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In a mega-stakes, high-suspense race against time, three of the most unlikely and winning heroes Stephen King has ever created try to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands.
In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes.
In another part of town, months later, a retired cop named Bill Hodges is still haunted by the unsolved crime. When he gets a crazed letter from someone who self-identifies as the "perk" and threatens an even more diabolical attack, Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, hell-bent on preventing another tragedy.
Brady Hartsfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that rush again. Only Bill Hodges, with a couple of highly unlikely allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again. And they have no time to lose, because Brady's next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim thousands.
Mr. Mercedes is a war between good and evil, from the master of suspense whose insight into the mind of this obsessed, insane killer is chilling and unforgettable.
Edgar Awards, 2015
"King excels in his disturbing portrait of Brady, a genuine monster in ordinary human form who gives new meaning to the phrase'the banality of evil." - Publisher's Weekly
"This exists outside of the usual Kingverse (Pennywise the Clown is referred to as fictive); add that to the atypical present-tense prose, and this feels pretty darn fresh. Big, smashing climax, too." - Booklist
"Nicely dark, never predictable and altogether entertaining." - Kirkus Reviews
"Pays off exuberantly .... Surprising and invigorating." - The New York Times
"It is a rich, resonant, exceptionally readable accomplishment by a man who can write in whatever genre he chooses." - Washington Post
"A taut, suspenseful race-against-time book ... [King is] in reliably fine form." - The New York Times
"A taut, calibrated thriller ... The majority of the book is merciless and unforgiving, and the scariest thing about it is how plausible the whole scenario is." - Miami Herald
"The nerve-shredding denouement is vintage King—a pulse-pounding race against time ..." - Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"A full-throttle sprint to the finish; the last 80 pages cannot be doled out over multiple reading sessions. You'll have to swallow them all in a single gulp." - Sarasota Herald Tribune
"A literary Van de Graaff generator: tightly paced and parsed with dynamic dialogue and traumatic twists." - Columbus Dispatch
"An oh-so-dark mystery that never shuts the door on love, loss and, possibly, redemption." - Cleveland Plain Dealer
"King deftly takes elements of hard-boiled mysteries and puts a fresh spin on them." - USA Today
"A showdown between good and evil that characterizes the best of King's work, regardless of genre." - Los Angeles Times
This information about Mr. Mercedes was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
© Tabitha King
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. He made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. In the fall of 1971, he began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co., accepted the novel Carrie for publication, providing him the means to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published over 50 books and has become one of the world's most successful writers. King is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to the American Letters and the ...
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