Mr. Mercedes - Stephen King

Title: Mr Mercedes (Bill Hodges #1)
Author: Stephen King
Genre: Suspense
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 449
Date read: August 2017

A cat-and-mouse suspense thriller featuring Bill Hodges, a retired cop who is tormented by 'the Mercedes massacre', a case he never solved. Brady Hartsfield, perpetrator of that notorious crime, has sent Hodges a taunting letter. Now he's preparing to kill again. Each starts to close in on the other in a mega-stakes race against time.


I love how Stephen King doesn't stick to just one or two genres, but seems to write a little bit of just about everything. This is his first foray into crime fiction (that I've read), and I thought he did it really, really well! Especially the last few chapters had me sitting on the edge of my seat and biting my nails (figuratively, anyway). A definite page-turner! And fortunately one with a proper ending, despite it being the first in a trilogy... although I'm still going to go straight ahead with the next book anyway.

I really liked Bill, Janey, Holly and Jerome and am pleased that we'll get to see at least most of them in the next books as well.

Finders Keepers - Stephen King

Title: Finders Keepers (Bill Hodges #2)
Author: Stephen King
Genre: Suspense
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 545
Date read: September, 2017

“Wake up, genius.” So begins King’s instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, an iconic author who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn’t published a book for decades. Morris Bellamy is livid, not just because Rothstein has stopped providing books, but because the nonconformist Jimmy Gold has sold out for a career in advertising. Morris kills Rothstein and empties his safe of cash, yes, but the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel.

Morris hides the money and the notebooks, and then he is locked away for another crime. Decades later, a boy named Pete Saubers finds the treasure, and now it is Pete and his family that Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson must rescue from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris when he’s released from prison after thirty-five years.


Not quite as good as the first book in the series, but pretty close! I even forgave it its copious use of foreshadowing in the first part (one of my biggest literary pet peeves. It's such a cheap trick and I KNOW Stephen King is better than that!) as the rest of the book more than made up for it. I was glad to see Hodges, Holly and Jerome back, although all three of them played much smaller parts in this book than I had expected them too.

Still, it kept me on the edge of my seat and was most definitely a page-turner, and though the last few chapters gave me a bit of pause as to the direction Stephen King's going to take the last book, I'm still moving straight on to that one too.