Stephen King’s favorite private investigator returns in “Never Flinch,” the sixth novel by King featuring Holly Gibney, who readers first met in the Bill Hodges trilogy (“Mr. Mercedes,” “Finders Keepers,” “End of Watch”) and who then helped solved the murders at the heart of “The Outsider” and “Holly.”
In “Never Flinch,” Holly cracks two more cases, one as the lead security escort for a polarizing author touring the nation to talk about women’s reproductive freedom, and the other back home in Ohio, as a serial killer preys on jurors following a miscarriage of justice.
The biggest connection between the two cases is classic King — the killers have dead Daddy issues. We meet them both relatively early in the plot and spend time inside their heads, though the true identity of one of them is a mystery until closer to the end. One of the murderers supplies the novel’s title, recalling how his abusive and overbearing father berated him to “push through to the bitter end. No flinching, no turning away.”
Even with two killers talking to themselves, Holly is still the star of the book. She continues to “attract weirdos the way a magnet attracts iron filings,” is how Holly’s friend Barbara puts it. More often than not, Holly’s obsessive compulsive disorder helps her “think around corners,” as one of the story’s detectives says.
King also brings back Barbara’s brother, Jerome, and introduces some dynamic new characters, including Sista Bessie (“She’s not the Beatles, but she’s a big deal”), a soul singer whose comeback concert serves as the nexus for the convergence of the novel’s two storylines. When they do, readers will enjoy the very Kingly ending. It’s not quite the pigs’ blood from “Carrie,” but it’s satisfying.
The pages turn very quickly in the final third of the book as all the characters arrive back in Dayton, Ohio (“the second mistake on the lake”), where we first met Holly, and where psychopath Brady Hartsfield began his killing spree in “Mr. Mercedes.” Will the Mingo Auditorium be the site of another massacre or will Holly and her amateur detectives save the day again?
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