Thursday, July 10, 2025
'NEVER FLINCH'.....STEPHEN KING'S FAVORITE P.I.TAKES ON TWO SEPARATE BUT EQUAL PSYCHOS......
Never Flinch by Stephen King (2025)
We love us some Uncle Stevie, but to be honest, we're not nearly as enamored with his Holly Gibney character as he is.
King dearly loves Holly, the shy, mousy, Mom-dominated introvert who over the course of six previous books, blossomed into an expert sleuth and all around indomitable (yet underestimated) battler of evil.
You never know whom King will throw at her......either very real flesh and blood villains or one of his straight-from-the-depths-of-hell other worldly monsters.
Now running her own detective agency, Holly usually uses her self effecting demeanor and unerring instincts to hunt down bail jumpers......until she's called upon to take on cases that put her in the dangerous path of Stephen King-sized villains.
In 'Never Flinch', she's up against not one, but two separate loons with murder on their addled minds.....for the first one, she's merely contributing her Sherlock Holmes-ian insights for her friend, a stymied police detective.
The elusive 'Bill Wilson' is on an odd vengeance fueled rampage. He seeks a form of cruel, cosmic payback on behalf of a poor soul wrongly accused, imprisoned and then murdered by a fellow inmate. Bill's traveling about and murdering total strangers who serve as randomly picked proxy victims representing the jurors who convicted the innocent man.
At the same time, Holly's taken on the unlikely task of bodyguarding the controversial Kate McKay, a fiery pro-choice activist on a cross country speaking tour. Though Kate's views align with the majority of Americans, she's a lightning rod for right-wing Trumptards. And now she's in the crosshairs of Chris, a young cross-dressing lunatic and rogue member of a notorious cult-like church. In short, a MAGA moron on meth, on a holy assassin's crusade to send Kate straight to hell.
As you would expect from Stephen King, these varying plotlines all converge in a stretched out finale that tosses in heaping amounts of terror, suspense violence and even the inclusion of 'Sista Bessie' an elderly, beloved jazz songstress.
Try as we might, we simply cannot work up the amount of affection and adoration that King holds for Holly Gibney. We admire her spunk, her bloodhound dedication to cracking her cases, her ability to remold and strengthen her character after a lifetime of living under the oppressive thumb of her mother. Sorry, Uncle Stevie, she's just not that damn interesting or compelling to many of your readers, including this one.
But as one of King's 'constant readers' we wouldn't dream of missing it, even if this Holly adventure isn't among the author's best work.
3 stars (***).
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