In the six years since Bill Hodges and his odd ball team thwarted Brady Hartsfield’s attempt to blow up a concert, Bill and Holly have run the agency Finders Keepers, being official partners rather than boss and employee ever since the case in the novel Finders Keepers. Jerome is taking a semester off from Harvard to work with Habitat for Humanity in Arizona. Bill has even stopped his regular visits to Hartsfield’s hospital room to check in on the status of the recovery. In other words, they are moving on with their lives. Hodges knows from the nurses that mysterious things have been happening around Hartsfield, but despite a creepiness, no one official has suspected that he is faking his mental state.
At the beginning of the novel, Hodges is called in on a case, a murder-suicide, by his old police partner. In theory, everything seems straightforward but something about it feels off to Hodges and Holly. Since the murder-suicide involved a survivor of the City-Center event, Hodges naturally wonders if there is something more to it, or if this simply more collateral damage from that night eight years before. Holly also finds a Zappit in the home, a tablet like gaming device from a failed company. It seems like an odd thing for an almost 80 year old woman to have so this leads Holly and Bill to do some digging.
While it might take Hodges and his team a while to find connections beyond vague inklings, King does not waste time, and quickly lets the reader into Brady’s perspective, and while his body is useless to him, he certainly has developed other abilities, and is very much aware of everything that is going on around him. He has used those abilities to set another potential catastrophe into motion, one that even has the potential to keep going without his influence once it is rolling.
Once Hodges and Holly get more of a grasp on what is going on, it is once again a race against time, and there are two clocks counting down: Hartsfield’s plan and Bill’s health. Bill has finally gone in for a check in about his stomach problems, and the results are not good.
While the first two novels in the series were more straight mysteries, this novel is back in classic King territory – supernatural abilities such as telekinesis and mind control. In the first novel, King had Jerome do a bit where he would pretend to speak in an almost minstrel like accent, and fortunately, that only happens once or twice in this novel because it feels so uncomfortable to have a white author writing his black character speaking like that, even if it is in a joking manner.
King’s endings are always tighter in his mysteries and that is also the case here. Overall, while I wouldn’t list the Bill Hodges trilogy among my favorite King pieces, they are solid, and if you like King, you will enjoy yourself with this one. It was a fitting conclusion, and since even the second novel of this trilogy tangentially related to the Mercedes Killer, it makes sense that King planned to have him be the end as well as the beginning.