ALA Booklist (Fri Apr 01 00:00:00 CDT 2016)

King's first mystery trilogy comes to an it's-definitely-over finish by largely sidestepping Finders Keepers (2015) to finish up business with vehicular killer Brady Hartsfield from Mr. Mercedes (2014). King, at last, can't resist going supernatural: Brady, comatose for six years, has been receiving the experimental drug Cerebellin, and though his body is worthless, he's gained telekinetic ability enough to make Carrie White jealous. By taking over the body of his doctor, Brady becomes "Dr. Z," distributing to kids he failed to kill in Mr. Mercedes Zappit game consoles preloaded with particularly nasty malware that, when activated, will compel its users to commit suicide. It's an impressively mean concept spurred by a constricted time line: our protag, retired detective Bill Hodges, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and has only three days before treatment begins. As with Doctor Sleep (2013), some of the paranormal elements feel hasty, and King overexplains plot while underexplaining motives. Still, the idea of a human drone is rich, and his sleuthing heroes are easy to love d miss when they are gone.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: King's mystery experiment has been page-flipping fun from the start, and no one's going to want to miss seeing how it all pans out.

Kirkus Reviews

You know it's a politicized time when the bad guy in a King novel loses points not strictly for being evil but for "living like Donald Trump." "It's always darkest before the dawn," King cheerfully reminds us at the very outset of this work of mayhem and murder, closing a trilogy devoted to retired detective Bill Hodges and investigative partner Holly Gibney. Yes, it is, and "darker than a woodchuck's asshole," too, reminding us that we're in King's New England, where weird things are always happening. Bill—well, his real first name is Kermit—has a doozy of a case from the very start: those weird things leapfrog back to the first volume, to a time, seven years before the present, when the perp of the so-called Mercedes Massacre drifted off into comaland. Throughout the trilogy, King has both honored and toyed with the conventions of hard-boiled crime fiction, and it seemed as if he'd be staking out that genre as his own; now, though, he steers back into the realm of horror that for sure belongs to him, for the baddie, Brady Hartsfield, who had merely been an incest-committing mass murderer before, has now acquired psychic powers and is experimenting merrily with ways to convince the innocent to kill themselves—and perhaps worse. Having lost some mobility, Brady is deeply ticked off—and, as King writes, "Being in a situation like that, who wouldn't want to kill a bunch of people?" Right, and it's up to Kermit/Bill and Holly to stop "Z-Boy," as he's now calling himself, from further mischief, very much more easily said than done. Suffice it to say that heavy machinery—having been run over, King hates cars, and having grown up when he did, he doesn't have much use for gizmo technology, either—figures into both the crime and its cure, and suffice it to say that both are exceedingly messy. Gleefully gross. And a few of the principals even outlive the tale, meaning there's hope for a sequel, assuming King wants to play with the definition of trilogy, too....

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

After two straightforward crime thrillers, MWA Grand Master King (Finders Keepers) torques this third and final novel featuring retired detective Bill Hodges into his trademark terror territory. Hodges has long suspected that Brady Hartsfield, the brain-damaged mass murderer captured at the end of Mr. Mercedes, has been faking his catatonia, and his suspicions are reinforced by rumors circulating in Brady-s hospital ward (in what may be a Midwestern state) that he can move objects telekinetically. The truth is actually worse: with the help of secretly administered experimental drugs and skillfully hacked computer technology, Brady has found a way to project his personality into others and commandeer them as his -organic wheelchairs.- The stage is set for Brady to compel mass suicide among users of a handheld gaming device whose interface he-s hijacked, and to draw out Hodges to settle a personal score. King has dealt before with this novel-s different themes-endowment with dangerous supernatural powers, the zombifying effect of modern consumer electronics-but he finds fresh approaches to them and inventive ways to introduce them in the lives of his recurring cast of sympathetic characters, whose pains and triumphs the reader feels. King-s legion of fans will find this splice of mystery and horror a fitting finale to his Bill Hodges trilogy. Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents. (June)