This book was just okay, and that’s a shame. It definitely feels like one of King’s duds for me, but it’s the second book in his Bill Hodges trilogy and the first book, Mr. Mercedes, got five stars from me. That said, I was chatting to someone on YouTube the other day about it and they said that the third is good again and that they thought it might have worked better as a duology.
Part of the reason for that is that this one could function as a standalone. Sure, there are a few bits here and there that do reference the first book (and presumably the third), but they could easily have been added to books one and three because there’s not much there. Most of it follows a completely different story which somehow felt familiar to me, as though I’d read it before. I even checked my Goodreads account to make sure that I wasn’t accidentally re-reading something.
Basically, a dude kills a writer and steals a bunch of money and some notebooks with his unpublished work in. Then he buries it and gets jailed for a different crime. Then some kid finds them all and he gets let out of jail. That takes us to about two thirds of the way through the book, a hell of a lot of setup for an unsatisfying ending.
One strange thing about my experience of this book is that it felt like the name was following me everywhere. I read it while spending some time in Oxford as part of a short break away and there was an estate agents there called “Finders Keepers” with their signs outside the front of all of the different houses that they were representing.
Sometimes I read Stephen King books and struggle to comprehend how it was written. That wasn’t the case with this one because it just felt like a bog standard mass market release. Sure, you could tell it was King from his writing style, but it also felt a bit like someone trying to imitate him. It just didn’t have any of that classic King magic.
Click here to buy Finders Keepers.