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Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Now an AT&T Audience Original Series
A masterful, intensely suspenseful novel about a reader whose obsession with a reclusive writer goes far too far--a book about the power of storytelling, starring the same trio of unlikely and winning heroes King introduced in Mr. Mercedes .
"Wake up, genius." So begins King's instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, an iconic author who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn't published a book for decades. Morris Bellamy is livid, not just because Rothstein has stopped providing books, but because the nonconformist Jimmy Gold has sold out for a career in advertising. Morris kills Rothstein and empties his safe of cash, yes, but the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel.
Morris hides the money and the notebooks, and then he is locked away for another crime. Decades later, a boy named Pete Saubers finds the treasure, and now it is Pete and his family that Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson must rescue from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris when he's released from prison after thirty-five years.
Not since Misery has King played with the notion of a reader whose obsession with a writer gets dangerous. Finders Keepers is spectacular, heart-pounding suspense, but it is also King writing about how literature shapes a life--for good, for bad, forever.
Author Notes
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, he became a teacher. His spare time was spent writing short stories and novels.
King's first novel would never have been published if not for his wife. She removed the first few chapters from the garbage after King had thrown them away in frustration. Three months later, he received a $2,500 advance from Doubleday Publishing for the book that went on to sell a modest 13,000 hardcover copies. That book, Carrie, was about a girl with telekinetic powers who is tormented by bullies at school. She uses her power, in turn, to torment and eventually destroy her mean-spirited classmates. When United Artists released the film version in 1976, it was a critical and commercial success. The paperback version of the book, released after the movie, went on to sell more than two-and-a-half million copies.
Many of King's other horror novels have been adapted into movies, including The Shining, Firestarter, Pet Semetary, Cujo, Misery, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers. Under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King has written the books The Running Man, The Regulators, Thinner, The Long Walk, Roadwork, Rage, and It. He is number 2 on the Hollywood Reporter's '25 Most Powerful Authors' 2016 list.
King is one of the world's most successful writers, with more than 100 million copies of his works in print. Many of his books have been translated into foreign languages, and he writes new books at a rate of about one per year. In 2003, he received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2012 his title, The Wind Through the Keyhole made The New York Times Best Seller List. King's title's Mr. Mercedes and Revival made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2014. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2015 for Best Novel with Mr. Mercedes. King's title Finders Keepers made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015. Sleeping Beauties is his latest 2017 New York Times bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
It seems only logical that King's new crime novel, which is linked to the Edgar Award-winning success of 2014's Mr. Mercedes, should reemploy the talents of that thriller's reader, Patton. Here, the actor's deceptively mellow, vaguely Southern delivery helps spin a thrilling yarn that shuffles two tales separated by 35 years. The earlier sections follow Morris Bellamy, a young sociopath so obsessed by the work of long-silent reclusive novelist John Rothstein that he kills him and steals the author's money, along with notebooks containing at least one unpublished novel. The other sections, set in the Midwest in 2010, focus on Pete Stauber, who finds the cash and notes where Morris hid them before his lengthy incarceration for another crime. Both stories converge when Morris is released from prison and arrives in town expecting to find his cache. Though the novel unfolds in third-person narration, King slants each chapter toward its featured player, and Patton adds an appropriate attitude. For example, he reads the chapters focused on Morris with a sort of grim determination laced with anger. The Pete chapters have a halting quality that reflects the teen's suspicious nature and lack of self-confidence. The chapters devoted to Drew Halliday, a crooked book dealer, are given a smarmy air of extreme self-satisfaction. The bottom line is that King has added another superb novel of suspense to his ever-increasing list, and Patton's inventive interpretations make it a must-hear audio. A Scribner hardcover. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
There are suggestions throughout this second installment of a planned trilogy that King's motley, appealing trio of detectives from Mr. Mercedes (2014) have some bad juju in their collective future that may make the case here look like a relative afternoon at the mall. As in Misery and The Shining, King swan dives into the looniness lurking at both ends of the writer-reader transaction. The loony in this particular joint is a pale, red-lipped sociopath named Morris Bellamy, who, in 1978, robs and murders his favorite novelist, John Rothstein, because he can't forgive him for making his lead character, Jimmy Gold, go into advertising in the last published installment of his epic trilogy. Yet along with the cash Bellamy collects during his crime are several notebooks comprising a rough draft for a fourth installment suggesting an outcome for Gold that Bellamy finds potentially more satisfying. Bellamy buries a trunk with the money and notebooks for safekeeping, but a 35-year prison hitch interrupts his plans. By the time Bellamy is paroled in 2014, Pete Saubers, a high school student who's something of a Rothstein aficionado himself, has excavated the trunk, sent the money in anonymously labeled parcels to his financially strapped parents, and stashed the notebooks for a possible sale on the proverbial rainy daywhose somewhat premature arrival comes, alas, at roughly the same time Bellamy appears in the Sauberses' life. Fortunately, Pete's back is covered by the odd-squad private detective team of portly, kindly ex-cop Bill Hodges, wisecracking digital whiz Jerome Robinson, and Hodges' phobic-savant researcher Holly Gibney, who first pooled their talents in Mr. Mercedesa book whose central crime, the murder and maiming of innocents by a luxury car, looms over this sequel like a stubborn shadow. This being a King novel, the narrative hums and roars along like a high-performance vehicle, even though there are times when its readers may find themselves several tics ahead of the book's plot developments. But such qualms are overcome by the plainspoken, deceptively simple King style, which has once again fashioned a rip-snorting entertainment; one that also works as a sneaky-smart satire of literary criticism and how even the most attentive readers can often miss the whole point behind making up characters and situations. Reading a King novel as engrossing as this is a little like backing in a car with parking assist: after a while, you just take your hands off the wheel and the pages practically turn themselves. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
LITERARY CELEBRITY SOUNDS like an oxymoron, but it does happen. Selling millions of books isn't enough; readers have to feel a profound personal connection to the writer. J.K. Rowling is definitely in the club. James Patterson, probably not. Or consider this story, one told to me 20 years ago by a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, the writer-rock band. (Now that might be an oxymoron.) The band stopped for breakfast at a small-town truck stop before the sun was up. This was pre-smartphone, pre-social media, practically pre-Internet. Yet by the time the band members returned to their tour bus, there were several people lined up, clutching copies of "The Stand," eager to meet the band's undisputed rock star, Stephen King. Yeah, that's not creepy at all. But it does illustrate why King has special standing in his new novel, "Finders Keepers," to examine the reader-writer relationship, which is increasingly a two-way street. What does a beloved writer owe his fans? Who's the boss, especially in an era when disenchanted disciples can cyberstalk, tweet their fury at a less-than-cordial encounter or even self-publish fan fiction? King of course has worked this territory before, most notably in "Misery," with a writer essentially enslaved by his No. 1 fan. But whereas Annie Wilkes was nuts, if you'll excuse the clinical term, fans are not necessarily fanatics. The desire to establish a bond with a beloved writer is a form of communion - or so said Martin Amis, who has acknowledged he did precisely that with Saul Bellow. In "Finders Keepers" (the second entry in a planned trilogy that began with "Mr. Mercedes"), book-besotted Morris Bellamy uses the metaphor of a classic love affair to define his roiling emotions about his favorite author: "It was ... just as fate had come between Romeo and Juliet. That comparison seemed both ludicrous and perfectly apt. He was a lover." Alas for the object of Morris's affection, John Rothstein, Morris feels betrayed. Rothstein will strike most readers as Salingeresque. He lives in seclusion in New Hampshire, his most famous book had a distinctive red cover, and it centered on an angry, rebellious young man. There's even mention of a story with an eerily familiar name, "The Perfect Banana Pie." And like Salinger, Rothstein stopped publishing in the 1960s but has continued to write about his most famous character, Jimmy Gold. Over the years, he has filled dozens of black leather Moleskine notebooks, which he then locks in a safe - another Salinger overlap - where he also keeps envelopes of cash. But there are echoes of other writers here, too. Rothstein's famous trilogy, which began with "The Runner" and continued with "The Runner Sees Action" and "The Runner Slows Down," feels like a nod to John Updike's Rabbit books. Bellow and Philip Roth are invoked as Rothstein's literary contemporaries; Roth lurks in the character's very name. Indeed, Roth tilled this soil in "Zuckerman Unbound," in which a would-be writer stalks the author of an enormously successful novel that sounds a lot like "Portnoy's Complaint." I couldn't help remembering the assessment of Zuckerman's literary agent: "First you lock yourself away in order to stir up your imagination, now you lock yourself away because you've stirred up theirs." Roth's Zuckerman may have been slightly paranoid, but King's Rothstein gets his brains blown out on Page 14. Morris and two accomplices take off with the notebooks and at least $24,000. Of these three perpetrators, only one - Morris, the one who pulled the trigger and who cares more about the notebooks than the money - makes it through the night alive. Back in his hometown, identified only as the "filthy little city that residents called the Gem of the Great Lakes," Morris brags about his score to a young bookseller he considers his only friend. The man's horrified reaction catapults Morris into a blackout binge, and he wakes up in jail. The good news is that he's not there for three murders. The bad news is that he has committed a particularly violent rape and faces life in prison. ALL OF THIS, it turns out, is basically back story - King is a natural raconteur, confident of his readers' interest, and so he's unafraid to interrupt the novel's present-day action with these flashbacks. But 35 years after Morris's crime spree, there's another family living in the house where he grew up, another young man susceptible to literature's power. In a town where a lot of people are down on their luck, the Saubers are even more so; the father, Tom, was injured when a maniac drove a Mercedes into a crowd of people at a job fair, killing and maiming many. (Yes, that's the opening scene from "Mr. Mercedes.") Pete and his younger sister, Tina, are painfully aware that their parents' marriage might not survive the fallout. When Pete finds a trunk full of cash and notebooks, he devises a way to use the money to help his family. He also finds himself under the spell of Rothstein's Jimmy Gold - but Pete has an advantage the rest of the world does not: He has read the never-published fourth and fifth books in the series, books that correct the seeming betrayal that so inflamed Morris. After Morris is paroled, he goes to find the trunk he stashed before his arrest, and this is where the main characters of "Mr. Mercedes" finally return: It will fall to the retired cop Bill Hodges and his investigative partners, Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson, to try to save the Saubers family. It's a classic race-against-time story, one that benefits from King's superb patience and pacing. Then, in a late-appearing subplot that circles back to "Mr. Mercedes," King introduces a supernatural element absent from the first book. To say more about this cliffhanger would be a spoiler, but part of me can't help wishing King had stayed with classic crime fiction. It's as if King's restless imagination is a power that cannot be contained. He played it pretty straight in "Mr. Mercedes," which just won the Edgar Award for best novel of 2014 from the Mystery Writers of America. Now he's toying with the form, batting it back and forth to see if it's still alive. His riskiest move, however, is creating a book - books - within a book. That's tricky for any writer. Inevitably, the reader must accept, without much evidence, that the cited work is a masterpiece. (Or hugely popular, or something that hit the sweet spot of the Zeitgeist.) I wasn't persuaded that Jimmy Gold's catchphrase - one that can't be printed in a family newspaper - became a watch cry for thousands. Then again, if you described "Eat, Pray, Love" or "Fifty Shades of Grey," they wouldn't sound like plausible literary phenomena either. I did believe that Morris and Pete fell under Jimmy's spell, and that's what matters. If their final showdown is a high-stakes confrontation between good and evil - well, good grief, what did you expect? Pete is King's ideal reader, a young man whose life is changed by the discovery of an important writer at a seminal time. If it is naïve or quaint to believe such discoveries are still made, then count me as naïve and quaint. Books can change lives and ignite passions. So, to echo the final line of King's author's note, here's to the constant readers, even the ones who leave notes at coffeehouses where writers are reputed to work, offering up grisly plots for future books. Oh, wait - that coffeehouse thing happened to me. Gulp. King invents a reclusive author, a safe full of notebooks and a deranged reader. LAURA LIPPMAN'S most recent novel, "Hush, Hush," was published in February.
Library Journal Review
What would you do if you found a buried treasure? Thirteen-year-old Peter -Saubers asks himself this very question when he finds an old trunk buried under a tree. His family has fallen on hard times following the economic downturn in 2008. Aside from a relatively small amount of money in the chest, there are over 100 hand-written notebooks. Peter realizes that they were penned by John Rothstein, a renowned novelist who was murdered long before Peter was born. Peter was one of the millions who had been touched by Rothstein's works. Also influenced by the novels is Morris Bellamy, an obsessed fan who killed the author years ago and buried the trunk. He's in prison for a different crime, and about to be paroled. Now the protagonists King introduced in Mr. Mercedes-Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and -Jerome -Robinson-are charged with protecting Peter and his family from Bellamy.- -VERDICT King's many, many fans will want this, especially those who loved Misery, but the second volume in King's projected trilogy will appeal to anyone who enjoys suspense and action, or anyone who finds enlightenment in reading about the internal struggle between right and wrong. It's not necessary to have read the previous book to enjoy this one. [See Prepub Alert, 11/25/14.]-Elizabeth -Masterson, Mecklenburg Cty. Jail Lib., Charlotte, NC © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.