Stephen King keeps writing murder mystery novels, possibly because he likes the genre but I think mostly because he likes his mystery solver character Holly Gibney. Never Flinch actually has two such mysteries. In the first one, there’s a serial killer who is targeting random people but naming them as proxies for the jury pool of a man who was innocent, but sent to jail and then murdered there. In the second one, one of those religious nuts that likes to blow up abortion clinics is hunting a lady who is going around the country encouraging people to vote for better state representatives to expand abortion access on a state by state basis.

As I know I’ve said before, King with an axe to grind is simply not as good of an author as King with his imagination flowing freely. I agree with all of his politics, and I nevertheless continue to wish they would not infect his books. It’s just too… apparent. Takes me out of the narrative, it does. And in this case, it’s half the plot. So, y’know. There’s that.

All the same, one of the things at which he excels is weaving disparate pieces of a narrative toward each other like three freight trains that seem to be on different tracks but it turns out they’re all headed for the same place, and if you think only two trains can crash into each other because of the way that train tracks work, well, that’s sort of my point, innit? So that’s the part of the story that was great. (And also, I share his enjoyment of his character.)

The only remaining downside of this book is that, the pieces of the plot woven together, the crescendo reached… the weaving was great, you see, but the crescendo was… fine. It was fine. It was not great. All in all, it was a mid book, which still means I followed it breathlessly and wanted to know how it turned out the whole time, because you see it was a mid book on a Stephen King scale. And I do love me some King. Ask anyone.

But I can also be honest with myself in the aftermath of that aforementioned trainwreck.