Stephen king’s ‘never flinch’ is a gripping detective tale | members only

Stephen King, 77, has been so wildly successful for so long — more than 50 years — that it’s easy to take him for granted. Every year, like clockwork, Maine’s master of the macabre manages

to deliver a harrowing new novel or a chilling collection of short stories, and we just expect it to be great. But his ease in dreaming up white-knuckle tales of terror tends to overshadow

the fact that King is a singular prose stylist. His voice is all his, and his fans can recognize it blindfolded at 10 paces. That’s certainly the case with King’s latest novel, _Never

Flinch_, where he downshifts from the dark psychological horror of 2024’s short story collection _You Like It Darker_ to spin a stunning detective mystery. (King modestly notes in an

afterword that “this was a difficult book to write, partially because I had surgery to repair a damaged hip in September 2023,” but, he adds, he’s “happy enough” with it.) _Never Flinch_

unspools in and around Buckeye City, Ohio — a change in setting from King’s usual haunted Maine backwaters — where we meet Izzy Jaynes, the hardscrabble town’s relentless and relentlessly

likable police detective. After the department receives an anonymous letter threatening the murder of “13 innocents and 1 guilty” as an act of “atonement for the needless death of an

innocent,” Jaynes snaps into action. There's a serial killer on the loose. But what’s this righteous nut’s motive? Simon & Schuster The author's latest brings back a favorite

King character, detective Holly Gibney. It doesn’t take the hard-boiled and whip-smart Jaynes long to connect the letter to the prison death of a man wrongly accused of pedophilia. The 13

innocents and one guilty are the jury, judge and prosecutor who sent him upstate. Jaynes runs her latest theories on the case by her old friend, you guessed it, Holly Gibney of the Finders

Keepers detective agency (you may remember her from King’s Bill Hodges Trilogy as well as _The Outsider, If It Bleeds _and the aptly named _Holly_). Meanwhile, a second would-be murderer is

stalking the best-selling feminist author Kate McKay (a “monster of ego” whose “tongue is a Ginsu knife,” King writes) as she crisscrosses the country on a book tour whose stops are more

like whipped-up political rallies than staid literary events. The tale feels like an homage to the sort of pulp procedural you’d have found on a spinning pharmacy rack 50 years ago, when

King first cut his teeth as a novelist. It’s lightning-paced, lurid and made for bingeing.  But it’s also smart and ambitious , with a sprawling, multistrand narrative that King weaves

together masterfully. I was already casting the Hollywood version in my head as I was turning the pages. (This fall, look for the film adaptations of two of his novels: _The Long Walk_,

which he published in 1979 under the pen name Richard Bachman, and 1982’s _The Running Man_.) Giving away too much of _Never Flinch_’s plot would be churlish, especially when it’s so

gripping and vise-tight. But let’s just say you won’t predict the enthralling last act. Once again, the merry-prankster author is toying with us — and we love the game.