When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just died. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny Dahl’s desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down.
Mere blocks from where Bonnie Dahl disappeared live Professors Rodney and Emily Harris. They are the picture of bourgeois respectability: married octogenarians, devoted to each other, and semi-retired lifelong academics. But they are harbouring an unholy secret in the basement of their well-kept, book-lined home, one that may be related to Bonnie’s disappearance. And it will prove nearly impossible to discover what they are up to: they are savvy, they are patient, and they are ruthless.
Holly must summon all her formidable talents to outthink and outmanoeuvre the shockingly twisted professors

‘Holly‘ is the Stephen King book I didn’t know I’d been waiting for. It has all the things I love about King’s writing but with no supernatural elements. ‘Holly‘ stands or falls by the quality of its writing, its plot and its characters and it’s a roaring success.

It’s a longish book (438 pages / 15 hours 24 minutes) that never drags and which kept me engaged to the last page.

‘Holly‘ is a gripping story about how Holly, a recurring Stephen King character who runs the Finders Keepers Private Investigation company, takes a case that results in her slowly uncovering the evil wrought by a pair of serial killers who have managed to kill people secretly and with impunity for years.

I loved the way Stephen King placed evil at the centre of the story without having to rely on anything supernatural. In previous books (‘The Outsider‘ and ‘If It Bleeds‘) Holly has gone up against supernaturals whose success as predators depended partly on the fact that most people were unwilling to accept the possibility of their existence. This time the evil she’s up against is entirely human in origin but still owes part of its success to people’s inability to imagine that a couple of retired college professors might be killers.

I liked the book never glorifies the serial killers and never turns the investigation into a game played between the killers and the detective. Instead, he makes sure that we feel the full impact of the evil being committed. He shows us the victims both through the eyes of those whom they’ve left behind and by showing how they react to the terrible circumstance that they’ve been placed in. One victim’s response is so brave and so dignified that it was both wonderful and heartbreaking to read. These killings have consequences: the grief and uncertainty of the bereft and the waste of the lives cut short.

Although the book isn’t, strictly speaking, a horror story, I could feel my dread growing with each page. It wasn’t because the baddies were bad (although they were irredeemable narcissistic entitlement made flesh) but because I was becoming increasingly invested in Holly and Barbara, both of whom seemed to be at risk. I knew that watching even one of them falling prey to the killers would be hard to take, even if they survived.

I was grateful that ‘Holly’ was relatively low on action because the action when it came was intense, brutal and memorable. I couldn’t taken a lot of that.

Fortunately, a lot of the book was taken up with Holly’s interviews with people as part of her investigation and with her discovery that her recently deceased mother had deceived her. I liked watching Holly work things out and I loved seeing her grow in confidence as she takes on her first major solo case. I enjoyed how Holly’s interviews turned into brief character sketches of a variety of people, some nice, some terrible but all credible. It was an extra bonus that, as she was carrying out these interviews during COVID, part of the character sketch was achieved by the interviewee’s opinions on whether mask-wearing made sense and whether COVID was a hoax.

One of my favourite threads in the book was watching eighteen-year-old Barbara’s blossoming relationship with a nonagenarian poet who became her mentor. I loved their discussions on poetry and on their motivations for writing and what writing actually does and how it feels when you know that you’ve written a line that really works. I could have read those pieces as free-standing text and still enjoyed them. That Stephen King managed to use them to move the plot forward and to increase the sense of threat that I felt on Barbara’s behalf is a sign of his skill as a storyteller.

Ageing is an important theme in this book. I loved the way Stephen King showed the empty vanity of struggling not to age and the dignity of accepting but not bowing to it.

I recommend the audiobook version of ‘Holly’. Justine Lupe’s narration is excellent. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.