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Review: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

Title: Mr. Mercedes
Author: Stephen King
Year Published: 2014

Genre: Adult mystery
Pages: 436
Rating: 5 out of 5

Location (my 2014 Google Reading map): USA (Chicago?)

FTC Disclosure: I bought this book with my own money

Summary (from the inside flap of the book): In the predawn hours, in a distressed American city, hundreds of unemployed men and women line up for the opening of a job fair. They are tired and cold and desperate. Emerging from the fog, invisible until it is too late, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes.

Months later, an ex-cop names Bill Hodges, still haunted by the unsolved crime, contemplates suicide. When he gets a a crazed letter from "the perk," claiming credit for the murders, Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, fearing another even more diabolical attack and hell-bent on preventing it.

Brady Hartfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that rush again. Only Bill Hodges, with a couple of eccentric and mis-matched allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again. And they have no time to lose, because Brady's next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim thousands.

Review: Confession: I have never read a Stephen King book before. They scare me. I can't see the movies either. Then I heard from Ti, a blogging friend, that she was reading this new Stephen King and I was intrigued. Mostly because she said there were no "clowns in the basement." Thank you Ti!

Stephen King's writing is so good. I was sucked in on the first page and I was glued to this book the whole time. When I wasn't reading, I was thinking about the characters as if they were real people. I wondered what they were doing, would Hodges catch Brady, or what was Brady's next creepy horrible action going to be. I also liked that the "main character" was actually a cast of characters, each one contributing to the story equally.

I am a mystery book fan, but often feel as if the "who done it" comes too quickly at the end. Stephen King has taken this problem out of the equation because we know who did it from the very start. As Bill Hodges (retired Detective) and Brady Hartfield (creepy bad guy) tell their parallel stories, we see them approaching one another and can hardly stand the suspense at the end.

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