The Outsider (2018) by Stephen King: 40-year-old Terry Maitland is a beloved high-school teacher and Little League coach in the small Oklahoma town of Flint City. But overwhelming witness, fingerprint, and DNA evidence suggest that he brutally raped and murdered an eleven-year-old boy.
So Detective Ralph Anderson makes the call to arrest him. Because Anderson is freaked out by the fact that his own son played Little League, Anderson decides to arrest Maitland in as public and humiliating a way as possible -- during a Little League game, with the stands packed.
A problem soon develops, however, as Maitland's lawyer and his own investigator discover: equally overwhelming evidence shows that Maitland was nowhere near Flint City at the time of the rape and murder.
Does Maitland have an accomplice? Did he try to commit the perfect crime? But if he tried to commit the perfect crime, why did he go out of his way to talk to witnesses before and after the murder while wearing a blood-soaked shirt? Why do the plethora of fingerprints and bloodstains suggest that he went out of his way to leave physical proof of his crime?
So begins The Outsider, Stephen King's new novel. This one is in many ways like a very detailed X-Files episode. No Mulder and Scully, but halfway through the novel Holly Gibney of King's Bill Hodges Trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch) will be called upon to fill the role of an outside investigator with experience when it comes to the paranormal.
For King the novel is pretty tight (it's 500 pages, so yeah, maybe there could be some trimming -- though I really only wished for more, not less). The details of the investigation are ably portrayed. The characterization is superb. It's a mash-up of the supernatural and the police procedural that works really well, perhaps in part because King practiced with End of Watch.
The novel also examines how good police can make catastrophic mistakes, as Ralph Anderson does with that initial public arrest. Anderson is the protagonist here, a good cop faced with something beyond his normal experience. Thankfully, brave, extremely intelligent Holly is there, a most unlikely Van Helsing, but an effective one. Her A/V presentation on what kind of thing they're facing is a miniature masterpiece of horror laced with unlikely comedy that rapidly turns to dread.
There are certainly derivative elements -- there are always in King, a master of synthesis far more than thesis. But the characterization and the pacing keep things going, along with some new (for King) locales. The climax is a dandy, another dark descent made by unlikely heroes in service of the light. Highly recommended.
End of Watch (Bill Hodges #3) (2016) by Stephen King: Intrepid but decidedly unhealthy retired police detective Bill Hodges returns in this conclusion to a trilogy that began in Mr. Mercedes and continued in Finders Keepers. Still set in a never-named U.S. Rust Belt city somewhere on one of the Eastern Great Lakes, End of Watch pits Hodges against the seemingly brain-damaged spree killer of Mr. Mercedes.
King manages to pull off something that looked a bit dodgy when it first became manifest in Finders Keepers -- namely, the introduction of the paranormal into the world of Bill Hodges. Brady Hartsfield, the Mercedes Killer of the first Hodges novel, was left with a brain made of mush at the climax of Mr. Mercedes. Hodges' soon-to-be-partner-in-private-detection, Holly Gibney, bonked Hartsfield on the head just before he could blow up an auditorium filled with thousands of boy-band-loving teenagers.
However, experimental drugs and the vagaries of the brain have slowly granted Hartsfield mental powers. He fakes being non compos mentis to avoid prosecution for his crimes while he gains strength and lethality.
Hartsfield is a return to one of King's favourite types, the Outsider with Wild Talents. Unfortunately, this psychic wants to kill people -- as many of them as possible. King combines a quasi-scientific mind-control premise that stretches back to at least Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Parasite" with an antagonist who's one of Thomas Harris' serial-killing grotesques writ larger and with super-powers.
Brady Hartsfield doesn't just want to kill people -- he wants to find ways to trick them into killing themselves. And with his powers, he now can. King's heroes have to engage Hartsfield on multiple fronts to stop him, from the Internet to the real world to the nebulous world of the mind.
Somehow, it all works. Even the bit where a character survives a gunshot because of something in her pocket. Well, OK, that doesn't quite work.
Otherwise, End of Watch works in part because Bill Hodges and Holly Gibney are carefully drawn characters. Hartsfield is a terrible, pitiful antagonist. There's also an immensely clever plot device involving video games and hypnotism. And there's a snowstormy climax that recalls the closing chapters of The Shining. In terms of tension and pleasure of reading, Mr. Mercedes remains the best of the Hodges trilogy, but End of Watch runs a close second. Highly recommended.
Finders Keepers by Stephen King (2015): The year is 2014 and the mismatched detectives of last year's Mr. Mercedes are back in a new mystery set three years after the conclusion of that novel -- and, as a sub-plot, there's also an odd continuation of the events of the previous novel that seems to be setting up the events of the third novel.
Our protagonist, retired police detective Bill Hodges, continues to run his private detective agency with the help of hyper-intelligent, socially challenged Holly Gibney, with an occasional assist from now-college-student Jerome Robinson. But the scene of carnage that began Mr. Mercedes has helped deliver another case. I'll let you find out how. Suffice it to say that injury and the economic collapse of 2008 will soon put a young man on a collision course with an unusual treasure buried near his house since the late 1970's. And one collision will set off many others.
This is really an odd novel, at least for King. We spend a lot of time with that kid -- Pete Saubers -- and his economically wounded family. And we spend a lot of time learning about that treasure and the terrible man who buried it. But the money in that treasure -- about $30,000 in cash -- is the smallest portion of the booty.
See, back in the late 1970's, a lousy guy in his early 20's was obsessed with a novelist named John Rothstein, who in King's world combines the attributes of John Updike, J.D. Salinger, and Philip Roth. In the 1950's and 1960's, Rothstein wrote a trilogy of novels subsequently dubbed The Runner Trilogy. Those novels featured a protagonist who seems to combine the personality traits of Updike's Rabbit Angstrom and Salinger's Holden Caulfield.
One day in the 1960's, Rothstein stopped publishing and essentially became a hermit overnight on a farm outside a small New England town. Years later, a young reader (and aspiring writer) named Morris Bellamy went looking for Rothstein. He told his two accomplices that they were looking for money. But Bellamy was really looking for Rothstein's unpublished work. And he found it. And, while fleeing from the police, buried it. Arrested and jailed for more than 30 years for a crime unconnected to the Rothstein home invasion, Bellamy finally gets out and goes looking for that unpublished work. But it isn't there -- Pete Saubers dug it up.
Morris Bellamy is one of King's more interesting antagonists, a self-pitying fan who believes he has more right to his favourite author's work than that author. The characterizations of the other characters are all solid, especially of the slowly blossoming Holly Gibney and the intelligent, thoughtful Pete Saubers, whose love of reading is ignited by the contents of that box of treasure. There's not a huge amount of detection in this second Bill Hodges volume, but the material on Rothstein, and on the used book trade (seriously), is highly enjoyable. Recommended, though keep in mind this is a mystery-thriller (mostly) and not a horror novel.
