Never Flinch is a Holly Gibney novel, the fifth King has written, though only the second where she is a leading character. Gibney, who shined as a supporting player in the Bill Hodges trilogy and The Outsider, has had a rougher time of it in her starring roles. Holly, who survived a childhood under her oppressive mother’s thumb to become an ace private investigator, is the kind of character audiences instinctively root for, but King’s handling of her has not always been the best. Her use of childish words like “poopy” can be hard to take, for instance.
This book finds Holly’s attention split between two cases. In the first, Holly’s police detective friend Isabelle Jaynes is trying to track down a serial killer apparently set off by the death in prison of a man falsely convicted of possessing child pornography. (He was framed by a co-worker, and if you think that sounds like a lot of effort to get back at someone who beat you out for a promotion, buckle up.) The killer publishes a letter claiming that instead of avenging the death by killing the guilty, he will kill the innocent so that the guilty can feel the cost of their actions. At each murder, he leaves the name of someone who contributed to the conviction, mainly the jurors, the judge, and the overly-ambitious prosecutor.
While Holly can’t help try her hand at finding the killer, it’s not actually her job. Her job is to protect feminist author Kate McKay as she conducts a nationwide lecture tour. McKay and her assistant have been targeted by a persistent stalker who seems to be escalating as they make their way across the country. McKay, who doesn’t seem to say anything that wasn’t being said 50 years ago, is somehow just that controversial. McKay is also, in King’s writing, kind of obnoxious, and doesn’t take Holly’s security precautions seriously.
Anyone who has ever read crime fiction at all knows that these two cases are going to converge at some point, and thankfully King doesn’t hide the ball on that, thankfully. However, he does labor mightily trying to contrive reasons for all his characters to be in the same place at the same time. The book culminates in a denouement literally laid out in a timeline, cutting back and forth between the crazy stalker, the spiraling serial killer, the auditorium anxiously awaiting Kate’s feminist lecture, a soul singer rehearsing for her comeback tour, and, of all things, a Police vs. Firemen charity softball game.
Let’s talk about those last two. The soul singer is Sista Bessie, and if you’re already worried that Stephen King might not be the author you want in charge of a character named Sista Bessie, you’re right on the money. Sista Bessie’s role in the book is basically just to give Holly’s friends the Robinson siblings (poet Barbara and writer Jerome) something to do while Holly is on the road playing bodyguard. (They’re fans who improbably both wind up working for the singer.) King is inconsistent in describing Bessie’s level of fame, but basically she’s a bit like Mavis Staples. Which makes it especially egregious that King has her agree to sing the National Anthem at the Police vs. Firemen softball game (where, incredibly, Isabelle Jaynes is schedule to pitch for the PD despite actively working a case involving multiple murders.) King never once seems to consider that it might be unlikely for a Black, female singer to sing the National Anthem at a cop event.
It’s one of just many inexplicable choices King makes in Never Flinch. Midway through the novel, two characters die for a seemingly obvious reason that could do a lot to ramp up the tension in the plot. However, for no reason that ever becomes clear, King immediately reverses course, having the characters die for a completely unrelated reason that does nothing to advance the story at all. It’s maddening. The entire charity softball game is essentially an attempt at levity that falls completely flat, to the point that even within the book King has characters calling out how absurd it is that this game is taking place with a serial killer on the loose, never mind that it’s taking place with the lead detective being forced to pitch.
King is, of course, mostly thought of as a horror writer. Never Flinch, though containing horrific things, is a crime novel. Though King has written quite a few crime novels, Never Flinch feels like a fumbling first effort. King treats certain plot points as though they are stunning revelations, when most astute readers of the genre will have already reached the conclusion themselves. He stunts his own premise by neglecting the human toll of the killings, never granting us access to the loved ones of the victims or to the lives of the people having others killed in their name. Most egregiously, he undercuts Holly’s prowess as an investigator by hinging the whole plot on her being incapable of making a connection that the reader can hardly believe she would miss.
I say all this as a major fan of Stephen King, and even a pretty big fan of the other Holly Gibney books. Never Flinch is a mess. It’s full of tin-eared dialogue, inconsistencies, and absurdities. It was a massive disappointment.