The 2010s was a decade chock full of amazing mysteries and thrillers. In particular, the crime thriller genre – inclusive of detective fiction, FBI thrillers, serial killer fiction, heist thrillers, police procedurals and many other whodunnits – has burned brightly. While the genre’s old guard continued to crank out plenty of winners, the decade’s best […]
The Bottom Line: Required reading for fans of The Shining, and a must for even casual Stephen King fans. If you didn’t catch Doctor Sleep when it was first released in 2014, the upcoming move release is a great time to catch up on this very worthy sequel to a classic. Here King returns to the […]
Newly updated to include King’s newest novel, The Institute! The reigning master of suspense is the author of more than 50 books and audiobooks, all of which have been international bestsellers. Carrie. It. Pet Cemetery. Misery. Thinner. All instant classics, and yet King’s craft seems to sweeten with age, with King still churning out some […]
The Bottom Line: A psychic thriller that ranks among King’s best. Stephen King’s latest thriller The Institute is in no way a sequel to Dr. Sleep (which itself was a sequel to The Shining), but thematically speaking, it’s a close cousin. As in Dr. Sleep, villains with terrifying psychic powers are hell bent on leveraging […]
The Bottom Line: Short, surprisingly sweet, and shockingly profound. In Castle Rock – the fictional Northeast setting for many of King’s stories – a web designer confides in a retired doctor friend that he is losing weight. He’s not on a diet, nor is he really exercising. The weight is just coming off at a […]
The Bottom Line: Although not officially a part of King’s Mr. Mercedes series, there’s enough left of the original trilogy’s magic here for one more good story. King’s marriage of the police procedural and horror genres pays off once again. In The Outsider, a small town is rocked when a longtime little league baseball coach is […]
The Bottom Line: Almost every egg King lays is made of pure gold, but not this one (see where this book ranks in our list of Stephen King’s Best Audiobooks). Still, that shouldn’t deter King fans from devouring every page. Sleeping Beauties, a collaboration between King and his son, Owen, is unlike any other Stephen […]
The Bottom Line: If you’ve read the first two books in King’s Bill Hodges trilogy, you can’t possibly miss the finale. If you haven’t read them, shame on you (see our reviews for those books here and here). In Room 217 of the Lakes Region Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic, something has awakened. Something evil. Brady Hartsfield, […]
The Bottom Line: The master of horror returns to his core genre with great success. In my view, many of Stephen King’s greatest books over the past two decades have not in fact been in the horror genre, but rather his crime fiction. In The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, a collection of short stories, King goes […]
The Bottom Line: A more-than worthy follow-up to King’s Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers is an intense, addictive and even touching morality tale. Those who fell in love with Retired Detective Bill Hodges in King’s previous outing will do so all over again. Finders Keepers begins with the tragic story of John Rothstein, an iconic author […]
