End of Watch

End of Watch – by Stephen King

O.K. First thing’s first: this is part 3 of Stephen King’s “Bill Hodges” trilogy, but this book is actually a sequel to the first book of the series – Mr. Mercedes.  In fact, I would strongly recommend that you don’t read this one until you read Mr. Mercedes.   The second book of the trilogy, Finders Keepers, has the same characters yet it’s completely unrelated to the plot of the other two.  To be fair, all three of these books are pretty good, but I’m not really a fan of books that ‘continue the story’ of an earlier book without giving the reader some sort of warning or introductory chapter that catches the reader up who may have not read the earlier work or, in my case, read it but forgot most of it.   Ironically King did just this with his ‘Dark Tower’ series of books.  He gave a nice handy recap at the beginning of each subsequent volume so the reader could easily transition into the new story.  He didn’t do that here.  He should have.

So I wasn’t really happy with the first 100 pages or so. Fortunately, by the time I finally got that far, I was able to remember the bulk of Mr. Mercedes since King, thankfully, frequently interjected many of the key plot events into this new story.   Again, good for me, but what about the reader who didn’t have the luxury of reading the first book before this one?  Well, King keeps things fresh in this novel since he adds his trademark woo-woo to this particular novel. By ‘woo-woo’ I mean the unseen, unexplained, supernatural that makes readers suspend their disbelief.  King doesn’t apply this supernatural twist to many of his books. In fact, both books 1 and 2 of this trilogy were basically simple detective/thriller stories.  This made it somewhat jarring if one was expecting the same, straightforward story this time around.

To give a brief summary of the plot, retired Detective Bill Hodges and his ‘team’ have moved on about eight years since they foiled the terrorist plot of Brady Hartsfield (‘Mr. Mercedes’). Hartsfield was seriously injured in his failed attempt and is now in a vegetative state at the local hospital doing nothing, it seems, but staring into space. Bill Hodges and members of the local police check in on Hartsfield from time to time to see if there’s any improvement in his condition.  You get the feeling that everyone wishes he would improve so they can take the bastard out and lynch him.  Although Hartsfield is basically a blank slate, Hodges can’t help but think that something isn’t right about Hartsfield.  Is he really that far-gone?  Or is he brilliantly faking out the rest of the world and only pretending to be a fried noodle so he can “get away” with his heinous acts that he committed several years ago?

Here’s where the woo-woo comes in.  I won’t go into detail but let’s just say that a less-than-ethical doctor starts administering less-than-ethical drugs to Hartsfield to experiment, and things go wrong.  Before we know it, Hartsfield is able to control people outside of his confined hospital walls and do much of the damage that was denied him when the Bill Hodges and his crew foiled his plans and saved the day many years ago.

This book is much more akin to King’s style than the first two books of the trilogy.  After so many books by King that are similar, you really don’t feel like that you’re exploring new territory, but you feel satisfied overall with the journey and the conclusion.  It’s a bit like visiting a new amusement park and riding a roller coaster.  Sure, you may not have ridden this particular roller coaster before, but you still feel satisfied after the ride was over, even though it wasn’t that much different than most every other roller coaster you’ve ridden at every other amusement park.

As great of an author as King is, he still displays serious limitations at times.  I won’t go into many of his violations that grate on my nerves since the majority of them are (thankfully) absent from this book.  In this particular book, though, King is guilty of overcommunicating some of the facts that he’s trying to get across to the reader.  This is awfully apparent with his main character Bill Hodges.  Bill is old (approaching 70) and is in pretty-bad shape health wise.  For whatever reason, King feels obligated to remind us of this fact on just about every single page.  

Every. Single. Page.

It really becomes frustrated to read over and over and over and over and over again dialogue such as:

“Bill clutched the side of his stomach in pain….”
“Bill was feeling particularly awful since his medication was wearing off…..”
“Bill’s stomach could only handle banana pudding…..”
“Bill felt worse than when he got shot in the leg 30 years ago…..”
“Bill hoped that throwing up would make him feel better…..”

And on and on and on.    Every. Single. Page.  If you’re reading this review, Mr. King, this really isn’t necessary.  Reminding your readers of Bill’s condition every 20 pages or so is fine, but good Lord……

So a good book and a satisfying entry and ending to the trilogy.  I should also point out that one of the main characters in this book, Holly Gibney, is prevalently featured in a later book of King’s: The Outsider.  To be fair, I think it’s o.k. that King retire Gibney, as well as the rest of the characters from this series.  It was a fun run, but it’s time to move on.