When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to “kill thirteen innocents and one guilty” in “an act of atonement for the needless death of an innocent man,” Detective Izzy Jaynes has no idea what to think. Are fourteen citizens about to be slaughtered in an unhinged act of retribution? As the investigation unfolds, Izzy realizes that the letter writer is deadly serious, and she turns to her friend Holly Gibney for help.

I gotta admit here that this book is easily a much better book than the books Stephen King has been writing since the 80s in my opinion. But this book in my opinion is a long way away from being a good Stephen king book. But as always I will explain everything in this review, so if you are interested in hearing my thoughts about this book then keep reading.

The plot in this book was split into 2 separate perspectives. Since this book involves a stalker who wants to murder an pro-choice activist which Holly was hired to be a bodyguard of, and the second part is a serial killer murdering innocent people because of a innocent guy being sentence for something he didn’t do and then being killed in the prison by an another inmate.  

I personally think that this book would have done so much better if the plot of this book was split into 2 books in the Holly Gibney series rather than shoving everything into one book. Because in my opinion there was too much action happening and following 2 cases being solved by holly at the same time was kind of confusing for me personally.  

The action in this book takes very long time to get to a suspense and tension level in this book, and I personally think that it would have done a much better job at being shorter and getting straight into action rather than focus on some police versus firefighters baseball match, Barbara becoming besties with a old gospel singer and all the rest of events which have taken place in this book which only became convenient for the Stephen King to use at the very end of this book. Since it seemed like he had no ideas how to write the ending of this book.

The characters in this book were very good. Which didn’t surprise me because Stephen King knows his stuff when it comes to creating good and relatable characters in his book. Which is one of the main reasons why I am such a huge fan of Stephen King’s books. 

One of the things which annoyed me in this book beside the plot which I already talked about above, is the thing that Holly doesn’t solve much cases in this book. Because all the breakthroughs she makes in this book is guessing and letting Jerome do the research and come back to her with the stuff he found out. Stephen king could easily take Holly out of this book and it wouldn’t change a thing in this book because of how small role Holly plays in this book.

The writing style in this book is very on point in this book. Because the writing style in this book is very good and it had completely grabbed my attention from the very moment I started reading this book. Which hasn’t surprised me at all looking at the fact that Stephen King has written this book.

The ending of this book is okay for the most part, there wasn’t a big standoff between holly and the main villain of this book. The ending itself felt like Stephen king wanted to be as quickly done with this book as possible.

I Give This Book 3 / 5