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‘End Of Watch:’ Latest Stephen King Novel Coming To Book Stores In June

By Anne Sewell
Published on: 21:08 PST, Apr 10, 2016

Anyone who has read Mr Mercedes and Finders Keepers by popular author, Stephen King will be thrilled to note that the final book in the Bill Hodges Trilogy, End of Watch, will be available in June 2016.

To avoid too many spoilers for those who have not yet read the novels, briefly, the story so far is that in Mr. Mercedes, eight people were killed and many more badly injured after Brady Hartsfield, an emotionally disturbed young man, drove a stolen Mercedes car into a crowd of people queuing at a job fair.

Newly retired police detective Bill Hodges was on the job in a private capacity, attempting to track down the Mercedes killer. Eventually Hartsfield, who plans an even worse attack on the local population, ends up in a hospital with a serious and untreatable brain injury after one of Hodges’ sidekicks attacks him.

Stephen King called the novel his first “hard-boiled detective book” and Mr. Mercedes went on to win the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, as well as the Goodreads Choice Award for 2014 in the “Mystery and Thriller” category.

When he first started Mr. Mercedes, King promised a trilogy of good reading, based on the character of the retired police detective Bill Hodges, and he has kept that promise.

In Finders Keepers, the story tells of a petty criminal, Morris Bellamy, who murders an acclaimed author after his latest work didn’t meet his satisfaction and steals a pile of handwritten notebooks by the author, hiding them away in a trunk with a lot of cash he found in the safe, before he is arrested and heads to jail.

In this second installment of the Bill Hodges Trilogy, years later a young man, Peter Saubers, find the notebooks and cash and comes up with a way of profiting from them to support his family, who were at that time struggling with money problems, mainly due to the fact his father was injured in the Mercedes incident.

When Bellamy finally gets out of jail, he goes looking for his hidden treasure, only to find it was gone. Needless to say, he is not impressed and he tracks the books down to young Saubers.

Bill Hodges once again gets involved in the story and teams up with Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson to rescue Saubers from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris.

Fast forward to the third book in the Bill Hodges trilogy by Stephen King and things are going to get even more horrific. Hartsfield, the perpetrator in the Mercedes Massacre, has been in the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic for five years. Doctors consider him to be in a vegetative state and that anything approaching a complete recovery is unlikely.

However, behind his blank stare and the drool running down from his mouth, Hartsfield is awake and aware and has now developed evil and deadly new powers, allowing him to wreak unimaginable havoc without ever leaving his hospital room.

Brady remembers who delivered the blow to his head that put him in the brain injury ward and is planning on getting revenge on Bill Hodges and his sidekick in his private detective business, Holly Gibney (who caused the injury in the first place.) However, he is not only planning unimaginable revenge on Hodges and Gibney, but on the people of the entire city.

As reported by KUTV News, Stephen King will be heading out on a book tour for his new novel End of Watch in June this year.

According to the official Stephen King website, End of Watch will bring the Hodges trilogy to a “sublimely terrifying conclusion,” which will combine the hard-boiled detective fiction of Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers, with the scary supernatural suspense that is King’s trademark.

[Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images]

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