Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Finders Keepers by Stephen King

In Finders Keepers, the second installment in a homicide-minded trilogy that opened with last year’s Mr Mercedes, Stephen King takes the thrill of literary discovery to murderous extremes. The first soul to perish is one John Rothstein, who in 1978 is a retired writer boasting an oeuvre and reputation to rival those of Roth, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the American canon.

Rothstein’s Jimmy Gold trilogy is revered by college literature teachers and one Morris Bellamy, a miscreant in his early 20s whose obsession with Rothstein’s work leads to the writer’s death and Morris’s theft from his home of hoarded cash and a collection of notebooks that contain further, unpublished Gold novels.

The scene of these events crystallizes King’s gift for infusing the worst human actions with absurdist levity: Rothstein, uncaring as to his fate, rightly identifies Morris (the son of a monstrously self-absorbed Pulitzer-nominated history professor) as the brains of the outfit, not least because one of Morris’ co-conspirators pronounces apocalypse “Acropolipse”. Before Morris can do much with his larcenous goods, some unfocused criminality elsewhere gets him pinched and incarcerated for a life term.

The action, which takes place in three time periods, jumps forward to 2009, the time in which Mr Mercedes wreaks havoc. Peter Saubers’ father Tom is one of the unlucky folk in the job line-up that the driver ploughs into, and his serious injuries and subsequent slough of despond stretch the four-strong family’s already meagre resources to breaking point. Until, that is, Peter happens upon a carefully secreted stash of cash and notebooks…

In the kind of coincidence that King likes to reveal is anything but, the Saubers family home happens to be the house in which Morris Bellamy grew up. When his ‘life’ term concludes, he returns to retrieve his possessions. In the interim, a number of townsfolk have put some skin in the game, including the adult Sauberses and one Andrew Halliday, a malodorous trafficker of rare-edition books who pays better than his competitors but is known to be unfussy about provenance.

King’s nuanced character renderings are never better than when he is writing clever adolescents, and even as a teenager, the resourceful Pete, who brims over with goodness, has the respect for literature and general acuity to know that possessing the notebooks of a dead literary lion “was like sitting on a bunch of beautiful stolen paintings you could never sell. Or a crate filled with dynamite.” The big ka-boom of the climax is thus foreshadowed.

The links to Mr Mercedes, and the thread of what promises to be an explosive conclusion to the trilogy, strengthen and thicken as Finders Keepers steams towards its own resolution, plot and character converging beneath King’s masterful hand. To restore order, the heroic trio of the first novel re-enters the fray, led by retired homicide detective Bill Hodges. He remains preoccupied, not to say obsessed, by Brady Hartsfield, the villain of the first piece who now resides in a traumatic brain injury clinic. Only “oatmeal left up top” is the specialists’ diagnosis; Hodges knows better. Book three can’t come soon enough.

As part of a trilogy Finders Keepers exceeds its purpose; as a standalone novel it is worth far more than the price of admission. Savour it as a new offering from an author who has proved himself a peer of the greatest of his literary countrymen: King knows better than anyone how fleeting the life of a writer can be.