New from Stephen King: End of Watch

King billed this trilogy as his first foray into hardboiled detective fiction, and the first two books in the series justified that description. In End of Watch, however, King pulls off an amazing trick: he elegantly and effortlessly transforms his detective story into a classic supernatural Stephen King book. In fact, far from showing a readiness to retire, End of Watch proves that King is at the top of his game right now.
Brady Hartsfield
Brady Hartsfield is an amazing character. In Mr. Mercedes he was horrifying enough, a demented, broken man whose central tragedy was being just smart enough to cause mayhem, but never smart enough to truly succeed at anything. His vicious hatred is mixed with just enough dark genius to make him terrifying. At the end of Mr. Mercedes he seems to be out of the picture for good, but King patiently keeps him in the background throughout the second book—and that slow boil bears incredible fruit with the surprising and scary evolution he undergoes in End of Watch. Hartsfield’s journey in these books is classic King genius, taking someone unpleasant and frightening to begin with and slowly turning them into a monster directly from our shared nightmares.
Life vs. Death
For a man who has survived a near-death experience and is now pushing 70, it’s understandable that themes of mortality are cropping up in Stephen King’s books. One of the most interesting things about End of Watch is the way King makes suicide a central theme without being simplistic about it. Hartsfield at one point styles himself the Suicide Prince, but death is everywhere in this book, both literally and in the ways the characters navigate choices between life and death, choices that are never obvious or easy. The way main character Bill Hodges faces these challenges make his arc one of the best King has ever devised.
The Little Things
King’s always had a way with characters and setting in addition to having an incredible imagination. Where in his earlier work he often deluged the reader with details about the people and places his stories involved, his style has evolved to the point where he’s much more economical with those details—and it’s incredibly effective. Several details and seemingly minor point from this story and the two books that preceded it—the sort of details you initially assume are just there to flesh out characters or give the setting some spice—turn out to be vitally important both thematically and in terms of plotting, and King handles these details masterfully. Without spoiling anything, for example, Bill Hodges’ ringtone is a nifty but unimportant character point right up until it becomes something else entirely, both in terms of the mechanics of the final confrontation, but also in what Bill and Brady each represent—literally life and death.
The Real World
One of the greatest talents King has always possessed is the ability to write fantastic stories that are not only set in the “real” world that we all share, but feel like they’re in that world. Where other writers often wind up in a sort of hyper-reality or augmented-reality in order to make their fantastic ideas seem plausible, King is one of the few who can make the fantastic feel absolutely real. Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers had a few classic King touches of the supernatural, but in End of Watch King reveals these stories exist in the same universe as his other works, a universe where terrifying unnatural things can exist, can happen, but which feels indistinguishable in other ways from reality. It’s an amazing effect, especially if you’ve read the first two books in the trilogy.
The Final Act
End of Watch is 100% the final book in a trilogy. Not just the third book in a series featuring the same characters, but the third part of a larger story. All three books can be enjoyed by themselves, of course; each has a more-or-less standalone story. But reading them in order means you get what King is trying to achieve, because End of Watch builds on the themes and events of the first two books, and its that foundation that lets King pull off his transformation of the story from a hard-boiled detective tale to a horror novel that happens to have a hard-boiled detective as its protagonist. In short, this is that rare book series where the sum of its parts is greater than the individual books.