Finders Keepers Archives - DaneCobain.com

Title: End of Watch

Author: Stephen King

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 372

Rating: 3.75*/5

Stephen King – End of Watch

This book is the third and final book in the Bill Hodges trilogy, and it came as something of a relief. I loved Mr. Mercedes, the first book, but Finders Keepers (the second one) wasn’t up to the same standard. This one isn’t as good as Mr. Mercedes either, but it’s still pretty good, and I did like how you get to learn more about some of the characters. The whole gang is here, from notorious domestic terrorist Brady Hartsfield to Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson.

It’s also interesting to see how Hartsfield’s ostensibly psychic powers develop and how he successfully uses suicide as a weapon. On the downside, it just didn’t feel quite right having all of these psychic powers and astral projection when the first book was basically a hardboiled crime thriller. Adding all of these other elements may be more King, but it just doesn’t seem to ring true to what the first book attempted to do. But maybe I’m only saying that because I think it kind of devalues Mr. Mercedes, which I gave 5/5 to.

There’s also the fact that I already knew how the entire trilogy was going to end from the very first book, purely because of the title of this one. When it finally happened, it felt like something of an anticlimax. The same is true with the final confrontation between Hodges and Hartsfield, which almost felt rushed after how much the reader has gone through to get there. Unless you’re a hardcore King fan who wants to read every single one of his releases, I’d suggest just reading Mr. Mercedes and then calling it quits.

I also had a few problems with King’s representations of tech, and he even says in his afterword that he’s changed some of the details to suit the story. I kept unsuspending my disbelief because stuff was happening that just isn’t possible. There was also a character who went to visit Hartsfield when I don’t think that she, as a person, would have done it. But if she didn’t, the entire book wouldn’t have happened. Bummer.

Stephen King Quote

Click here to buy End of Watch.

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Stephen King – Finders Keepers | Review

Title: Finders Keepers

Author: Stephen King

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 375

Rating: 3.5*/5

Stephen King – Finders Keepers

This book was just okay, and that’s a shame. It definitely feels like one of King’s duds for me, but it’s the second book in his Bill Hodges trilogy and the first book, Mr. Mercedes, got five stars from me. That said, I was chatting to someone on YouTube the other day about it and they said that the third is good again and that they thought it might have worked better as a duology.

Part of the reason for that is that this one could function as a standalone. Sure, there are a few bits here and there that do reference the first book (and presumably the third), but they could easily have been added to books one and three because there’s not much there. Most of it follows a completely different story which somehow felt familiar to me, as though I’d read it before. I even checked my Goodreads account to make sure that I wasn’t accidentally re-reading something.

Basically, a dude kills a writer and steals a bunch of money and some notebooks with his unpublished work in. Then he buries it and gets jailed for a different crime. Then some kid finds them all and he gets let out of jail. That takes us to about two thirds of the way through the book, a hell of a lot of setup for an unsatisfying ending.

Stephen King

One strange thing about my experience of this book is that it felt like the name was following me everywhere. I read it while spending some time in Oxford as part of a short break away and there was an estate agents there called “Finders Keepers” with their signs outside the front of all of the different houses that they were representing.

Sometimes I read Stephen King books and struggle to comprehend how it was written. That wasn’t the case with this one because it just felt like a bog standard mass market release. Sure, you could tell it was King from his writing style, but it also felt a bit like someone trying to imitate him. It just didn’t have any of that classic King magic.