Finders Keepers by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Perhaps you have heard of Stephen King. He’s had a few books published.
Finders Keepers is the second book in his Bill Hodges trilogy, a thriller in which a high school senior unwittingly faces off against a quite-mad man freshly released after a long sting in prison.
Hodges doesn’t actually appear until about a quarter of the way into the story. Instead the reader is taken back to 1978 where a young Irish man with unusually red lips leads a home invasion of a reclusive author, making off with a load of cash and a collection of notebooks containing work the author has been writing since his alleged retirement years earlier. The young man, Morris Bellamy, is a fan and as King himself once pointed out, fan is short for fanatic and Bellamy is very much a fanatic about the characters the author John Rothstein has created, to the point where he perhaps finds them more real than, well, real people.
When the story jumps forward to the present, Bellamy is just being released from prison, having served 30+ years for a rape conviction. He has spent his incarceration patiently waiting for his release, knowing the stash of loot form Rothstein’s home–cash, but more importantly, dozens of notebooks filled with writing the author has worked on since his alleged retirement–is safely stored in a trunk buried in the woods near his old house. Unfortunately for Bellamy, Peter Saubers, the aforementioned high school senior, has discovered the trunk, used the money to help his family and taken the notebooks, planning to sell them.
The remainder of the story is a series of unfortunate events for Saubers, as Bellamy closes in on the teen, willing to do anything it takes to get back the notebooks he sees as rightfully his. Hodges, along with Holly and Jerome from Mr. Mercedes, enter into the story to aid Saubers before it’s too late.
King effortlessly ratchets up the tension after spending a good while drawing the reader in and while characters sometimes connect the dots a little too easily (I wish I was half as good at making connections as these people), he never cheats. There is no sleight of hand here, just expert play with the cards that have been dealt.
King also sets up the third and final book of the trilogy by having Hodges make regular visits to the hospital where Brady Hartsfield, the Mr. Mercedes killer of the first novel, now resides. It seems that Brady may not be quite as incapacitated as his brain trauma would suggest. Here King broadly hints at more familiar territory, suggesting abilities that go beyond the merely normal.
While the book ends with a set-up for the final volume, the story of Finders Keepers is self-contained and can be enjoyed without having read Mr. Mercedes. It’s a terrific tale of suspense filled with characters that King brings alive with his usual expertise.
Recommended.
