Finders Keepers had me from page one. It barely even had to flutter its skirts at me before I was hopelessly enamored of it. This probably says more about me than it does the book, but I think it also speaks well of the book. When King is on, he’s on, and with this one he delivers an engaging, tense, and yet emotionally affecting story. For me, it was a nearly perfect reading experience.
I really liked Mr. Mercedes when I read it last year. I liked Retired Detective Kermit “Bill” Hodges and his friendship with a ragtag bunch of people as they tracked down mass murderer Brady Hartsfield. But this one, with its premise of a young boy finding buried treasure, and the treasure being BOOKS, was like Ashley catnip.
It’s been four years since the events of the last book, and Hodges and his gang (mostly Holly, with some Jerome cameos, now that he’s away at college) are now running a private investigation office. But they aren’t even the focus of the book. That honor goes to the dual (and dueling) protagonist/antagonist pairing of Morris Bellamy, the man who murdered his favorite author in 1978 and stole his unpublished manuscripts (along with $22k of cash) but then went to jail for life for an entirely different crime, and the young boy Peter Saubers who finds them buried under a tree thirty years later.
I just ate this up. The audio book was great, also, except that I got it from the library, and all they had was the CDs not the download for my super cool space phone, so I ended up getting frustrated that I couldn’t just listen to it at all times.
The only thing I really didn’t like, and even that is growing on me the more I think about it, is that SPOILERS the manuscripts end up burning and no one but Pete has ever read them. This ending makes my soul hurt. I SCREAMED when it happened. In hindsight, as painful as I still find it, it makes the most sense for the characters of Morris and Pete and how their arcs end. But I still kind of hate it. Worth noting that unlike a lot of people, I had zero trouble with the supernatural bent the book goes in the end, where we can expect a return of Brady Hartsfield in book three, this time with telekinetic powers of some sort END SPOILERS.
The whole time I was reading this, I just felt like a little kid and somebody was reading me a story. It’s probably my favorite thing about Uncle Stevie’s writing, that great quality of just being a storyteller that he has. I’ll take that any day over fancy prose and whatever else The Man thinks quality literature is.
So I bought it in hardcover before I was even finished with it. No regrets.
[4.5 stars]
