Morris is livid – not just because Rothstein has stopped writing but because he has made the nonconformist Jimmy sell out for a career in advertising. Morris breaks into Rothstein’s house and empties his safe of cash. But the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel – and Morris is prepared to kill for them. Later, he goes to jail for another crime but not before he has hidden the spoils.
2009: Meet young Pete Saubers, whose father was brutally injured by a stolen Mercedes while he was queuing at a job fair. When Pete discovers a buried trunk containing the money and notebooks, he realises he has the means to rescue his family from poverty. If he can keep it secret…
2014: Morris is up for parole. And he’s hell-bent on recovering his treasure. That’s when retired detective Bill Hodges – who has set up a company called ‘Finders Keepers’ – is asked to investigate. Together with colleagues Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson, Hodges must rescue Pete from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris…
Not since Misery has King written with such visceral power about a reader with such a dangerous obsession. Finders Keepers is spectacular suspense, and it is also King writing about how literature shapes a life – for good, for bad, forever.
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For quite some time now I have wanted to get my hands on a good Stephen King book (are there any bad ones written by him at all?) and therefore when I started Finders Keepers I was more than excited having started off with my first Stephen King book, and man, was I left spell bound or what?
While the book itself is a standalone one with only the principal characters from his earlier book Mr Mercedes being carried over into this one as well, there are enough hints and character traits that carry over from the earlier book that it makes it inevitable that readers will surely want to pick up the earlier book and read that one as well. In fact, King ties up the main events in the first book with one principal event in this book as well, and that clearly shows how much the man knows his art and how much he has perfected his craft of storytelling.
As the blurb states, the narrative of this book primarily deals with two readers, one of whom is quite a fanatic of a reclusive novelist and the other an accidental but equally knowledgeable reader of the same novelist, separated by decades of their love for the author and his work, as well as by physical and mental distances. While they populate separate ‘worlds’ for all practical purposes, they are brought together by their love for the author and a strange coincidence of fate as well. And as is wont with Stephen King novels, sparks fly when these two protagonists meet.
Add to this mix, ex cop Bill Hodges, his assistant Holly and his friend Jerome, the principal characters from the first book in this trilogy and lo and behold, you have a crackerjack of a suspense thriller on your hands. Pretty soon, everybody is facing their worst demons, racing the clock and struggling to keep their wits around them just to stay alive. Suffice to say that the book is quite unputdownable, and for sure, has forced my hand not only to read the next one in the trilogy coming out next year, but also to grab a copy of the first one in the trilogy as well.
Click here to purchase the book from Flipkart [Link] or Amazon [Link].
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A review copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher in return for an honest and unbiased review of the same.