One of my personal projects this year is going back and finishing some series I started long ago but didn't finish. I read Mr. Mercedes back in 2014, but despite liking it I never got around to reading the rest of the trilogy despite buying the books. Here we go!

Stephen King pays homage to himself as he pairs elements from Misery and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption with one of his stock heroes -- an intelligent teen boy who likes to read and aspires to write -- in a satisfying little thriller about a famous author ratholing unpublished manuscripts (see also, Bag of Bones) and the lengths a fan will go to to read them.

Ostensibly, this is the middle book of the Bill Hodges trilogy, but Bill and his colleagues, Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson, don't really show up until page 157 and barely impact the rest of the story at all. Truly, they could be scraped out of the tale with very little editing, which causes me to entertain a theory that King might have inserted them into an existing (ratholed) or in-progress manuscript when his publisher asked for a quick sequel to Mr. Mercedes. Regardless, this book is obviously biding time until Hodges can have a final confrontation with his true nemesis.

Still, it's hard to dislike Stephen King when he's in the groove, and this book zips right along. ( )

Shit don't mean shit. -Holly ( )

My review of this book can be found on my YouTube Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/q945Aqt6FeA

Enjoy! ( )

Not a bad direction for the trilogy, I really enjoy the turn this series seems to be taking. There was a little too much reflection on the first book for my taste - it some parts it made sense to look back and remind us of the first book but in some parts it just got to be excessive ( )

It took me a while to finish this book, not cause of the book, but due to studying.

Wow, this book had me on the edge of my seat, at times putting it down, and having to walk around the room to catch my breath.
Another brilliantly writing story with the characters of Bill and Holly and Jerome returning to help with another victim of the Mercedes killer (from book I in the trilogy).

Now it is just the small wait for the third in the trilogy to be released on the 7th of July. ( )