Finders Keepers

King of Thrillers

The echoes of his last book, Revival  (reviewed here in February this year) were still booming in the mind, when out comes another Stephen King Book, Finders Keepers.

This  is a sequel to his terrific thriller, Mr Mercedes (2014), and is intended to be a trilogy starring the retired detective Bill Hodges. He was pulled out of mind-numbing boredom by the horrific incident in which a man driving a Mercedes deliberately ran over a queue of poor job seekers—an act of astounding cruelty and open challenge to Hodges.

The old cop, still sharp though out of shape, had tracked down the killer, Brady Hartsfield, and thwarted just in time his plan to blow up a concert hall packed with music lovers, with the help of his friends Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson (his mimicry of black working class speech is hilarious!), who reappear in the second book. Hodges now runs an agency called Finders Keepers with the still emotionally fragile but recovering Holly as his computer wiz assistant.  Brady Hartsfield is still alive, but comatose. There’s no doubt that he will cause mayhem in the next book titled The Suicide Prince.

King takes the crazy fan idea from his own book Misery, in which a psycho reader Annie Wilkes, unhappy with the ending of her favourite writer Paul Sheldon’s latest book, forces him to write another by imprisoning him and chopping off his body parts to terrorize him. In Finders Keepers, there’s the nutty reader Morris Bellamy, who kills a celebrity writer John Rothstein, because he felt let down by the character of Jimmy Gold he had written about. (“You created one of the greatest characters in American literature, then shit on him... A man who could do that doesn’t deserve to live,” he screams, before shooting the writer.)

In Rothstein’s safe, he finds money and notebooks that point to two more Gold novels. An excited Bellamy steals the contents of the safe, kills his accomplices and buries the trunk containing the books and money in a deserted spot, hoping to retrieve them when the media and cop bedlam over the murder cools off.

Bellamy covers up the murder of the writer very cleverly, but unfortunately for him, he gets arrested and convicted for rape. Nealy thirty years later, the trunk is found by another young book lover Pete Saubers, whose family is going through a grave financial crisis because his father was incapacitated in the Mercedes incident.

Pete sends money in small installments to his family anonymously, but is fascinated by Rothstein’s writing. When the money runs out, he tries to sell the notebooks to an unscrupulous rare books dealer, Drew Halliday. He doesn’t know that Drew used to be a friend of Bellamy, and that the killer is out of prison. Bellamy wants the money to start over, but more than that he is desperate to get his hands on the notebooks to find out what happened to the fictional character he idolized.

Pete gets into deep trouble, which only his kid sister understands. She asks Hodges for help, and the chase begins to stop Bellamy from going on a rampage—since he has little to lose.

In typical King fashion, the tension and suspense builds up gradually and moves towards an action-packed climax. In spite of two gut-churning murders, King writes about the Saubers family with a great deal of warmth.  This is a book Stephen King fans will like--though out of his recent output, 22/11/63, the time travelling story about the Kennedy assassination remains unbeatable.

Finders Keepers 

by Stephen King

Published by Scribner

Pages 448