January 1, 2018

When the corpse of a sexually assaulted 11-year-old boy is found, fingerprint evidence and eyewitness accounts implicate upstanding citizen Terry Maitland, an English teacher, Little League coach, and father. He's got an alibi, but Det. Ralph Anderson soon has DNA evidence, and the investigation ratchets up to some scarily King-worthy puzzles.

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March 19, 2018
MWA Grand Master King wraps a wild weird tale inside a police procedural in this nicely executed extension of his Bill Hodges detective trilogy (begun with 2014’s Mr. Mercedes). Det. Ralph Anderson of the Flint City, Okla., police force appears to have beloved youth baseball league coach Terry Maitland dead to rights when he publicly arrests him for the grisly murder of an 11-year-old boy, since the crime scene is covered with Terry’s
fingerprints and DNA. Only one problem: at the time of the murder Terry was attending a teachers’ conference in a distant city, where he was caught clearly on videotape. The case’s contradictory evidence compels Anderson and officials associated with it to team up with Holly Gibney (the deceased Hodges’s former assistant) to solve it. What begins as a manhunt for an unlikely doppelgänger takes an uncanny turn into the supernatural. King’s skillful use of criminal forensics helps to ground his tale in a believable clinical reality where the horrors stand out in sharp relief. Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill.

March 15, 2018
Horrormeister King (End of Watch, 2016, etc.) serves up a juicy tale that plays at the forefront of our current phobias, setting a police procedural among the creepiest depths of the supernatural.If you're a little squeamish about worms, you're really not going to like them after accompanying King through his latest bit of mayhem. Early on, Ralph Anderson, a detective in the leafy Midwestern burg of Flint City, is forced to take on the unpleasant task of busting Terry Maitland, a popular teacher and Little League coach and solid citizen, after evidence links him to the most unpleasant violation and then murder of a young boy: "His throat was just gone," says the man who found the body. "Nothing there but a red hole. His bluejeans and underpants were pulled down to his ankles, and I saw something...." Maitland protests his innocence, even as DNA points the way toward an open-and-shut case, all the way up to the point where he leaves the stage--and it doesn't help Anderson's world-weariness when the evil doesn't stop once Terry's in the ground. Natch, there's a malevolent presence abroad, one that, after taking a few hundred pages to ferret out, will remind readers of King's early novel It. Snakes, guns, metempsychosis, gangbangers, possessed cops, side tours to jerkwater Texas towns, all figure in King's concoction, a bloodily Dantean denunciation of pedophilia. King skillfully works in references to current events (Black Lives Matter) and long-standing memes (getting plowed into by a runaway car), and he's at his best, as always, when he's painting a portrait worthy of Brueghel of the ordinary gone awry: "June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack." Indeed, but overturned lasagna pales in messiness compared to when the evil entity's head caves in "as if it had been made of papier-mâché rather than bone." And then there are those worms. Yuck.Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King's boundless legion of fans.

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Starred review from June 25, 2018
Reader Patton’s steady, realistic narration adds a strong element of credibility to King’s supernatural police procedural, in which a small-town detective is faced with an apparently impossible crime. The worst day in the life of Flint City, Okla., detective Ralph Anderson is when he arrests popular Little League baseball coach Terry Maitland for the murder of a young boy. The coach’s fingerprints and DNA are all over the crime scene, but he has an ironclad alibi: he was at a convention in another city and has witnesses and even video footage to prove it. Subsequent events suggest the presence of an otherworldly serial killer whom Anderson and his associates set out to find and destroy. Joining them is Holly Gibney, a fascinating character from the author’s Bill Hodges crime trilogy. Brilliantly deductive, neurotic, and obsessively determined, she quickly takes over the novel, and Patton provides her with an edgy, breathless, and impatient voice that, at times, is an almost crooning stream-of-consciousness. Patton’s approach for Anderson and his other associates is more conventional: they speak in fittingly tough, hardboiled tones. As for the voice of the monstrous outsider, it is surprisingly conversational and educated, with just a hint of chilling playfulness. This audiobook demonstrates King’s ability to make even the most fantastic story believable and poignant, and Patton’s unswerving talent for making fiction feel real. A Scribner hardcover.

April 1, 2018

When a young boy's mutilated corpse is found in a public park, the evidence points to Little League coach and high school English teacher Terry Maitland. Despite his vehement claims of innocence, witnesses put him at the scene of the crime, and his fingerprints and DNA are found all over the murder scene. The police have an airtight case, except that other witnesses and video also confirm Terry's alibi: that he was miles away at a teacher's convention on the night of the murder. For Det. Ralph Anderson, it is simultaneously the most straightforward and frustrating case of his career. How can a man be in two places at once? After the success of his "Bill Hodges" series and Sleeping Beauties, coauthored with his son Owen, King's latest feels somewhat flat and predictable. Followers of the horror master's career will likely guess the outcome early on. Usually a maestro of character development, King casts his novel with tired and one-dimensional figures, including Anderson, whose emotional development is disappointingly nonexistent. An extended cameo from a favorite past King character does little to increase the enjoyment. VERDICT King's fans may be dispirited by this latest disappointing thriller; however, his name alone will ensure it flies off the shelves. [See Prepub Alert, 12/1/17.]--Tyler Hixson, Brooklyn P.L.

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