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End of Watch -- formerly The Suicide Prince
At the event in Brooklyn tonight, Steve said that he is working on the follow-up to Finders Keepers, which has the working title The Suicide Prince.
Comments
Brady Hartsfield, perpetrator of the Mercedes Massacre, where eight people were killed and many more were badly injured, has been in the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic for five years, in a vegetative state. According to his doctors, anything approaching a complete recovery is unlikely. But behind the drool and stare, Brady is awake, and in possession of deadly new powers that allow him to wreak unimaginable havoc without ever leaving his hospital room.
Retired police detective Bill Hodges, the unlikely hero of Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers, now runs an investigation agency with his partner, Holly Gibney, who delivered the blow to Hartsfield's head that put him on the brain injury ward. Brady also remembers that. When Bill and Holly are called to a murder-suicide with ties to the Mercedes Massacre, they find themselves pulled into their most dangerous case yet, one that will put not only their lives at risk, but those of Hodges’s friend Jerome Robinson and his teenage sister, Barbara. Because Brady Hartsfield is back, and planning revenge not just on Bill Hodges and his friends, but on an entire city.
In End of Watch, Stephen King brings the Hodges trilogy to a sublimely terrifying conclusion, combining the detective fiction of Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers with the supernatural suspense that has been his trademark. The result is an unnerving look at human vulnerability and up-all-night entertainment."
June 7 Jersey City, NJ
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June 7 Word Bookstore, Jersey City, NJ
June 8 Penguin Bookshop, Sewickley, PA
June 9 Books & Co., Dayton, OH
June 10 Taylor Books, Charleston, WV
June 11 Parnassus Books, Nashville, TN
June 12 Carmichael’s Books, Louisville, KY
June 13 Prairie Lights, Iowa City, IA
June 14 Bookworm, Omaha, NE
June 15 Booksmart, Tulsa, OK
June 16 Bookworks, Albuquerque, NM
June 17 The King’s English, Salt Lake City, UT
June 18 Barnes & Noble, Reno, NV
Kirkus Reviews 2016 April #1
You know it's a politicized time when the bad guy in a King novel loses points not strictly for being evil but for "living like Donald Trump." "It's always darkest before the dawn," King cheerfully reminds us at the very outset of this work of mayhem and murder, closing a trilogy devoted to retired detective Bill Hodges and investigative partner Holly Gibney. Yes, it is, and "darker than a woodchuck's asshole," too, reminding us that we're in King's New England, where weird things are always happening. Bill—well, his real first name is Kermit—has a doozy of a case from the very start: those weird things leapfrog back to the first volume, to a time, seven years before the present, when the perp of the so-called Mercedes Massacre drifted off into comaland. Throughout the trilogy, King has both honored and toyed with the conventions of hard-boiled crime fiction, and it seemed as if he'd be staking out that genre as his own; now, though, he steers back into the realm of horror that for sure belongs to him, for the baddie, Brady Hartsfield, who had merely been an incest-committing mass murderer before, has now acquired psychic powers and is experimenting merrily with ways to convince the innocent to kill themselves—and perhaps worse. Having lost some mobility, Brady is deeply ticked off—and, as King writes, "Being in a situation like that, who wouldn't want to kill a bunch of people?" Right, and it's up to Kermit/Bill and Holly to stop "Z-Boy," as he's now calling himself, from further mischief, very much more easily said than done. Suffice it to say that heavy machinery—having been run over, King hates cars, and having grown up when he did, he doesn't have much use for gizmo technology, either—figures into both the crime and its cure, and suffice it to say that both are exceedingly messy. Gleefully gross. And a few of the principals even outlive the tale, meaning there's hope for a sequel, assuming King wants to play with the definition of trilogy, too. Copyright Kirkus 2016 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
King's first mystery trilogy comes to an it's-definitely-over finish by largely sidestepping Finders Keepers (2015) to finish up business with vehicular killer Brady Hartsfield from Mr. Mercedes (2014). King, at last, can't resist going supernatural: Brady, comatose for six years, has been receiving the experimental drug Cerebellin, and though his body is worthless, he's gained telekinetic ability enough to make Carrie White jealous. By taking over the body of his doctor, Brady becomes "Dr. Z," distributing to kids he failed to kill in Mr. Mercedes Zappit game consoles preloaded with particularly nasty malware that, when activated, will compel its users to commit suicide. It's an impressively mean concept spurred by a constricted time line: our protag, retired detective Bill Hodges, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and has only three days before treatment begins. As with Doctor Sleep (2013), some of the paranormal elements feel hasty, and King overexplains plot while underexplaining motives. Still, the idea of a human drone is rich, and his sleuthing heroes are easy to love—and miss when they are gone.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: King's mystery experiment has been page-flipping fun from the start, and no one's going to want to miss seeing how it all pans out. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
After two straightforward crime thrillers, MWA Grand Master King (Finders Keepers) torques this third and final novel featuring retired detective Bill Hodges into his trademark terror territory. Hodges has long suspected that Brady Hartsfield, the brain-damaged mass murderer captured at the end of Mr. Mercedes, has been faking his catatonia, and his suspicions are reinforced by rumors circulating in Brady's hospital ward (in what may be a Midwestern state) that he can move objects telekinetically. The truth is actually worse: with the help of secretly administered experimental drugs and skillfully hacked computer technology, Brady has found a way to project his personality into others and commandeer them as his "organic wheelchairs." The stage is set for Brady to compel mass suicide among users of a handheld gaming device whose interface he's hijacked, and to draw out Hodges to settle a personal score. King has dealt before with this novel's different themes—endowment with dangerous supernatural powers, the zombifying effect of modern consumer electronics—but he finds fresh approaches to them and inventive ways to introduce them in the lives of his recurring cast of sympathetic characters, whose pains and triumphs the reader feels. King's legion of fans will find this splice of mystery and horror a fitting finale to his Bill Hodges trilogy. Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents. (June)
Library Journal
★ 05/15/2016
Brady Hartsfield awakens from a coma with terrible new powers, and the stage is set for the tense, thrilling conclusion to King's Bill Hodges trilogy (after Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers). After being put in the city's brain trauma center by Hodges and his partner, Holly Gibney, and condemned to a life as an invalid at the conclusion of Mr. Mercedes, the newly conscious Hartsfield discovers he can manipulate things—and people—with his mind. When people connected to the massacre in the first book start committing suicide, Hodges races against time to find out why. One would assume that a writer like King, who has been on top of his game for decades, would eventually run out of ideas. Instead, he serves up one of the most original crime thrillers to come along in years, thanks to his trademark supernatural flair. However, the paranormal takes a backseat to a story that is essentially about human weakness, how easily one can be exploited, and the strength it takes simply to live. VERDICT A spectacular, pulse-pounding, read-in-one-sitting wrap-up that will more than satisfy King's Constant Readers (as he addresses his fans before and after almost every book). [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/15.]—Tyler Hixson, Library Journal
Stephen King, who has written many series as well as stand-alone novels, said
the same thing tends to happen to him. In 2012, eight years after
completing his seven-volume “Dark Tower” series, for instance, he
produced an eighth book, “The Wind Through the Keyhole,” whose action
takes place between Books 4 and 5.
Characters with unfinished business inveigle themselves into his head, he said in a
telephone interview. He’s currently toying with going back into his
Bill Hodges trilogy, though “End of Watch,” coming out next month, is
meant to be the final installment. “There’s a character named Holly I
keep thinking about,” he said.
Ms. Rowling gives interviews very rarely and declined to comment for this
article. But Mr. King said he sympathized with her relationship to her
material. “There are two things,” he said. “I think she likes the Harry
Potter people, and it’s a little bit hard for her to let go. And she’s
aware that there are millions and millions of people who loved those
books. Writers feel responsibility to their readers, and some of that is
a way of saying to the fans, ‘If you want a little more, I’ll give you a
little more.’”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/theater/jk-rowling-just-cant-let-harry-potter-go.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/stephen-kings-end-of-watch-final-round-for-a-despicable-villain/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2016/06/06/stephen-king-end-of-watch-book-review/84814590/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2016.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news