Stephen King introduced us to Bill Hodges in Mr. Mercedes, where the retired detective had found himself slipping further and further into ennui, until he received a taunting letter from a person claiming to be the Mercedes killer, a madman who had driven his car into a crowd six years prior killing 8 and injuring dozens more. Finders Keepers brings us back into Bill Hodges’ life, where he works with Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson as private investigators, mostly catching bail-jumpers. Until Jerome’s little sister brings in a distraught friend who claims her older brother is in big trouble, and will Bill & associates please help?
Rewind. John Rothstein is a famous author who retired his fan-favorite character Jimmy Gold decades ago and hasn’t published since. Morris Bellamy is Jimmy Gold’s biggest fan, and furious that his hero was given such an unsatisfactory ending. So, as all perfectly sane people do, he murders Rothstein and steals his notebooks and all the cash in his safe, confident that he can make even more money from the sale of all those unpublished Jimmy Gold stories. But before he can fence the notebooks, he’s jailed for an unrelated crime, and the notebooks (and the $20,000) are left buried under a tree behind his mother’s house.
Fast forward. Pete Stauber’s dad was one of the people badly injured by the Mercedes Killer, and between medical bills and the recession things are tense at home. Until, that is, Pete finds literal buried treasure. Pete anonymously sends cash to his family over the next few years, but when the money runs out he realizes he has to try to sell a notebook. Unfortunately for him, the man he chooses is the same man Morris approached a few decades back, who knows exactly where those books came from and what was done to get them. And even worse, Morris has finally been granted parole, and is on his way back to collect what’s his.
Finders Keepers is a tense story that keeps you hoping that the characters will make good decisions and cringing when they inevitably don’t. (Pete, that is. Bill, Holly, and Jerome do pretty well.) Morris is just an awful person, and every chapter you spend inside his head makes you want to take a bath after. Stephen King is almost too good at writing man as the monster. If you’ve wanted to try out Stephen King but felt his horror novels might be too much, the Bill Hodges trilogy might be your way in. King doesn’t shy away from violence, but there is less of it, and the trilogy doesn’t have the creeping dread that inhabits Salem’s Lot, for example. Bill, Holly, and Jerome are great characters, and you grow to really love Pete over the story. Even when you want to shake him.