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Resumen
Resumen
#1 New York Times Bestseller * A New York Times Notable Book * An NPR Best Book of the Year
Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King's most compelling and resourceful characters, returns in this chilling "exploration of grief and delusion, just pure undistilled evil" ( New York magazine) as she uncovers the truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town.
When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency, hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly Gibney is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just passed away. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny's desperate voice makes it impossible to turn her down.
Meanwhile, mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each other, and semi-retired lifelong academics. But they are also harboring a shocking, unholy secret in the basement of their well-kept, book-lined home, one that may be related to Bonnie's disappearance. And it will prove nearly impossible to discover what they are up to...for they are savvy, they are patient, and they are ruthless. Now Holly must summon all of her formidable talents to outthink and outmaneuver these unimaginably depraved and brilliantly disguised adversaries in this chilling and unforgettable masterwork from Stephen King.
Reseñas (5)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
PI Holly Gibney returns after King's 2020 novella If It Bleeds to face off against a pair of deliciously wicked predators in this lurid if somewhat plodding thriller. It's July 2021, and the Finders Keepers detective agency is on hiatus, with Holly taking time off to mourn her mother, who recently died of Covid. She's lured back to work by a series of persuasive calls from a woman named Penny Dahl, whose preteen daughter, Bonnie, disappeared three weeks earlier. As Holly begins to poke around the neighborhood where Bonnie was last seen, residents alert her to the disappearance of 11-year-old Peter "Stinky" Steinman, who vanished from the same area three years ago. Additional conversations point Holly in the direction of former college professors Rodney and Emily Harris, whose veneer of elderly innocence is complicated by rumors that they may be connected to a slew of missing persons cases stretching back nearly a decade. At first, Holly investigates the Harrises as a matter of protocol, but it doesn't take long for her to realize she's facing down a pair of cunning foes with far darker secrets than she could've imagined. The narrative can dawdle, with things starting to feel especially padded in the middle stretch, but readers are likely to forgive the delay by the time the stomach-turning dénouement comes around. This pitch-black thriller ends on a high note. Agent: Liz Darhansoff, Darhansoff & Verrill. (Sept.)
Guardian Review
Holly opens with a scene of peculiar horror. In 2012 Jorge Castro, a creative writing teacher in a university town, is jogging on a misty evening. He sees two colleagues, professors Emily and Rodney Harris, struggling to load Rodney in his wheelchair into their van. "She can't be much more than seventy. Her husband looks much older." He offers to help push the chair up the ramp. Too late, he realises their objective. Jorge wakes confined to a cage in their basement. To what end, we do not know, but the specially constructed cage does not bode well, nor do the tools hanging from the wall, or the other facilities provided: "he knows what the Porta-John means: someone intends for him to be here a while". Emily Harris enters and offers him a raw calf's liver, "a slab of dark red meat floating in an even darker red liquid". Eat this or nothing, she tells him. Eleven years later, Holly Gibney has just finished participating in her mother's funeral over Zoom when a new client, Penny Dahl, leaves a voice message begging her to investigate her missing daughter Bonnie. Slowly, Holly begins to connect the dots between Bonnie and other disappearances in the neighbourhood over the years. Stephen King's resilient, solitary private detective has appeared in four recent novels - Mr Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch and The Outsider. But this, as the title implies, is her book. As a character, she leaps off the page - dogged and resourceful, drawn to a profession that requires the sorts of interpersonal skills she struggles with as someone on the autism spectrum, with obsessive-compulsive disorder and sensory processing disorder. "Tears are hard for Holly to handle", but she has chosen a path where tears are all she sees. The novel is not so much a whodunit as a whydunit, moving between Holly in the present and the Harrises' victims over the years Macabre college professors the Harrises are no less acutely observed. The tenderness and loyalty between them, the care as well as the emotional attrition born of a long marriage, is both plausible and chilling. The novel is not so much a whodunit as a whydunit, moving between Holly in the present and each of the Harrises' victims over the years. Each capture is evoked in devastating detail, from the vegan who refuses to cooperate to a teen skateboarder whose mother descends into alcoholism after his unsolved disappearance. As the narratives converge and the true nature of their project is revealed, the horror mounts. Holly, as one would expect from a King novel, goes deep into the darkness. King has said that the novel originated with one scene: a daughter at her mother's virtual funeral. Holly Gibney's fictional universe is rooted firmly in our reality. The story takes place during lockdown: characters bump elbows in greeting, exchange the names of their vaccine brands. Holly's mother, an anti-vaxxer, died of coronavirus. The peril and the isolation of Covid-19 are everywhere. There's a lot of sorrow in Holly: for the lives lost during the pandemic; for the inevitable decline and failure of the human body; for the flawed power of familial love. "Like so many of her mother's teachings," Holly reflects, "it had stuck with her only child. Oranges are gold in the morning and lead at night. Sleeping on your left side wears out your heart. Only sluts wear half-slips." Later, Holly dreams of her mother "in Holly's old bedroom. 'Remember who you belong to,' Charlotte says. She goes out and locks the door behind her." The Harrises' objective, eventually revealed, may be a sly commentary on the parasitic nature of academia - because this is also a novel about writing. Jorge Castro, the first victim, is a creative writing teacher; Emily Harris reads creative-writing submissions for the department; Jerome Robinson, a young Black character, is writing a book, and his even younger sister, Barbara, is an aspiring poet. Barbara acquires a mentor in Olivia Kingsbury, a celebrated poet now in her final years. Like all the plot strands, this weaves itself into the novel's conclusion, but it's a pleasure in its own right for its meditations on writing and truth. "They don't teach that in college, do they? No,'' says Olivia to Barbara during one of their many talks. "The idea that the creative impulse is a way to get rid of poison ¿ no. They don't teach that." Lyrical and horrifying, Holly is a hymn to the grim pursuit of justice. The detective's dogged search for truth drives the book; Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, Trump and the 6 January insurrection are all persistent themes. Even the Harrises are railing against the injustices of time and age. And the novel itself is striving towards an expulsion of poison, and a healing.
Kirkus Review
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel. Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character "stole his heart." Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn't exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it's possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn't understand how this phrase is currently used--and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable. Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Reseña de Booklist
Private investigator Holly Gibney, who played supporting roles in Mr. Mercedes (2014), Finders Keepers (2015), and The Outsider (2018), takes center stage in King's new novel. A woman has gone missing, and her distraught mother begs Holly to take the case. Holly would rather not--the COVID-19 pandemic is in full swing, and Holly's own mother has just died, but as King's readers will know, Holly is unable to turn away from someone in distress. As she digs into the case, she soon discovers that the missing woman might not be the only person who has disappeared in the past few years. A serial killer? Or something altogether more evil? Opening up a new Stephen King novel and encountering his conversational prose is like settling into a comfortable chair or digging into a favorite meal. There's an immediate sense of satisfaction. In her new leading role, Holly shines. She's tough, relentless, and compassionate while at the same time being vulnerable and prone to lapses of confidence. The story is the kind of thing King excels at, too--dark, mysterious, and deeply unsettling. This is the novel Holly deserves.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: King is always on hold lists, but requests will ratchet way up as a favorite female character takes the helm.
Library Journal Review
King gives former supporting player Holly Gibney (introduced in Mr. Mercedes) her own full-length novel to solve the case of a missing person. Private investigator Holly is supposed to be on bereavement leave after the death of her mother, but she can't dismiss the persistent Penny Dahl. Penny's daughter Bonnie disappeared while biking home from work a month earlier, and the police didn't have time for more than a cursory investigation into what seemed to be a case of an adult walking away from her own life. Holly investigates, with help from friends. She soon realizes that Bonnie's is not an isolated case; others have gone missing in the last few years. The only similarity among the disappeared people is that they were last seen in the same area. The deeper Holly goes, the more convinced she becomes that something very sinister is going on. VERDICT King's choice to set the novel in the middle of COVID works, both to develop his characters and to keep Holly off base, emotionally and professionally. He eschews the supernatural here but finds all the horror possible in the evil that "normal" people may do. Mystery and horror readers will find much to love.--Jane Jorgenson