One of the few remaining Stephen King novels I’d not yet read, and honestly one of the ones I barely had any consciousness of whatsoever. The cover and the description make it sound way way way different than the actual novel is. This is not noir or anything close to it. It all takes place in a newspaper work room as two old timer newspaper men in a small town tell a story of a body found on the beach some 25 years earlier to an intern. The body likely met an untimely and possibly violent end, but this book is a mystery disguised as a puzzle. And that’s the whole point. They talk in different ways about how sometimes stories seems like puzzles, wherein all the tools and clues necessary to resolve the unknown are present and available, but in many cases, if not most cases in life, we are dealing with a mystery in which something is unknown, including the limits and borders of the unknown. It’s interesting of course because they argue that this is what makes for unsatisfying newspaper stories, and of course what makes for satisfying novels and fiction, a curiosity explored, but hardly ever resolved. It’s not much of a novel, but it’s good at doing the thing it wants to do, and creates the exact kind of thing it seems to want to. It doesn’t resolve anything, and it doesn’t step on any toes in the process. It of course would be more satisfying as part of a collection.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Colorado-Kid-Hard-Case-Crime/dp/1789091551/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+colorado+kid&qid=1571938429&s=books&sr=1-1)