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Mr. Mercedes reviews

edited May 2014 in General news
This discussion was created from comments split from: Mr. Mercedes.

Comments

  • The first review, from Publishers Weekly, is out.

    In this suspenseful crime thriller from megaseller King (Doctor Sleep), ex-detective Bill Hodges is settling badly into his retirement. Then he receives a taunting letter from someone who claims to be the Mercedes Killer—the media's name for the hit-and-run driver who, a year earlier, deliberately plowed a stolen car into a crowd at a job fair, killing eight and maiming 15. Hoping to wrap up the unsolved case, Hodges follows the letter writer to an anonymous social media chat site, inaugurating a game of cat and mouse with escalating stakes and potentially fatal consequences. Bill's antagonist is Brady Hartsfield, a sociopath who is skilled in computers and electronics and who—with a touch of brilliant irony—also operates the neighborhood ice cream truck. Coincidence and luck figure significantly in the final outcome, but King excels in his disturbing portrait of Brady, a genuine monster in ordinary human form who gives new meaning to the phrase "the banality of evil." Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents. (June)

  • edited April 2014

    And now for the Booklist review: 

     King's interest in crime fiction was evident from his work for the Hard Case Crime imprint—The Colorado Kid (2005) and Joyland (2013)—but this is the most straight-up mystery-thriller of his career. Retired Detective Bill Hodges is overweight, directionless, and toying with the idea of ending it all when he receives a jeering letter from the Mercedes Killer, who ran down 23 people with a stolen car but evaded Hodges' capture. With the help of a 17-year-old neighbor and one victim's sister (who, in proper gumshoe style, Hodges quickly beds), Hodges begins to play cat-and-mouse with the killer through a chat site called Under Debbie's Blue Umbrella. Hodges' POV alternates with that of the troubled murderer, a Norman Bates–like ice-cream-truck driver named Brady Hartfield. Both Hodges and Hartfield make mistakes, big ones, leaving this a compelling, small-scale slugfest that plays out in cheery suburban settings. This exists outside of the usual Kingverse (Pennywise the Clown is referred to as fictive); add that to the atypical present-tense prose, and this feels pretty darn fresh. Big, smashing climax, too. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: No need to rev the engine here; this baby will rocket itself out of libraries with a loud squeal of the tires. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

  •  

    And now, the Kirkus review. (probable spoilers)

     

    In his latest suspenser, the prolific King (Joyland, 2013, etc.) returns to the theme of the scary car—except this one has a scary driver who’s as loony but logical unto himself as old Jack Torrance from The Shining.

    It’s an utterly American setup: Over here is a line of dispirited people waiting to get into a job fair, and over there is a psycho licking his chops at the easy target they present; he aims a car into the crowd and mows down a bunch of innocents, killing eight and hurting many more. The car isn’t his. The malice most certainly is, and it’s up to world-weary ex-cop Bill Hodges to pull himself up from depression and figure out the identity of the author of that heinous act. That author offers help: He sends sometimes-taunting, sometimes–sympathy-courting notes explaining his actions. (“I must say I exceeded my own wildest expectations,” he crows in one, while in another he mourns, “I grew up in a physically and sexually abusive household.”) With a cadre of investigators in tow, Hodges sets out to avert what is certain to be an even greater trauma, for the object of his cat-and-mouse quest has much larger ambitions, this time involving a fireworks show worthy of Fight Club. And that’s not his only crime: He's illegally downloaded “the whole Anarchist Cookbook from BitTorrent,” and copyright theft just may be the ultimate evil in the King moral universe. King’s familiar themes are all here: There's craziness in spades and plenty of alcohol and even a carnival, King being perhaps the most accomplished coulrophobe at work today. The storyline is vintage King, too: In the battle of good and evil, good may prevail—but never before evil has caused a whole lot of mayhem.

    The scariest thing of all is to imagine King writing a happy children’s book. This isn’t it: It’s nicely dark, never predictable and altogether entertaining.

  • Library Journal's review to finish off the pre-publication stuff.  Note:  SPOILERS and the review is much more negative than the rest.

    After having written over 50 horror, sf/fantasy, and suspense novels,
    King pens his first hard-boiled detective thriller. A maniac accelerates
    a Mercedes into hundreds of unemployed applicants lined up at a job
    fair—killing eight and wounding 15. Det. Bill Hodges, a streetwise
    inspector, searches unsuccessfully for the Mercedes killer. After he
    retires, the bored detective receives a crazed note from the lunatic
    driver, Brady Hartfield, who promises to strike again in an even more
    diabolical manner. Hodges's talented and eccentric assistants unravel
    Brady's convoluted computer records revealing when he intends to drive a
    wheelchair strapped with eplosives into a concert arena jam-packed with
    screaming teenyboppers. VERDICT King's customary use of bizarre events
    and freakish characters does not provide a credible basis for this
    detective novel. Also, he encumbers the plotline with insignificant
    details, causing his thriller to plod along rather than pulse with the
    tension and suspense often characteristic of detective fiction. [Prepub
    Alert, 1/1/14.]—Jerry P. Miller, Cambridge, MA


  • NY Times summer reading preview: 

    Mr. King happens to be such a dependably strong storyteller that readers know exactly what to expect from him, except on those unmistakable occasions when, as with the breadth and ambition of “Under the Dome,” he breaks the mold. This time, he’s in reliably fine form with a taut, suspenseful race-against-time book about a retired cop who is pitted against a Mercedes-driving thrill killer. Since Mr. King delivers such cafeteria-style abundance and variety, a very different kind of King novel, “Revival,” is only six months down the road.
  • "The scariest thing of all is to imagine King writing a happy children’s book."

    Heheh - great quoteable!
  • Chuck Bowen in Slant -- not a positive review at all.
  • edited June 2014
    Doug Knoop, Seattle Times:  "Haunted and Taunted By An Unsolved Crime"
  • Author Megan Abbot in the NY Times Sunday Book Review
    Author Michael Marshal Smith in the London Guardian
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