From 2015, this is a second mystery novel from Stephen King, one that not only builds on the events of his prior mystery, Mr. Mercedes, but also surpasses that novel in both its believable suspense and its literary context. This novel features two familiar characters from the prior book: Bill Hodges, a retired detective, and Holly Gibney, now his middle-aged and brainy assistant at the detective service that Bill calls Finders Keepers. But at the core of this novel is a new character, the teenager Pete Saubers, who makes a fascinating discovery in a field not far from home.

What Pete finds is notebooks written by John Rothstein, a famous author of teenage angst who has retired to a quiet haven in New Hampshire and no longer publishes his fiction. These notebooks contain two unpublished novels that extend Rothstein’s Jimmy Gold series of three published novels. Rothstein is obviously patterned after J. D. Salinger, the actual author who also retired to New Hampshire after writing about teenagers. In this novel, two Rothstein readers have identified with Jimmy Gold, not only Pete but also a young Morris Bellamy, who becomes the villain of this novel.

It is because Morris is an understandable, if violent, villain, and because this novel’s denouement is much more natural than is that of Mr. Mercedes that I found this to be the superior work. While on still another level, I was fascinated by the worship a literary author prompts in the lives of these two youths. As well as by the contrast in their response to the notebooks, and how differently both their lives are changed as a result.

On the opening pages, a young Bellamy, with two accomplices, kills Rothstein, accusing him of betraying his readers. How? By ending the third novel with Jimmy Gold appearing to sell out to the world of advertising. But an ironic fate now raises its head. Bellamy, fearing being caught after the murder, flees home, hides the notebooks in a trunk, and buries them in a field behind his house—not having had time to read the two unpublished novels and learn how Jimmy’s fate has changed. And then, before he can dig them out to read, he commits a rape and receives a life sentence. With the result that for the next 35 years, Bellamy yearns for freedom so he can recover those notebooks, read them, and learn what happened to Jimmy Gold.

King alternates Bellamy’s life story with that of Pete Saubers, the other Rothstein fan, and his family. And his father, mother, and sister do make a fascinating family. Pete’s father, for example, was injured in the prior book when the car of the title deliberately plowed into a crowd of people. As a result, family tension is high as it falls on hard times.

The stories of young Pete and the grizzled Bellamy begin to come together 35 years after the original murder, when Pete finds the trunk with the notebooks, and reads the rest of the Jimmy Gold story. Whereupon, King continues the suspense, as he did in Mr. Mercedes, by alternating still more between the two adversaries, his young hero and this hardhearted criminal.

Along with the notebooks, Pete discovers in the trunk more than $20,000, which he uses to secretly support his poverty-stricken family. But finally the money runs out, and, with the family finances still depleted, he explores selling the notebooks. For the sale will also enable his provocative and smart younger sister Tina to go to the rich high school of her dreams.

By now, Bellamy, paroled from prison, has arrived back in the small Midwestern town of Northfield, where Pete lives. And, as he seeks out the notebooks, he discovers the one coincidence in this story—that Pete Saubers and his family now live in the same house where Bellamy himself grew up. Which has made it convenient for Pete, years later, to wander into the same field and discover where Bellamy had hidden the trunk with the notebooks.

As an aside, the title of this book reflects not just to Hodge’s retirement business but also to the “right” that Pete has to the money and the notebooks that he has found. For this novel is built on that key event.

Alternating among the two Rothstein fans, one seeking to read the notebooks and one seeking to sell them, along with the efforts of Hodges and Holly to support and protect Pete, the novel builds to a deadly confrontation between Pete and Bellamy, which explodes into a threat to Pete’s family, and eventually even puts at stake the existence of the notebooks themselves.

The richness of this novel evolves from its exploration of two points of view about our literary heritage and two points of view about our responsibility toward one another. All of which makes this work more than a tension-filled mystery. Through its reverberations of the world of J. D. Salinger, it draws us into a portrait of our attitude toward American culture, as well as into the tensions between the idealism and the violence that pervade our society.

There is violence here, note, but no horror. None of King’s trademark of the past. This is simply the King the storyteller, with a tale that fuels the imagination of every reader. Until the final chapter, that is, which introduces something new.

This is when Bill Hodges resumes his hospital visits to Brady Hartsfield, the killer of Mr. Mercedes. Because Bill is growing more and more suspicious that this villain is only pretending to remain in the coma he endured after being violently subdued at the end of Mr. Mercedes—and thus preventing from going off a bomb that would have killed hundreds of children. Hodges suspicion is confirmed after he leaves the hospital, for in the final paragraph Brady activates an e-reader, opens a distant water faucet, and tips over a photograph. All without moving from his hospital bed.

It is the only suggestion in this novel of a world beyond the natural, the only suggestion that King has not forgotten his origins as a novelist of horror. But what it also appears to do is to foreshadow the last in this series of three Northfield novels. It teases that something is going to happen in the third novel that will take us beyond our normal human experience. One can only hope that such developments will be believable. And hope for a similar literary or philosophical context that will also extend the story-telling of this final work in the series beyond the limits of a horror story. (May, 2019)