Book #26: Finders Keepers by Stephen King
Finders Keepers by Stephen King
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is the second book in a trilogy involving the character Bill Hodges, who first appeared in "Mr Mercedes". The main plot involves a character called Morris killing an author in 1978, and being sent too jail, but not before he stole the author's manuscripts for a series of books and buried them.
In the present, another character, Pete finds the manuscripts, and takes them, but not long before Morris, now out of prison, decides to come looking for them.
At first, I was keen to see what happened next. The first part of the book required a lot of attention, as it jumped back and forth a lot between the past and present, setting up the scene, and going into a lot of detail (for example, Morris' experiences in prison).
However, this backstory takes up about a third of the book, and Bill Hodges doesn't even appear until part 2. When he does, he starts to feel like a side character, and it almost feels like he was grafted into the story as an afterthought (he has no involvement in the main storyline until about half way through).
This definitely is not one of my favourite Stephen King books, as I found the pacing really slow, as it moved towards an inevitable conclusion, while the book slowly established how Morris found out what the reader already knew about the manuscripts. The main plot felt almost like a case of "seen it all before".
The novel does reference the events of Mr Mercedes, and even brings back in the book's villain, Brady Hartsfield at the end. The novel makes it quite apparent that he will feature more prominently in the final book in the trilogy, "End of Watch", but I was still unsure what the purpose of including this book was. It felt entirely skippable, although I will have to see if the third book continues any of the plot threads from this one.
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