Serial killer questions frustrate King’s P.I.

If you’re a Stephen King fan, you’re probably familiar with private investigator Holly Gibney. She played a supporting role in the Bill Hodges trilogy, and took centre stage in 2023’s Holly.

That was a terrific novel, and Never Flinch (Scribner, 448 pages, $28), Gibney’s second star turn, is even better.

Holly’s juggling a couple of cases, including an off-the-books investigation into a potential serial killer, and nothing seems to be going even remotely smoothly.

If you’ve met Holly, then you know she’s easily frustrated and not exactly what you’d call diplomatic — character traits that frequently get her in trouble. On the other hand, she’s brilliant, thrives under pressure and refuses to back away from a fight.

The book features some of King’s best writing and a villain who’s so deliciously evil that you really want to boo as you’re reading. A wonderful novel.

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There’s down on your luck and then there’s Harper, a good woman for whom pretty much everything has gone bad. Her sisters, who really do love her, come up with a plan to help her out: they invite her to join the Wheel, an exclusive group that will, for a relatively small financial investment, provide Harper with enough money to dig herself out of the hole she’s in.

That’s the jumping-off point for El Dorado Drive (Putnam, 368 pages, $27), the latest brilliantly convoluted thriller from Megan Abbott.

Yes, the Wheel sounds like a pyramid scheme, but it’s not. It is, as Harper soon discovers, much, much worse — and by the time she’s figured out what she’s involved in, it could be too late to do anything about it.

Abbott has won pretty much every mystery-writing award there is, and if you’ve never read her, now’s an excellent time to start.

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John Marrs takes an extraordinary idea and makes it seem not only plausible, but weirdly possible.

Take his latest, The Family Experiment (Hanover Square Press, 384 pages, $25), for example. The idea: a new reality TV series allows prospective parents to create a virtual-reality child to see what parenting will really be like. It’s a way of advertising a new subscription service called Virtual Children and it’s just as creepy as it sounds.

Although it’s a standalone story, the book is set in the same world as Marrs’ The One (2017) and The Marriage Act (2023), and it has a lot in common with them: a rather dystopian approach to the near future, a cast of vividly realized characters and a story that absolutely refuses to go in the direction you’re expecting it to. A must-read, if you’re a fan of sci-fi stories set just around the corner.

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It took him long enough — pushing 80 years old, Dave Barry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning humour writer and novelist, has finally written an autobiography, Class Clown (Simon & Schuster, 256 pages, $26).

And it’s a real one, too, not a spoofy life story, not a lot of jokes strung together in book form. Sure, it’s deliriously funny in some places, but, especially in the early sections, it’s also serious and, particularly in the book’s opening chapters, downright touching.

Barry has a tough time believing he’s deserved the life he’s had. He’s a guy who — as he puts it — writes booger jokes for a living and who accidentally stumbled into humour-writing, but he’s won a major award (while wondering whether he deserved it), been the inspiration for a semi-popular TV sitcom and played in a rock band with Stephen King.

In his decades as a newspaper columnist, he mostly wrote about whatever struck his fancy, from exploding whales to lawnmower races to the songs of Neil Diamond, and he never intended to become famous for it.

Luckily for us, he did.

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Halifax freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month. You can follow him on Bluesky at @bookman.bsky.social.