Finders Keepers

A Novel

By: Stephen King

Narrated by: Will Patton

2016 Audie Award Finalist for Best Male Narrator

A masterful, intensely suspenseful novel about a reader whose obsession with a reclusive writer goes far too far - a book about the power of storytelling, starring the same trio of unlikely and winning heroes King introduced in Mr. Mercedes.

"Wake up, genius." So begins King's instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, an iconic author who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn't published a book for decades. Morris Bellamy is livid, not just because Rothstein has stopped providing books but because the nonconformist Jimmy Gold has sold out for a career in advertising. Morris kills Rothstein and empties his safe of cash, yes, but the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel.

Morris hides the money and the notebooks, and then he is locked away for another crime. Decades later a boy named Pete Saubers finds the treasure, and now it is Pete and his family that Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson must rescue from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris when he's released from prison after 35 years.

Not since Misery has King played with the notion of a reader whose obsession with a writer gets dangerous. Finders Keepers is spectacular, heart-pounding suspense, but it is also King writing about how literature shapes a life - for good, for bad, forever.

©2015 Stephen King. All rights reserved. (P)2015 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Critic reviews

"Narrator Will Patton takes the best Stephen King novel in years and turns it into an audio masterpiece.... Listeners may double check to see how many narrators are performing this work. But it's just Patton, and he's more than enough." (AudioFile)

Another excellent story by the master

Stephen king never fails to deliver. This book is on par with any of his greats.

King is truly The Master and Patton is perfect

This book was wonderful. A great and compelling storyline but my favorite part has the be the characters, which are artfully developed by King and made so endearing by Patton. As Holly might say: "buy this book. Buy it, buy it, buy it!"

All roads lead to the Tower.

Stephen King never fails to keep me spellbound from the beginning to the end.

Awesome book

Better than mr Mercedes

The main plot of the story was interesting. It reminded me of the goldfinch with a salingeresque box of notebooks rather than a painting. A nice enjoyable thriller that moves from the past, present, and hints to interesting things to come in the future.

"I guess what I mean is his work changed my heart.

The second book in the Bill Hodges story has all of your favorite characters from "Mr. Mercedes" with some new ones thrown in for good measure. It is a recipe for exciting adventure.

The book begins with a robbery at a famous author, John Rothstein's house with money and mole skinned notebooks stolen by an obsessive fan who isn't pleased that Mr. Rothstein sold out his favorite character Jimmy Gold. Not since "Misery" has an obsessed fan made such an indelible impression on me. The thief is caught for another crime and sent to prison.

Thirty plus years later, Pete Saubers,14, finds a treasure in the woods, cash and notebooks. It comes in handy because the recession has hit his family hard and they seem to be falling apart.

After the money runs out, Pete wonders if the notebooks might have some value also and tries to find a way to help his sister attend a private school with her friends. Before he knows it, Pete and his entire family are in deep doo-doo.

The tale really gets going when Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney and Jerome Robinson decide to pitch in and help them out. I trust in these people to do the right thing and save the day. If they can catch a serial murderer before he blows up an auditorium than they can catch this obsessive fan from hurting the Saubers family.

My favorite character is Holly, the OCD to the max lady who became Bill's secretary and computer whiz whose instinct if not her people skills are top notch. It's nice to see her begin to come out of her shell around Bill and to be able to step outside of her comfort zone in order to help others.

As in "Mr. Mercedes", this is not a typical Stephen King book. It's more a thriller, but like all of King's books it's written in the way we speak and the characters are real and believable.

I listened to this book with Will Patton's narration and there is no better narrator today than him.

I loved it!

Stephen King on Literature and Obsession

Presented as an offbeat detective story, the best parts of Stephen King's Finders Keepers is his meditation on great books, famous authors, and the readers who love and sometimes obsess over them to the point of insanity. The careful reader with a notebook (preferably a Moleskine notebook as it is integral to the plot) could develop a pretty good American Lit reading list from King's asides. (Philip Roth's American Pastoral is highly recommended.) Say what you will about King, he is a serious literary man down to his fingertips.

What the reader cannot read is the Jimmy Gold novels by the reclusive John Rothstein because King made them up. Rothstein is a none too thinly disguised J.D.Salinger although the Jimmy Gold books sound more like John Updike's series of novels about Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom than Catcher in the Rye. However, the impact Jimmy Gold has on fanatical young readers is closer to Holden Caulfield's legendary status in American literature. Readers could spend the rest of their lives in the library reading back issues of The New Yorker from the 1950s onward if they wanted to pick up all the allusions King makes in Finders Keepers. I suspect that Stephen King is living a counter life where he is still the high school English teacher he was before Carrie happened.

The detective/thriller plot of Finders Keepers is basic good versus evil, which is what separates King from the postmodern novelists of the New York literary set where King is generally considered a bull in a china shop.

Whatever.

So King has written a tale of two literary fanatics. The evil Morris Bellamy, who loves the Jimmy Gold books so much that in the ultimate act of literary criticism, he murders the reclusive author in his New Hampshire hideaway. (Shades of Salinger fan Mark David Chapman murdering John Lennon because the Double Fantasy album didn’t meet the standards of Catcher in the Rye.) This is not a spoiler as the murder happens in the first chapter. Breaking into the author’s safe, Bellamy steals Moleskine notebooks containing two unpublished Jimmy Gold novels. Bellamy buries the literary treasure for later reading but his evil-doing ways catch up with him quickly and he is sentenced to prison for life before he can dig the books back up.

Decades later a good high school American lit student, Pete Saubers, finds the lost Rothstein novels along with a considerable amount of cash and uses it to help his family recover from the Great Recession of 2008.

But no good deed goes unpunished, so Saubers grand plan to help his sister by selling the lost Jimmy Gold novels turns into a train wreck.

Finder Keepers is ostensibly a Bill Hodges detective novel ~ the second in a trilogy of King's own ~ the retired policeman shows up to try to save Pete and his family. But the Hodges part of the story feels tacked on. It is as if King suddenly found himself halfway through a thriller about a murdered author and lost literary treasure when it suddenly hit him that he was supposed to be writing a Bill Hodges story.

Being a master craftsman, King gets the added room to fit into the architecture of the house. Hodges even helps the author build in a little more suspense near the end. But the reader may still notice that the Hodges parts could have been edited out and the story of lost literary treasure would have been just as good. Maybe even better.

Suspenseful

This story is very intriguing and suspenseful. Once I started listening, I could not stop!

Enjoyed old friends

Loved it. I didn't stop once started. Nice hearing the voices of the characters from Mr. Mercedes.

Most suspenseful book I've listen to, maybe ever.

This book had me sucked in early on. It was such a unique storyline but still manages to tie into Mr. Mercedes, the first book of the series. I would suggest starting with that one but it's not totally necessary if you don't. I can't wait to start book three. Also, this is not SyFy or unrealistic. Steven King has written some strange far-fetched books. That's not a criticism as he is the master of suspense, but I just want to let anyone interested know this is real world fiction. I mention this because I'm not a big fan of SyFy or Horror, and have overlooked some of Mr. Kings books for that reason.

A Boy and his Dog

If you could sum up Finders Keepers in three words, what would they be?

Nobility, Greed, love

What other book might you compare Finders Keepers to and why?

Misery

Which character – as performed by Will Patton – was your favorite?

Peter

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes

Any additional comments?

Morris(the Wolf) would have killed Tena. Why not, Peter needed to see why he shouldn't be holding the lighter so close to the notebooks.