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Holly Gibney, a 50-something private eye with anxiety and a passion for movies, takes on a missing person case that's bigger than it initially seems.
Previous books explain how Holly became a detective in middle age and detail some past cases. You don't need to read the others to read this one - you can pick up what you need to know in this book - but ideally you should have read Mr. Mercedes, The Outsider, and If It Bleeds.
Holly is set in the summer of 2021, such a specific time period that it makes the book feel like a well-observed period piece, complete with people bumping elbows and telling each other which Covid vaccine they got. When it begins, her business partner is out with Covid and Holly, who's germ-phobic and whose mother just died of Covid, doesn't plan to take on any cases. But then a woman calls, frantic. Her adult daughter Bonnie has been missing for weeks, and the police seem to have given up...
We, the readers, already know more-or-less what happened to her. A prologue showed a pair of unlikely serial killers - an elderly professor couple from the local college - kidnapping a different victim years ago. Periodically we flash back to them taking other victims. While we know who took Bonnie, we don't know whether she's still alive, or exactly why an elderly couple have been kidnapping and murdering an apparently random selection of people.
In the prologue we also got a snippet of what I initially believed to be one of King's excellently sketched cameo characters, an elderly poet who's a professor at the same university. The poet, Olivia, turns out to be a very important character in a major subplot that is connected to the main story, but is primarily about her mentorship of Barbara, a young poet who's a friend of Holly's. (If you've read the other books, Barbara is Jerome's younger sister; Jerome has some excellent scenes in this book too.) King doesn't often write about female writers, so this storyline, which is about 80% unrelated to serial killers, was an unexpected delight. It's a very moving portrayal of the growth of a young writer under an older writer's mentorship, and the passing of the torch.
Holly's story is a straightforward gumshoe narrative, made extra nervewracking by our knowledge that the people she's tracking down are right in front of her nose, and also by the presence of Covid and some family drama involving her mother's death. I love Holly and King clearly does too; she's got very believable struggles with mental health and childhood trauma and generally being a misfit, but she's kind and brave and she never gives up.
I was initially reluctant to read this because of the setting, but it works surprisingly well. The omnipresence of Covid and people talking about Covid and conspiracies and politics functions both as an obstacle for Holly and a reflection of the major theme, which is aging and mortality and changing times, and how we deal with them.
The poet Olivia is 99 years old, while Barbara is 19. They both know they have very little time to learn and teach and enjoy each other's company, and they make the most of it, knowing all the while that the more they get from the relationship, the more it will hurt when it ends. Holly is facing personal fears of inadequacy and social anxiety plus the fear of death from Covid every time she interacts with anyone, and soon the fear of death by serial killer is thrown into the mix; she takes precautions but doggedly keeps pursuing her case.
The other big theme is mothers and daughters. Holly is dealing with her relationship to her dead mother, who is still fucking with her from beyond the grave. (Since this is King, I should explain that I don't mean as a ghost, I mean psychological baggage plus some unpleasant revelations via her will.) Bonnie Dahl and her mother had a big fight right before Bonnie was kidnapped, Holly spends a lot of time unraveling their relationship in retrospect while trying to figure out if Bonnie might have actually run away, and her mother's anguish both kicks off the plot and remains a force throughout the book. Barbara has a good relationship with her actual mother, but her mentorship with Olivia has aspects of mother-daughter/grandmother-daughter. Even one of the earlier victims has a subplot involving a surrogate mother-daughter relationship she had with a neighbor as her birth family was a disaster.
( Read more... )
This is a very polarizing book, but I loved it. The characters are great, it's often very moving, and it's got a banger of a climax and a perfect final line.
Previous books explain how Holly became a detective in middle age and detail some past cases. You don't need to read the others to read this one - you can pick up what you need to know in this book - but ideally you should have read Mr. Mercedes, The Outsider, and If It Bleeds.
Holly is set in the summer of 2021, such a specific time period that it makes the book feel like a well-observed period piece, complete with people bumping elbows and telling each other which Covid vaccine they got. When it begins, her business partner is out with Covid and Holly, who's germ-phobic and whose mother just died of Covid, doesn't plan to take on any cases. But then a woman calls, frantic. Her adult daughter Bonnie has been missing for weeks, and the police seem to have given up...
We, the readers, already know more-or-less what happened to her. A prologue showed a pair of unlikely serial killers - an elderly professor couple from the local college - kidnapping a different victim years ago. Periodically we flash back to them taking other victims. While we know who took Bonnie, we don't know whether she's still alive, or exactly why an elderly couple have been kidnapping and murdering an apparently random selection of people.
In the prologue we also got a snippet of what I initially believed to be one of King's excellently sketched cameo characters, an elderly poet who's a professor at the same university. The poet, Olivia, turns out to be a very important character in a major subplot that is connected to the main story, but is primarily about her mentorship of Barbara, a young poet who's a friend of Holly's. (If you've read the other books, Barbara is Jerome's younger sister; Jerome has some excellent scenes in this book too.) King doesn't often write about female writers, so this storyline, which is about 80% unrelated to serial killers, was an unexpected delight. It's a very moving portrayal of the growth of a young writer under an older writer's mentorship, and the passing of the torch.
Holly's story is a straightforward gumshoe narrative, made extra nervewracking by our knowledge that the people she's tracking down are right in front of her nose, and also by the presence of Covid and some family drama involving her mother's death. I love Holly and King clearly does too; she's got very believable struggles with mental health and childhood trauma and generally being a misfit, but she's kind and brave and she never gives up.
I was initially reluctant to read this because of the setting, but it works surprisingly well. The omnipresence of Covid and people talking about Covid and conspiracies and politics functions both as an obstacle for Holly and a reflection of the major theme, which is aging and mortality and changing times, and how we deal with them.
The poet Olivia is 99 years old, while Barbara is 19. They both know they have very little time to learn and teach and enjoy each other's company, and they make the most of it, knowing all the while that the more they get from the relationship, the more it will hurt when it ends. Holly is facing personal fears of inadequacy and social anxiety plus the fear of death from Covid every time she interacts with anyone, and soon the fear of death by serial killer is thrown into the mix; she takes precautions but doggedly keeps pursuing her case.
The other big theme is mothers and daughters. Holly is dealing with her relationship to her dead mother, who is still fucking with her from beyond the grave. (Since this is King, I should explain that I don't mean as a ghost, I mean psychological baggage plus some unpleasant revelations via her will.) Bonnie Dahl and her mother had a big fight right before Bonnie was kidnapped, Holly spends a lot of time unraveling their relationship in retrospect while trying to figure out if Bonnie might have actually run away, and her mother's anguish both kicks off the plot and remains a force throughout the book. Barbara has a good relationship with her actual mother, but her mentorship with Olivia has aspects of mother-daughter/grandmother-daughter. Even one of the earlier victims has a subplot involving a surrogate mother-daughter relationship she had with a neighbor as her birth family was a disaster.
( Read more... )
This is a very polarizing book, but I loved it. The characters are great, it's often very moving, and it's got a banger of a climax and a perfect final line.
