You always get your money’s worth with mega-bestselling author Stephen King.
The guy knows how to fill up pages, and although it’s no 1,000-plus tome like “The Stand,” “Never Flinch,” his seventh Holly Gibney outing, is 448 pages strong.
To be sure, King has more to offer than a solid page-to-cost ratio. He could write the book equivalent of bubble wrap and I would still want to read it, but what is delivered — swathed in shipping material — sometimes fails to meet expectations. Unfortunately, that’s the case with King’s latest.
Holly Gibney debuted in 2014’s “Mr. Mercedes,” the first book in King’s Bill Hodges trilogy. Holly is introduced as an unstable technological savant with subterranean levels of self-esteem who connects with the retired detective as he tracks a killer responsible for getting behind the wheel of a Mercedes and mowing down several people outside a job fair. As the investigation goes on, Holly begins to find her footing and to piece together the confidence her mother systematically shredded.
In the next novels, “Finders Keepers” and “End of Watch,” Holly blossoms under Hodges’ tutelage, discovering that she is a pretty good detective herself, one with well-developed intuition (although the attribute is often exhibited as something “nagging at her, and she should know what it is, but she does not.” It comes in handy as some of the cases, like “The Outsider” (Cynthia Erivo played Holly in the HBO adaptation) and novella “If It Bleeds,” brush the supernatural.
2023’s “Holly” finds her coming into her own as she looks for a missing young woman, an investigation that will force Holly to come to terms with her fraught relationship with her less-than-ideal mother.
With “Never Flinch,” Holly’s growth as a character comes to a screeching halt.
For reasons that don’t make sense within the arc King has created, Holly is drawn into becoming the bodyguard for Kate McKay, a women’s rights activist with a stalker whose violence grows as McKay’s cross-country lecture tour continues. Holly hits the road with the activist and brings along a gun, despite her deep need to be near her home and her abhorrence of weapons. Motivation is problematic, to say the least.
