks do we all wear to keep the world at bay so no one will see who we really are?
Having read almost all of Morrell's novels, I can definitely say "Double Image" is a bit different in tone and approach compared to his other works, yet at the same time it's very much a Morrell novel. It’s also not so unusual, seeing that throughout his career he wasn’t afraid to try new approaches and new things. I know he is very meticulous when it came to doing research for his novels, and it's shown here, as his knowledge about the photography world and photographers and Hollywood's Golden Age were implemented brilliantly into the plot.
5 stars.
Is it a perfect novel? No. But it's a well-written, insightful novel, a very unique experience that would not only entertain, but would also leave you pondering, as the story and characters would keep lurking in your mind long after you've finished reading.
And while I do love (almost) everything I've read by Morrell, "Double Image", to me, is still his best work. Give it a go. You won't be disappointed. (Maybe try “Nowhere Man” too, while you’re at it. You’d be surprised how much these two works complement each other and are still very much relevant, haunting and brilliant).
He fought to rouse his spirit. Hey, I saved the other three rolls. That’s still a lot. If I can get them out of here . . .
The sentence didn’t want to be completed.
Yes? he asked himself. If I can get them out of here?
Are those photographs worth dying for?
This time, he didn’t hesitate.
Are you kidding me? The UN inspection team is desperate to get its hands on evidence like this. The film will prove that the atrocities committed here were much worse than anyone imagined. That bastard Ilkovic will finally have to pay for what he did.
Maybe.
Coltrane felt uneasy. I don’t understand.
Oh, the photos you took are shocking enough to get Ilkovic convicted, all right. But what if the politicians become involved and declare an amnesty for the sake of peace in the region? What if nothing changes? Are your pictures worth getting killed for?
A homicide detective friend of his had once joked that Coltrane felt about cameras the way police officers did about backup guns—naked without one. “Come to think of it,” the detective had continued joking, “cameras and guns both shoot people, don’t they?” But it wasn’t the same at all, Coltrane insisted. His kind of shooting didn’t kill people. It was supposed to make them immortal. That was the reason he had become a photographer. When he had been twelve, he had found a trove of photographs of his dead mother and had fantasized that they kept her alive.
Those pictures of his mother had been beautiful.
As shivers seized him and his consciousness faded into a place that was despairingly even darker, he managed one last lucid thought.
Then why have I been taking ugly pictures for such a long time?
“Then tell me something else that’s true. Why did you become a photographer?”
Coltrane turned to leave. “I won’t bother you any longer.”
“I asked you a question. Quick now. Don’t think about it. Answer me. Why did you—”
“To stop time.”
“Indeed?” Packard’s sunken eyes assessed him. “What’s your name?”
“Mitchell Coltrane.”
“Mitchell . . .” Packard’s gaze went inward, then focused on him more tightly. “Yes, I know your work.”
Coltrane couldn’t tell if that meant the same as stepping in dog shit.
“Tell me why you want to stop time,” Packard demanded.
“Things fall apart.”
“And the center cannot hold? I didn’t know anybody read Yeats anymore.”
“And people die.” “How very true.” Packard coughed again, painfully.
“You’ve heard the stories about photographers who go to primitive regions, where the natives won’t let the photographers take pictures of them because the natives are afraid the cameras will steal their souls. I have no idea if those stories are true, but if they are, the natives are wrong. The camera doesn’t steal anything. It gives: immortality. That’s what I thought when I was a young man. I wanted to take photographs of everybody I met, to memorialize them with pity and love—because one day they were going to die. But not in my photographs. As long as my photographs existed, I thought, so did those people.”
“Wanted? Thought? You keep using the past tense.”
“Somewhere along the line, I went wrong. I started taking pictures that didn’t celebrate living but fixated on dying. I started documenting despair instead of hope.” Coltrane shook his head sharply. “No more. I want to glorify life.”
“So now we have a photograph of a fragile old man who happens to be a genius, inspecting the contents of one of his books. A photograph about a photographer and his photographs.”
Coltrane’s voice was filled with melancholy. “His photos stayed the same, but he got older.”
“But now he stays the same in this photo.”
But the photograph of Falcon Lair wasn’t the treasure of the day. That honor went to the image of Diane.
He had done it in color. The glow of sunset chased the wanness from Diane’s cheeks. Her face was raised yearningly, her recessed eyes sad, her gaunt features determined, her frail shoulders braced as she smiled wistfully toward the sunset of her life.
“That I want my name on,” Coltrane said. “Her bravery’s an inspiration.”
Once you see the elements of the image you want, it’s too late to release the camera’s shutter. By the time you do, those elements will have changed. In that instant, clouds will have shifted, smiles will have weakened, branches will have been nudged by a breeze. It is the nature of life for things to be in motion, even if they do not appear to be, and the only way to capture the precise positioning of your subject as you desire it is to study your subject until you understand its dynamic—and then to anticipate what your subject will do. The photographer’s task is to project into the future in order to make the present timeless.
In photography, when unfocused rays of light reflect off an object and strike a negative, they create overlapping blurs known as “circles of confusion.” That was how Coltrane felt, trapped in circles of confusion. What are you doing? he asked himself. As he drove through frustratingly dense traffic toward the police administration building in downtown L.A., his mind—no matter how weary—wouldn’t let him have any peace. Do you think that if you put yourself in a time frame that goes back far enough, you’ll be able to feel as if nobody you love has died?
Jennifer was the first to speak. “When you were making love to me, did it occur to you that Rebecca Chance and Randolph Packard might have made love in this bed?”
“. . . No.”
“It did to me. I imagined that she and I had changed places. Did the nude photographs of her excite you?”
“A little.”
“Did they make you more eager to have sex?”
“I suppose.”
Jennifer lowered her hand from his face and drew it along his body, fondling him.
“Like this excites you?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” When Jennifer kissed him, he tasted the salt of a tear on her cheek. “Because I can’t compete with her, Mitch. I’m not a goddess. I’m only a woman.”
His camera clicked on the last exposure. As the rewind motor whirred, he lowered the camera. His back muscles slowly relaxed. But his tension was the result of exhilaration. Working a camera after so long had given him a rush, as had the clandestine nature of the photographs he was taking, the idea that he was trying to trap someone who wouldn’t know that he was being photographed. He wondered if that was the same kind of rush that the stalker got, the power of observing without being observed, of capturing someone’s soul without the target’s being aware that the theft had occurred. Suddenly chilled, he remembered the vulnerability and nakedness he had suffered when he found the photographs that Dragan Ilkovic had taken of him.
The time was a little before five. Dusk, intensified by the weather, became more pronounced. It would soon be dark. The thing to do is find a place to hole up and wait, he thought. It’s not like I haven’t been in snow in the mountains before.
Sure, in Bosnia.
The thought startled him. Where the hell did that come from? Pushing it away, he glanced around and saw a wooded slope behind him. From its top, he would have a vantage point on the cabin as soon as the weather lifted. A drift spilled over the tops of his hiking boots, but his wool socks kept most of it from chilling his ankles. Breathing rapidly from the unaccustomed altitude, he arrived on the bluff, assumed he was in line with the unseen cabin, and took shelter beneath the snow-laden boughs of a fir tree. Its limbs were bent over him in a tent shape.
Again, he had the feeling that he’d done this before.
In Bosnia.
I haven’t come far, he dismally thought.
In point-and-shoot cameras, the viewfinder and the lens have different openings. As a consequence, the image seen through the viewfinder is not quite the same as that received through the lens and recorded on film, making precise framing difficult. The difference between what the viewfinder sees and what the lens sees is known as the parallax effect, and that is what Coltrane suffered now. What he had thought was happening was so at odds with what had truly been happening that the parallax threatened to drive him insane.
Fire purifies, but how, Coltrane wondered, can you incinerate your mind? The increasing traumas of the previous two months had so numbed him that only after surviving the final horror did he begin to understand the full extent of his psychic damage. The rational part of him had grieved over the murders of his two closest friends and of his grandparents, but the irrational part, he came to realize, had never acknowledged that those murders had occurred, that those loved ones were lost to him forever. Those conflicting parts seemed to be reacting to separate universes, and in one of those universes, the murders couldn’t possibly have occurred, just as Coltrane couldn’t possibly have been hunted by Dragan Ilkovic. So, if those events couldn’t have occurred, they hadn’t occurred. Otherwise, he would surely have gone insane.
Dragan Ilkovic had seemed the epitome of evil, but then Coltrane had encountered Tash Adler, her malignance existing on such an unimaginably primal level that it had shocked away the numbness created by what Ilkovic had done to him. He wept without warning. He couldn’t sleep for fear of nightmares. He needed all his concentration to explain repeatedly to the police and the fire investigators what had happened in his house that night and the events that had led up to it.
When you reach absolute bottom, Coltrane told himself, when you can’t possibly fall any further and deeper, you have to start climbing. In that way, Tash had done him a favor. By setting fire to the house that had once belonged to Rebecca Chance and Randolph Packard, she had destroyed part of a festering past that had taken possession of him.
Fire purifies, but how, Coltrane wondered, can you incinerate your mind?
War photographer Mitchell Coltrane, narrowly escapes a horrible experience in Bosnia, in which he almost lost his life. When he goes back to Los Angeles, he realizes that he spent too much time depicting the darker side of humanity, immortalizing inhumanity instead of taking photographs that convey hope and beauty. When he meets the world renowned photographer Randolph Packard , an opportunity arises for Coltrane to change direction and finally do some beautiful, meaningful work. But his experience is Bosnia comes back to haunt him, when Dragan Ilkovic, a ruthless war-criminal, arrives in LA and goes after everyone Coltrane cares about in order to make him suffer. As Coltrane and his on-and-off girlfriend, Jennifer, fight to survive, he sinks deep into Packard's world and stumbles upon a photograph of a stunning woman who haunts his thoughts. As Coltrane sets out to discover who she is and why Packard was so obsessed with her, Coltrane becomes obsessed himself with the woman, not realizing that past and present are colliding. As he starts to piece together the mysteries of the past, he meets a woman who looks exactly like the one in the photograph, and their meeting is a catalyst for events to would spiral Coltrane's life completely out of control, as he realizes that he sees through the lens of the camera doesn't reflect reality at all, and that obsessions come with a high price.
It's been 26 years since I've first read "Double Image". I was always interested in photography, and even went to a few courses, and that was part of the attraction for this novel when I picked it up back then (The other was the masterpiece of a TV show called “Nowhere Man”, that chronicled the life of Thomas Vale, a successful photographer, whose life is turned upside down in one night when suddenly no one recognizes him, no one knows who he is, his entire identity has been erased and he’s being chased by people who would do anything to put their hands on the negatives of a photo he took- one to leads to a sinister, complex conspiracy. Much like “Double Image”, the series also uses in a very intelligent way, the photography world, implementing them into the plot brilliantly, while exploring what it means to be you, what is an identity, and who are you when you don’t have one anymore. These same topics were also explored thoroughly in another novel by Morrell, “The Fifth Profession”, which is another masterpiece in itself). Being 13 at the time (yes, 13, though for someone who always read books, and started reading serious novels like "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" at age 7, it's not really early), I wasn't sure what to expect from this novel, but what I did discover stayed with me from that day forward (It was also my first David Morrell novel, and since then he became a mainstay in my library).
"Double Image" is not only an intelligent psychological thriller (an ACTUAL psychological thriller), it also contains many insights about the human psyche that still ring true. It's a story about obsessed people, and how these obsession cost them their lives and their sanity. It's a story about people who, in the aftermath of tragedy, want to change and find a new direction, and cling to anything they can find that they think make them feel good, but they are looking for these changes in all the wrong places. It's a story of hope and despair, of how we perceive reality and how easy it is to manipulate it. It's a story of doing everything you can to cling on to life and its beauty, of trying to remain sane in an insane world, where hate, lies, illusions, deceptions and distortions are part of our daily routines. A story about survival, and being human, and seeing the world for what it is, instead of painting it the way we want it to be. A story about identity- what it means to have one, and hat is an identity- is it really ours alone or is a mirror of other people’s perceptions? Are we really who we are and what we present to the world? And how many masks do we all wear to keep the world at bay so no one will see who we really are?
Having read almost all of Morrell's novels, I can definitely say "Double Image" is a bit different in tone and approach compared to his other works, yet at the same time it's very much a Morrell novel. It’s also not so unusual, seeing that throughout his career he wasn’t afraid to try new approaches and new things. I know he is very meticulous when it came to doing research for his novels, and it's shown here, as his knowledge about the photography world and photographers and Hollywood's Golden Age were implemented brilliantly into the plot.
5 stars.
Is it a perfect novel? No. But it's a well-written, insightful novel, a very unique experience that would not only entertain, but would also leave you pondering, as the story and characters would keep lurking in your mind long after you've finished reading.
And while I do love (almost) everything I've read by Morrell, "Double Image", to me, is still his best work. Give it a go. You won't be disappointed. (Maybe try “Nowhere Man” too, while you’re at it. You’d be surprised how much these two works complement each other and are still very much relevant, haunting and brilliant).
He fought to rouse his spirit. Hey, I saved the other three rolls. That’s still a lot. If I can get them out of here . . .
The sentence didn’t want to be completed.
Yes? he asked himself. If I can get them out of here?
Are those photographs worth dying for?
This time, he didn’t hesitate.
Are you kidding me? The UN inspection team is desperate to get its hands on evidence like this. The film will prove that the atrocities committed here were much worse than anyone imagined. That bastard Ilkovic will finally have to pay for what he did.
Maybe.
Coltrane felt uneasy. I don’t understand.
Oh, the photos you took are shocking enough to get Ilkovic convicted, all right. But what if the politicians become involved and declare an amnesty for the sake of peace in the region? What if nothing changes? Are your pictures worth getting killed for?
A homicide detective friend of his had once joked that Coltrane felt about cameras the way police officers did about backup guns—naked without one. “Come to think of it,” the detective had continued joking, “cameras and guns both shoot people, don’t they?” But it wasn’t the same at all, Coltrane insisted. His kind of shooting didn’t kill people. It was supposed to make them immortal. That was the reason he had become a photographer. When he had been twelve, he had found a trove of photographs of his dead mother and had fantasized that they kept her alive.
Those pictures of his mother had been beautiful.
As shivers seized him and his consciousness faded into a place that was despairingly even darker, he managed one last lucid thought.
Then why have I been taking ugly pictures for such a long time?
“Then tell me something else that’s true. Why did you become a photographer?”
Coltrane turned to leave. “I won’t bother you any longer.”
“I asked you a question. Quick now. Don’t think about it. Answer me. Why did you—”
“To stop time.”
“Indeed?” Packard’s sunken eyes assessed him. “What’s your name?”
“Mitchell Coltrane.”
“Mitchell . . .” Packard’s gaze went inward, then focused on him more tightly. “Yes, I know your work.”
Coltrane couldn’t tell if that meant the same as stepping in dog shit.
“Tell me why you want to stop time,” Packard demanded.
“Things fall apart.”
“And the center cannot hold? I didn’t know anybody read Yeats anymore.”
“And people die.” “How very true.” Packard coughed again, painfully.
“You’ve heard the stories about photographers who go to primitive regions, where the natives won’t let the photographers take pictures of them because the natives are afraid the cameras will steal their souls. I have no idea if those stories are true, but if they are, the natives are wrong. The camera doesn’t steal anything. It gives: immortality. That’s what I thought when I was a young man. I wanted to take photographs of everybody I met, to memorialize them with pity and love—because one day they were going to die. But not in my photographs. As long as my photographs existed, I thought, so did those people.”
“Wanted? Thought? You keep using the past tense.”
“Somewhere along the line, I went wrong. I started taking pictures that didn’t celebrate living but fixated on dying. I started documenting despair instead of hope.” Coltrane shook his head sharply. “No more. I want to glorify life.”
“So now we have a photograph of a fragile old man who happens to be a genius, inspecting the contents of one of his books. A photograph about a photographer and his photographs.”
Coltrane’s voice was filled with melancholy. “His photos stayed the same, but he got older.”
“But now he stays the same in this photo.”
But the photograph of Falcon Lair wasn’t the treasure of the day. That honor went to the image of Diane.
He had done it in color. The glow of sunset chased the wanness from Diane’s cheeks. Her face was raised yearningly, her recessed eyes sad, her gaunt features determined, her frail shoulders braced as she smiled wistfully toward the sunset of her life.
“That I want my name on,” Coltrane said. “Her bravery’s an inspiration.”
Once you see the elements of the image you want, it’s too late to release the camera’s shutter. By the time you do, those elements will have changed. In that instant, clouds will have shifted, smiles will have weakened, branches will have been nudged by a breeze. It is the nature of life for things to be in motion, even if they do not appear to be, and the only way to capture the precise positioning of your subject as you desire it is to study your subject until you understand its dynamic—and then to anticipate what your subject will do. The photographer’s task is to project into the future in order to make the present timeless.
In photography, when unfocused rays of light reflect off an object and strike a negative, they create overlapping blurs known as “circles of confusion.” That was how Coltrane felt, trapped in circles of confusion. What are you doing? he asked himself. As he drove through frustratingly dense traffic toward the police administration building in downtown L.A., his mind—no matter how weary—wouldn’t let him have any peace. Do you think that if you put yourself in a time frame that goes back far enough, you’ll be able to feel as if nobody you love has died?
Jennifer was the first to speak. “When you were making love to me, did it occur to you that Rebecca Chance and Randolph Packard might have made love in this bed?”
“. . . No.”
“It did to me. I imagined that she and I had changed places. Did the nude photographs of her excite you?”
“A little.”
“Did they make you more eager to have sex?”
“I suppose.”
Jennifer lowered her hand from his face and drew it along his body, fondling him.
“Like this excites you?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” When Jennifer kissed him, he tasted the salt of a tear on her cheek. “Because I can’t compete with her, Mitch. I’m not a goddess. I’m only a woman.”
His camera clicked on the last exposure. As the rewind motor whirred, he lowered the camera. His back muscles slowly relaxed. But his tension was the result of exhilaration. Working a camera after so long had given him a rush, as had the clandestine nature of the photographs he was taking, the idea that he was trying to trap someone who wouldn’t know that he was being photographed. He wondered if that was the same kind of rush that the stalker got, the power of observing without being observed, of capturing someone’s soul without the target’s being aware that the theft had occurred. Suddenly chilled, he remembered the vulnerability and nakedness he had suffered when he found the photographs that Dragan Ilkovic had taken of him.
The time was a little before five. Dusk, intensified by the weather, became more pronounced. It would soon be dark. The thing to do is find a place to hole up and wait, he thought. It’s not like I haven’t been in snow in the mountains before.
Sure, in Bosnia.
The thought startled him. Where the hell did that come from? Pushing it away, he glanced around and saw a wooded slope behind him. From its top, he would have a vantage point on the cabin as soon as the weather lifted. A drift spilled over the tops of his hiking boots, but his wool socks kept most of it from chilling his ankles. Breathing rapidly from the unaccustomed altitude, he arrived on the bluff, assumed he was in line with the unseen cabin, and took shelter beneath the snow-laden boughs of a fir tree. Its limbs were bent over him in a tent shape.
Again, he had the feeling that he’d done this before.
In Bosnia.
I haven’t come far, he dismally thought.
In point-and-shoot cameras, the viewfinder and the lens have different openings. As a consequence, the image seen through the viewfinder is not quite the same as that received through the lens and recorded on film, making precise framing difficult. The difference between what the viewfinder sees and what the lens sees is known as the parallax effect, and that is what Coltrane suffered now. What he had thought was happening was so at odds with what had truly been happening that the parallax threatened to drive him insane.
Fire purifies, but how, Coltrane wondered, can you incinerate your mind? The increasing traumas of the previous two months had so numbed him that only after surviving the final horror did he begin to understand the full extent of his psychic damage. The rational part of him had grieved over the murders of his two closest friends and of his grandparents, but the irrational part, he came to realize, had never acknowledged that those murders had occurred, that those loved ones were lost to him forever. Those conflicting parts seemed to be reacting to separate universes, and in one of those universes, the murders couldn’t possibly have occurred, just as Coltrane couldn’t possibly have been hunted by Dragan Ilkovic. So, if those events couldn’t have occurred, they hadn’t occurred. Otherwise, he would surely have gone insane.
Dragan Ilkovic had seemed the epitome of evil, but then Coltrane had encountered Tash Adler, her malignance existing on such an unimaginably primal level that it had shocked away the numbness created by what Ilkovic had done to him. He wept without warning. He couldn’t sleep for fear of nightmares. He needed all his concentration to explain repeatedly to the police and the fire investigators what had happened in his house that night and the events that had led up to it.
When you reach absolute bottom, Coltrane told himself, when you can’t possibly fall any further and deeper, you have to start climbing. In that way, Tash had done him a favor. By setting fire to the house that had once belonged to Rebecca Chance and Randolph Packard, she had destroyed part of a festering past that had taken possession of him.
June 30, 2025
DNF - I gave up on this book what felt like it should be half way through (because the pace up till then had been rapid, so much happening in the first couple of hundred pages) but was closer to a quarter-way. Having not really enjoyed the first part of the book, a sneaky peek at other readers reviews of this persuaded me that the problems I was having getting on with the book would not improve, and that it wasn't worth persisting.
What felt like a quick-moving thriller ended up feeling more 'rushed', the author cramming in plenty of action and twists to try and keep the reader interested, but using a load of devices which failed to be believable. A central character and his pursuer both having unending resources of luck, money and stupidity (I didn't 'buy' the wisdom of hiding out in a house which you may have easily been followed to, I didn't 'buy' some Serb criminal wanting to waste all that time and effort to pursue some American journalist back in the USA, and I didn't 'buy' the central character's relationship with the police in flip-flopping between relying on them and then ignoring all their advice and going off on one) and identikit characters with little depth past the 'hero', 'love interest', 'black cop', 'evil Communist', and 'wise old guy' stereotypes. I know I didn't finish it, but I'm pretty confident this wasn't going to hold my interest.
What felt like a quick-moving thriller ended up feeling more 'rushed', the author cramming in plenty of action and twists to try and keep the reader interested, but using a load of devices which failed to be believable. A central character and his pursuer both having unending resources of luck, money and stupidity (I didn't 'buy' the wisdom of hiding out in a house which you may have easily been followed to, I didn't 'buy' some Serb criminal wanting to waste all that time and effort to pursue some American journalist back in the USA, and I didn't 'buy' the central character's relationship with the police in flip-flopping between relying on them and then ignoring all their advice and going off on one) and identikit characters with little depth past the 'hero', 'love interest', 'black cop', 'evil Communist', and 'wise old guy' stereotypes. I know I didn't finish it, but I'm pretty confident this wasn't going to hold my interest.
March 31, 2012
Oddly constructed but lots of great action
No one, and I mean no one in modern fiction does a better job of creating the "man on the run" story line than David Morrell. He creates tension and paranoia in his stories that make the reader turn the page. This story is no different in that respect. But, it does have a horrible flaw.
Double Image features photographer Mitch Coltrane. He mostly does news photography but is also quite the talented artistic photographer. When the story starts, Coltrane is in Bosnia photographing Dragan Ilkovic, a war criminal whose men are digging up mass graves in order to more properly dispose of them. Coltrane gets his pictures, barely escapes with his life and decides that it is time to get out of the news business because the sights are starting to give him nightmares...
Read more at: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2011/...
February 19, 2012
This book starts with Coltrane's job and emphasizes how he had lived in danger because of his photos. And then he slowly gets involved with a woman who looks like the one in the pictures that he discovered hidden. Just when he thought he killed the most dangerous person in his life, another one arrives.
It's really slow paced because Morrell is very descriptive. But I didn't expect the ending at all. In the middle, I was thinking, "Oh, that is so predictable." And when I found out that it was true, I thought, "I was right." And then Morrell delivers a shocking ending that made me smile in wicked appreciation of his brilliant mind.
It's really slow paced because Morrell is very descriptive. But I didn't expect the ending at all. In the middle, I was thinking, "Oh, that is so predictable." And when I found out that it was true, I thought, "I was right." And then Morrell delivers a shocking ending that made me smile in wicked appreciation of his brilliant mind.
September 18, 2018
I know this book was published a number of years ago, but it still offered a good read. Not too many books have given me that edgy feeling, but this one did. It's almost two stories in a single book. The connection between the two "plots" seemed a bit of stretch until the end. Enjoyable read, even after all these years.
April 14, 2009
The book started out well, but it went down hill quickly--just entertainment.
May 29, 2018
A book of 2 halves with a good twist at the end binding them.
May 9, 2021
The first half of this book featuring Dragan Ilkovic: 5 stars.
The second half of this book featuring Natasha Adler: 3 stars.
Split the difference, and you get 4 stars (but just barely).
The first half of this story was an adrenaline rush. Absolutely fantastic. A photographer (Mitch Coltrane) being hunted down by a ruthless genocidal maniac due to photos exposing evidence of war crimes was brilliantly done. I felt copious amounts of stress from Ilkovic's actions. The slow agonizing deaths he imposed on people important to Coltrane made me struggle to sleep. I wish the entire novel had been dedicated to the need to outsmart and outrun a madman who had eluded the United Nations. Though I felt relief when that part was over, I was also disappointed that the first half had ended, it was that well written.
But the second half...
The second half felt like a completely different story. Some characters changed, many, like Coltrane, remained the same. The thrill of the chase and fearing who's in the shadows was lost in the second half. Coltrane went from being a man with a desperate need to survive to an accidental stalker. Natasha Adler was predictable, and therefore scads less interesting than Ilkovic. Her half of the book didn't really mesh well with Ilkovic's, and I wish there would have been a connection beyond similarities with a decades-old photograph. And I figured out 3/4 of the book's twist with 150-200 pages to go, so that sucked.
Sidebar into Are You Effing Kidding Me? Land: the author delved into female pubic hair way more than was necessary. We're talking creepy, borderline obsessive commentary. If Coltrane was with a naked woman, it was brought up multiple times, mentioned as an observation in photos he went through, and was the subject in a couple of his own photos. That's just off the top of my head! Thanks for appreciating the female body and all, but the lady pubic hair references came up so often they were resigned-heavy-sigh inducing.
Now to give remaining kudos where kudos is due. The book's title is clever. Coltrane's assignment to retake his idol's photographs was certainly an homage to the title, and Natasha Alder for sure with her uncanny likeness to an old photo that Coltrane discovers. But Coltrane himself is also a Double Image. He's a man who has been stalked, but he also becomes a stalker. Coltrane's friend/possible girlfriend knows him purely as a brilliant photographer, and is exposed to a whole other version of him when he becomes threatened, becoming a version of the soldiers or mercenaries he'd known in war-torn areas. Coltrane, with his obsessive desire to be like his idol, unfortunately mirrors who Randolph Packard, a famous photographer and Coltrane's idol, used to be.
Overall, this book was worth reading. The pace was decent, and for the most part the characters were interesting. There were a few loose ends that never got tied up, and a few people were predictable, so you'll have to use your imagination, but overall my need to read a thriller was satisfied.
The second half of this book featuring Natasha Adler: 3 stars.
Split the difference, and you get 4 stars (but just barely).
The first half of this story was an adrenaline rush. Absolutely fantastic. A photographer (Mitch Coltrane) being hunted down by a ruthless genocidal maniac due to photos exposing evidence of war crimes was brilliantly done. I felt copious amounts of stress from Ilkovic's actions. The slow agonizing deaths he imposed on people important to Coltrane made me struggle to sleep. I wish the entire novel had been dedicated to the need to outsmart and outrun a madman who had eluded the United Nations. Though I felt relief when that part was over, I was also disappointed that the first half had ended, it was that well written.
But the second half...
The second half felt like a completely different story. Some characters changed, many, like Coltrane, remained the same. The thrill of the chase and fearing who's in the shadows was lost in the second half. Coltrane went from being a man with a desperate need to survive to an accidental stalker. Natasha Adler was predictable, and therefore scads less interesting than Ilkovic. Her half of the book didn't really mesh well with Ilkovic's, and I wish there would have been a connection beyond similarities with a decades-old photograph. And I figured out 3/4 of the book's twist with 150-200 pages to go, so that sucked.
Sidebar into Are You Effing Kidding Me? Land: the author delved into female pubic hair way more than was necessary. We're talking creepy, borderline obsessive commentary. If Coltrane was with a naked woman, it was brought up multiple times, mentioned as an observation in photos he went through, and was the subject in a couple of his own photos. That's just off the top of my head! Thanks for appreciating the female body and all, but the lady pubic hair references came up so often they were resigned-heavy-sigh inducing.
Now to give remaining kudos where kudos is due. The book's title is clever. Coltrane's assignment to retake his idol's photographs was certainly an homage to the title, and Natasha Alder for sure with her uncanny likeness to an old photo that Coltrane discovers. But Coltrane himself is also a Double Image. He's a man who has been stalked, but he also becomes a stalker. Coltrane's friend/possible girlfriend knows him purely as a brilliant photographer, and is exposed to a whole other version of him when he becomes threatened, becoming a version of the soldiers or mercenaries he'd known in war-torn areas. Coltrane, with his obsessive desire to be like his idol, unfortunately mirrors who Randolph Packard, a famous photographer and Coltrane's idol, used to be.
Overall, this book was worth reading. The pace was decent, and for the most part the characters were interesting. There were a few loose ends that never got tied up, and a few people were predictable, so you'll have to use your imagination, but overall my need to read a thriller was satisfied.
March 2, 2023
This is another of those books I got for free - really been hit and miss there.
This book started well, and had a pretty impressive pedigree - written by the man who wrote First Blood and spawned the Rambo series. And the first full part of the story really sank its hooks into me, with our hero Mitch Coltrane exposing war crimes and getting chased by men with guns.
And it lasts maybe one uber-chapter (each chapter is broken down into smaller sub chapters - first time I've ever seen that done), and then Mitch is back home, regretting his life choices and seeking direction.
Everything that comes after that first uber-chapter, I can't say I hated, but I struggled to care about. As others below have said - Double Image feels like two novellas stitched together with no links in between. I admit - I skimmed once I realized how the plot was about to jump the rails onto a completely different track - so I may have missed a connection between the two plots, beyond the main character being the same.
I also found some of the plot decisions to be a little absurd.
I'm sure for thriller fans going into it with the presumption that it's just two short stories starring the same main character, it might be more enjoyable, so add a star. But for me, it just didn't capture my imagination.
This book started well, and had a pretty impressive pedigree - written by the man who wrote First Blood and spawned the Rambo series. And the first full part of the story really sank its hooks into me, with our hero Mitch Coltrane exposing war crimes and getting chased by men with guns.
And it lasts maybe one uber-chapter (each chapter is broken down into smaller sub chapters - first time I've ever seen that done), and then Mitch is back home, regretting his life choices and seeking direction.
Everything that comes after that first uber-chapter, I can't say I hated, but I struggled to care about. As others below have said - Double Image feels like two novellas stitched together with no links in between. I admit - I skimmed once I realized how the plot was about to jump the rails onto a completely different track - so I may have missed a connection between the two plots, beyond the main character being the same.
I also found some of the plot decisions to be a little absurd.
I'm sure for thriller fans going into it with the presumption that it's just two short stories starring the same main character, it might be more enjoyable, so add a star. But for me, it just didn't capture my imagination.
January 5, 2023
Another very good read from David Morrell. With Double Image Morrell intended to create a ‘noir thriller’, and managed very well in my view. The entire novel is written in first person form, where we see everything from the perspective of the novel’s lead character, Mitch Coltrane. That form was a common style in noir movies. The Coltrane character is an award winning professional photographer who has to deal with two different dangerous challenges and mysteries – almost like ‘two novels in one’ (Double Image). That Morell wanted to create a ‘noir’ thriller (popular Hollywood movie thrillers in the 1940s and 1950s – camera-photographer) is clear since the lead character (Coltrane) dwells on the great director Billy Wilder and his noir thriller Sunset Boulevard (1950), when driving along that very iconic road, in search for answers to a mystery. Another famous Billy Wilder noir movie is his 1944 masterpiece Double Indemnity (‘double’ again).
Morrell manages to write in a style similar to how we experience a classical noir movie. Thoughts also go to excellent hard-boiled detective authors like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald. Morrell, who started his career as an English professor at the University of Iowa, knows his business. It’s a novel I can recommend.
Morrell manages to write in a style similar to how we experience a classical noir movie. Thoughts also go to excellent hard-boiled detective authors like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald. Morrell, who started his career as an English professor at the University of Iowa, knows his business. It’s a novel I can recommend.
January 15, 2018
Started this in like december 01 I think and finished it now cuz IM super lazy 😂😂 pretty excellent and beautifully written. Its like Im reading a 5 year story even the book happened at a 2-month Event. Brings me nostalgia thinking about Coltrane’s memories and alot of cliff hangers. Really an excellent Book (Left me still incredibly shaking and sweating at the end) and have never Felt an intense fear and suspense and thriller on a book like that Ever before. Will most likely read some more of David Morells’ books :) ( Btw I find Jennifer one of My favorite characters out of the Book. she is so brave, calm, and so down to earth, adorable, person )
July 5, 2022
Two plotlines centered on Mitch Coltrane, a photojournalist recognized for his superior photo-taking in war zones. First one is about a mass murderer from the Bosnian war convicted of his crimes due in part to photos taken by Mitch; he vows revenge on Mitch and somehow travels around the world stalking him, killing his friends, and tracking his every move until a confrontation in the California desert. Second one is a combination of the films, LAURA, VERTIGO and FATAL ATTRACTION, where Mitch is obsessed with photos of a beautiful silent movie actress who disappeared in the 1920s; he searches for everything about her and finds her granddaughter, now in her 20s, who looks exactly like her. It turns out she is being stalked by someone so Mitch helps her, and they fall in love, but things take a bizarre twist and nothing is as it seems. There is a climax like in VERTIGO, but it is just as unsatisfying - there needed to be more background about the supposed mental illness in the family. Why did the author or publisher combine these two unrelated stories into one long novel? Events take place in December with references to Christmas.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 23, 2019
After reading the Fraternity of the rose I hoped for more out of a Morrell. It is not a bad book: the first 300 pages are enticing. But then the plot falls into a stereotypical treatment of woman that just obscured the thrilling aspect of the novel for me.
The final scene in the house is well-written, but again falls into a stereotypical treatment of women's role in thrillers. The epilogue almost made me puke, I recommend stopping the book before these last three pages.
All in all an okay book. I recommend starting with his masterpieces the Fraternity... and Conjured... before this one.
The final scene in the house is well-written, but again falls into a stereotypical treatment of women's role in thrillers. The epilogue almost made me puke, I recommend stopping the book before these last three pages.
All in all an okay book. I recommend starting with his masterpieces the Fraternity... and Conjured... before this one.
May 26, 2020
2.5 Creí que por ser thriller iba a ser más rápido de leer, digo, sí te atrapa y todo, pero tiene demasiados "giros" que de alguna manera en lugar de despertarte hacen que se pierda el hilo y el interés. Eso, que para mí fueron demasiados enredos que resolver.
No sé que pensar sobre el papel de las mujeres en la novela, irse a los extremos casi siempre resulta en miradas machistas y paternalistas, algo se siente mal, auqnue en teoría no se ofendió a nadie. En fín, no creo que sea mi tipo de libro, pero entretenido está.
No sé que pensar sobre el papel de las mujeres en la novela, irse a los extremos casi siempre resulta en miradas machistas y paternalistas, algo se siente mal, auqnue en teoría no se ofendió a nadie. En fín, no creo que sea mi tipo de libro, pero entretenido está.
January 11, 2018
This book was almost like it was 2 separate books. There was a very thin line that connected the two stories......but I felt when reading it that I had totally stepped into a different book, another time.....was just an interesting layout.......not 100% sure how I felt about the book - this is why this review is difficult to write.......
May 16, 2019
This book is about a man from the war that got out and wants to distract himself for the images in his head. He finds a picture of a women and want to find her but doesnt know where. This is very different from other books and shows a very differnet view of people's minds. It will bring you different feeling but it's a okay book.
October 9, 2023
I’m conflicted on this one, it almost felt like, 2, maybe 3 different books in one. Early on it was really enjoyable, but the whole Tash Adler stuff, while I see how it connected and brought everything together was a bit, I don’t know, unbelievable. It brought what I thought started off as an excellent book down to a good book.
February 27, 2017
Morrell most often known as the Rambo author has written a somewhat ponderous mystery.
Reminiscent of a Chandler story, it's simultaneously too long & not developed enough to warrant the length.
Still a good read with interesting insights into professional photography.
Reminiscent of a Chandler story, it's simultaneously too long & not developed enough to warrant the length.
Still a good read with interesting insights into professional photography.
January 27, 2019
I went from deciding to not finish it to plunging into non-stop action and then halfway through almost giving up again. Then the second half introducing Tash caught me and sent me hurtling to the end. So glad I didn’t give up.
August 8, 2022
Absolute trash.
Written like a terrible 90s straight to video thriller.
Waaaaay too long winded.
Terrible movie style dialogue.... "don't die on me mccoy" is quite literally a line said by the main character from this book.
Terrible trash.
Written like a terrible 90s straight to video thriller.
Waaaaay too long winded.
Terrible movie style dialogue.... "don't die on me mccoy" is quite literally a line said by the main character from this book.
Terrible trash.
June 16, 2020
A decent page turner that featured a major left turn in the middle. I wonder if this was originally two books. I can't say I was rooting wholeheartedly for Coltrane.
July 5, 2021
Read in 1998. Psychological thriller.
July 21, 2023
Not as good as many of his other books. Seemed a bit too improbable, but still had some good action sequences.
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