Finished: Finders Keepers (King) A thoroughly page-turning book, the sequel to the equally page-turning Mr. Mercedes. In Mr. Mercedes a psychopath stole a Mercedes and ran down a bunch of people standing in the early morning hours in a job fair line, killing several and wounding more. He was then pursued throughout the book by retired police detective Bill Hodges, and his unlikely assistants, yard boy Jerome, and highly functioning savant, Holly. The trio ends up saving the day when they prevent the psychopath, Brady, from blowing up a concert full of teenyboppers. However, rather than kill him, they only put him in a coma after hitting him in the head. Doctors say he will never again think cognitively, but in Finders Keepers, he has come awake and sits for hours staring. Bill Hodges visits him often to see if he can illicit any kind of a response, but only weird things happen, and usually after Hodges leaves so he doesn't witness the weird things....like Brady looking at a picture of him and his equally psycho and now deceased mother and making it tip over. That's just a very tiny bit of the Finders Keepers story, though. This story focuses on the family of one of the victims of the vehicle nightmare, Tom Saubers, who was maimed horribly, having to relearn how to walk all over again. Already out of a job, hence the job fair line, and with a school teacher wife, Linda, a thirteen year old son, Pete, and nine year old daughter, Tina, the marriage of Tom and Linda Saubers is disintegrating, and vocally, right before the eyes of their angst-ridden kids. One day hiking in the woods behind their house, Pete finds an old buried trunk full of moleskin notebooks and quite a bit of money...$20,000 to be exact! He thinks about turning it all in to the police, and then realizes that if he sends the money to his parents a little bit at a time from an anonymous source, maybe it will help them get back through the rough financial times and back on their feet...and sure enough, it does! What Pete doesn't know is that that money and the moleskin notebooks were stolen from famous author John Rothstein thirty years before. In a horrific opening scene of the book, we read as three young hoodlums break into Rothstein's remote cabin, antagonize him into giving his safe combination, and then kill him before taking the money and the books. What two of the hoodlums don't know is that it's only the books that interest psychopath Morris Bellamy. Morris is obsessed with John Rothstein's character Jimmy Gold, from his famous trilogy, The Runner series. (Rothstein and The Runner sounds alot like Updike and his Rabbit, Run series to me!) Anyway, apparently in the first two Runner books, Jimmy Gold has defied convention and his parents and become quite the f.u. rebel. But, by the third book, he's given in to what everyone else has and is married with children and living in a :::gasp:::suburb. This changing of his favorite character has sent young Morris Bellamy over the edge and he decides to kill Rothstein for it...but not before getting his hands on whatever else the recluse has been writing for the past twenty years. So, Morris does all that, and then he kills his two partners who both thought they were just there for the money. Morris has a friend, Andy, who works at a bookstore who has bragged that he could sell any Rothstein writings that came about for quite a bit of money some day. Morris takes this to mean they have a plan, and proceeds to kill Rothstein and steal the notebooks. When Morris goes to Andy, Andy is appalled, screeching at Morris that John Rothstein's murder is all over the news and that he was never part of his plan. Besides he wouldn't be able to sell anything by Rothstein until he had his own shop, several years from now, and especially now that Rothstein was just murdered.  Because of Andy's paranoia, Morris is certain that the police will be on him any minute, so before he can even read any of the moleskin notebooks, he lines the old trunk he bought in plastic and buries the books and money in the forest. Then, as fate would have it, he goes out, gets drunk, blacks out and violently rapes a woman, getting himself sent to prison for 35 years!! Fast forward 31 of those years and we come to the night that Tom Saubers is hit by the Mercedes. A few months later, Pete finds the old trunk that Morris buried out in the woods behind the house that Morris also used to live in, that is now occupied by the Saubers family!! So, thirteen year old Pete starts sending his parents the mysterious money, $500 a month for four years, until it runs out. It really does help keep them on their feet while Pete's dad is able to recuperate and learn to walk all over, and finally start establishing a bit of a business in real estate. Meanwhile, Pete reads all the John Rothstein notebooks and realizes that he's reading two additional novels about Jimmy Gold from The Runner series, a book he had to read in school. In the two new novels, never published of course, Jimmy Gold apparently reverts back to his old self and ways. Pete falls in love with Rothstein's writing almost as much as Morris did, but not in a psychotic way. When Pete is seventeen, a junior in high school, a great student, especially in English Lit, and thinking of colleges for the next year, the money finally runs out. He thinks they'll probably do okay now as a family, but his sister Tina is dying to go to the private school that all her friends do, and her parents can't quite swing that. Pete begins to toy with what he could possibly do to make his sister's dreams come true and contacts a seller of old books...Andy! That's right....35 years later, Andy has his own book selling shop. He's also got a reputation for doing things not exactly above board, which is what young Pete will need if he's going to try to sell a novel from a man that he now knows was murdered and his work and money stolen. Pete thinks he would be in major trouble now for giving all the money to his parents, so he doesn't want to go through proper channels. Well, it just so happens that right as Pete is trying to sell some of the notebooks to Andy...Morris Bellamy is finally getting paroled! He's been in prison for 35 years and is now 59 years old, and he still has only one thought on his mind....go get his moleskin notebooks and read them. For 35 years he's dreamed about what John Rothstein could have possibly written about. Was there more Jimmy Gold? So, the first time he can duck his parole officer, Morris makes his way to where he buried the books and he's thrilled to dig up the trunk. However, when it comes up empty, he's shocked and then enraged. Who in the world has stolen his notebooks??? The only person he can think of who even knew he had the books was his old pal Andy, so he makes his way to Andy's bookshop and pays him a visit. Andy is shocked to see Morris out of prison. Before Morris brutally kills Andy, he makes him tell him that Andy has been making a deal with the real person who has the books...a teenage boy, Pete Saubers. Morris leaves the dead Andy in his book store office, puts the "closed" sign up, takes his car and goes to stake out the Saubers family. Of course, it all makes sense to him when he sees they live in his old house! Meanwhile, Pete has been suffering and nervous and is becoming fidgety and thin. Tina is very worried about him and turns to her best friend Barbara, who was one of the teenyboppers who was saved from being bombed at the concert in Mr. Mercedes. She also happens to be Jerome's little sister! So, Barbara gets in touch with Bill Hodges, who is now working as a private detective with Holly, while Jerome is off at an Ivy League college getting his degree. Tina breaks down to Hodges and Holly and tells them she thinks Pete is in serious trouble. As a matter of fact, she thinks her brother is somehow the one who sent their family the surprise money for all those years, but where could he have gotten the money? Jerome comes home for the weekend, and Hodges, Holly and Jerome hop right on the case. Pete, however, can see them coming a mile away after a brief discussion with Hodges, and he loses them on the day he goes to finalize his deal with Andy. Of course, it's not Andy waiting for him in the shop, it's Morris Bellamy! As Pete sees Andy's decaying body and with Morris' gun pointed at him, he realizes he won't make it out of there alive if he tells Morris where the notebooks are. Pete, being younger and more agile, throws a full decanter at Morris' head, dodges his bullets and runs from the bookstore. Meanwhile, Hodges, Holly and Jerome have figured out how much danger Pete is in because they've figured out that Pete has John Rothstein's old notebooks and they put two and two together about Morris Bellamy being out of prison. Anyway, Pete and Hodges finally talk by phone and Pete indicates that he's worried about his mom and sister at home...that "the bad guy" (Morris Bellamy) knows where they live because he lived there when he was a kid!! Before Pete OR Hodges can get to the house, of course Morris Bellamy gets there first and he shoots Pete's mom. :-( Then, he takes Tina to the old abandoned Rec building near their house and calls Pete. He wants the notebooks traded for Pete's sister! Little does Morris know that the notebooks are right under his own nose!! Pete has hidden them at the Rec building! Pete high tails it to the Rec building with a lighter, some lighter fluid and a plan. With a gun pointed at his tied up sister, Pete threatens Bellamy that he will burn the pile of notebooks, which Pete has poured out on the floor in front of Bellamy's stunned eyes, if he does not release his sister. Morris is crazed with curiosity and can't take his eyes off the notebooks as Pete knows exactly how to hit him where it hurts by letting him know that there are in fact two more Jimmy Gold novels in there, referencing an old girlfriend of Jimmy Gold's from the first book. Don't you want to know what happens? Just as it looks like Morris may give in, he raises the gun like he's going to shoot and Hodges comes down the stairs swinging. The gun goes off hitting no one, but the shock of the sounds makes Pete accidentally drop the lighter on the pile of notebooks!!! Morris screams in horror as he watches his beloved books go up in flames! It's been 35 years and he still never got to read one word! As Hodges and Pete struggle to get Tina untied before the building burns down around them, Morris keeps diving into the burning pile of notebooks trying to save them. The last thing the trio sees as they escape out the window is Morris' charred body still groping for the books. Whew! They make their way back to Pete's house where Holly has stayed until an ambulance comes for Pete's mom...yes, she survives. Yay! I really thought Stephen King was going to kill off the mom, but wait....that's Disney that always kills off the mothers isn't it? ;-) So...in the end, there are no charges against Pete for doing what he did as a young teen. Instead, he's the only person in the world who has read the final two novels belonging to Rothstein, so he gets to actually write his own article for The New Yorker about it! In the last chapter, Hodges once again visits Brady, the killer from Mr. Mercedes, and needles him to try and get a reaction. Hodges just knows that Brady is looking at him, but he can't prove it. After Hodges leaves, Brady concentrates really hard and the water in his hospital bathroom turns on and off, and the picture of he and his mother once again falls over face down. doo-doo doo-doo, doo-doo doo-doo! I think the third book of the trilogy most likely will be Brady waking up and/or causing some kind of telepathic havoc, no? :-)