I guess that Hard Case Crime must have been over the moon when one of the kings of fiction deigned to write a novel for them. I’m also guessing that he’s so powerful a literary figure that he doesn’t have to worry about his publishers getting upset when he writes for another one.
I’m not really a Stephen King fan, although I do admire him from afar. The last of his books I read was Christine when it was published in paperback – probably when I was still at school. But loving this publishing house’s work, I didn’t hesitate to jump on this novel.
Unlike any of the other novels I’ve read in this series, this one has a contemporary setting. That’s not to say that it doesn’t mostly take place in the past, although not as far into the past as the usual 50s/60s settings.
In this instance a junior reporter is being basically told the tale by two elderly newspaper editors of a dead man who’d shown up on the remote beach of their small New England island. At first there was no clue as to his identity or how he’d ended up there. Slowly the mystery begins to become unravelled, but this is an unusual tale. It’s particularly unusual in the sense that the ending is not what you expect. And I don’t mean some kind of twist in the tale. In case you read this, I won’t say any more.