With 'Never Flinch', Stephen King proves (again) he's scary good at mystery too

USA Today

3 days ago

With 'Never Flinch', Stephen King proves (again) he's scary good at mystery too
Show Caption
Hide Caption
'The Life of Chuck': Tom Hiddleston headlines Stephen King movie
Based on a Stephen King novella, "The Life of Chuck" chronicles the life of accountant Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) in three acts told in reverse.
Imagine Jimi Hendrix also being a tuba virtuoso, or Andy Warhol also excelling on an Etch-A-Sketch.
The artistic greats, the geniuses, are often really, really good at one thing. Then there's Stephen King.
For decades, his horror stories – on the page and on the screen – have scared the bejeezus out of generations of people. (One of the things that defines Gen X is the fact many of us read his stuff earlier in our pop-culture lives than our parents would have preferred.) From 'It' and 'The Stand' to 'Carrie' and 'The Shining,' he's influenced an entire genre of entertainment more than anybody.
Then, somewhat unexpectedly, King wrote a hard-boiled detective novel – entering the sleuthing space of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and more recently Michael Connelly. Over the past decade, from 2014's 'Mr. Mercedes' to his latest riveting novel 'Never Flinch' (★★★½ stars; Scribner; 448 pages), the master of horror has proven to be scarily good at the mystery thriller, too. So much so it's kind of unfair, honestly.
King hasn't done it alone. He's found an inspirational muse in Holly Gibney.
First a supporting player in the 'Mr. Mercedes' trilogy, Holly has become King's go-to recurring character and, in a bibliography filled mostly with iconic villains, one of his greatest heroes. Mixing lovable quirks – she calls things she doesn't like 'poopy' – with a relatable cadre of issues, she's a private investigator with a crowd-pleasing nature and a nose uncannily adept for sussing out a bad guy. Sometimes, like in 'Never Flinch,' multiple culprits.
In the new book, Holly is hired as a bodyguard by rabble-rousing celebrity women's rights activist Kate McKay when her lecture tour is threatened by an increasingly violent mystery assailant. Holly's on that case and also is helping her police detective pal Izzy Jaynes with a serial killer on a revenge mission, who, after the death of a wrongfully convicted man, promises to 'kill 13 innocents and one guilty.'
With two absorbing criminal plot lines, King juggles one whodunit and a pair of character studies while deftly and delightfully getting into the heads of the sinners and saints populating the book. The author also successfully continues to build out the world of fictional Buckeye City, Holly's Midwestern town that's getting to be as infamous as Castle Rock or Derry.
Holly herself debuted as a side character in 'Mr. Mercedes,' which pitted aging cop Bill Hodges against homicidal ice cream man Brady Hartsfield (aka the Mercedes Killer), and she inherited their Finders Keepers detective agency after Bill's death in trilogy closer 'End of Watch.'
From those books sprang Jerome and Barbara Robinson, the young sibling duo who continue to be Holly's closest allies in 'Never Flinch.' Bill's old partner Pete Huntley stops in for a spell every so often – not to mention Bill's presence that still haunts these stories – and Izzy takes a more central role in King's growing crime-solving universe after appearing in 2023's 'Holly.' Jerome even puts their relationship in a meta literary context: 'Holly's Sherlock Holmes and Izzy's Inspector Lestrade!' (For the record, Izzy's probably got a better fastball than that old Scotland Yarder.)
King clearly loves writing Holly and her entourage – it's apparent not only from the ink spilled on her adventures but the way she's grown over each case and every book. Why she deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the writer's other memorable protagonists, like Roland Deschain of the 'Dark Tower' books or the Losers' Club in 'It,' is because Holly continues to blossom as a human being. She suffers from low confidence and constantly wrestles with the anxiety caused by her late mom, yet every mystery works to build up her fortitude and spirit, from that face-changing Chet Ondowsky in the title novella of the 2020 collection 'If It Bleeds' to the two elderly married psychos of 'Holly.'
But as Holly improves herself, so does King himself. A large swatch of his Constant Readers would probably rather him just get back to the scary stuff already. The man still does a horror tale like no other – he's not the king for nothing. What's different and so enjoyable about reading his Holly stories, other than how he weaves his signature folksiness and macabre sensibilities with modern themes like abortion rights and evangelical extremism, is that King seems to be having fun testing his own imagination and experimenting with different ways to tell a detective yarn.
That landscape is rife with so many colorful personalities – Sherlock, Miss Marple and Sam Spade of an old-school persuasion, Jack Reacher, Harry Bosch and Harry Hole from a more modern place. To not consider Holly Gibney a vital part of that crew at this point would be pretty poopy.