The blurb:
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.
Meanwhile, controversial and outspoken women's rights activist Kate McKay is embarking on a multi-state lecture tour, drawing packed venues of both fans and detractors. Someone who vehemently opposes Kate's message of female empowerment is targeting her and disrupting her events. At first, no one is hurt, but the stalker is growing bolder, and Holly is hired to be Kate's bodyguard—a challenging task with a headstrong employer and a determined adversary driven by wrath and his belief in his own righteousness.
Holly Gibney has been a recurring character for King for a while now. She first showed up as a secondary character in Mr Mercedes and then took on a life of her own. The Gibney stories vary in their inclusion of the supernatural: the Bill Hodges trilogy started off pretty much straight thriller and added in a supernatural element; Holly was likewise straight thriller. If It Bleeds (novella in the collection of the same name) and The Outisider are definitely supernatural. Never Flinch is back in the line of straight thrillers. To a degree, that switching back and forth feels uncomfortable to me; it's like Jim Butcher writing a Dresden novel with no supernatural elements or Robert Harris writing a Lecter sequel with the fae or something. You're never quite sure what you're going to get.
I enjoyed The Outsider especially; it was a pretty good dive into normal people suddenly having to deal with the definitely not normal. Sympathetic characters, a good read.
Never Flinch...a lot of the characters are not so sympathetic, and it's by design. I've read some reviews that seem to take a particular dislike to Kate McKay, the client for whom Holly is providing bodyguard services. Kate is charismatic on stage, but driven off-stage, focused on her mission more than on the people around her. It is true that she would not be a lot of fun to work for, or perhaps be friends with — but that's true of a lot of public figures of the 'lightning rod' species. It takes a fair amount of ego to think that enough people to fill a good-sized venue will give a toss what you think, far less pony up the money and time to come hear you say it. It takes a certain amount of rigidity of spine as well. It's not so much that those characteristics seep through into your real life; it's that you need them in your real life to be able to do the lightning rod stuff (and, in a lot of cases, the real life is the lightning rod stuff, there's no separation). So Kate is an unlikeable character in some ways, but that's a very realistic portrayal to me. It tracks pretty well with what I'd expect a real-life Kate McKay to be like.
The story involves two antagonists: the Bill Williams character who is threatening to kill 14 people, and the person threatening Kate McKay on her tour. The two eventually do tie up into the same conclusion.
Bill Williams/Trig is the former. He feels overwhelming guilt for the death in jail of a man falsely accused of pedophilia. In the end, though, he realises that murder has become a kind of addiction for him — he's no avenging angel, he's just another serial killer. I can't really comment on the psychological background King assigns him but it's basically abuse leading to him becoming a serial killer himself. And addiction — one thing that King certainly knows and has been quite public about.
Spoilers ahoy from here onwards.
The other villain is...oh boy, there's a lot going on here. Years back, Thomas Harris wrote Silence of the Lambs, with Buffalo Bill as the killer. Bill was not transgender, but wanted to be — but despite the book and movie both explicitly saying that, and saying that transgender people are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators of it, Bill was still ultimately portrayed as a freak. Both book and movie did some damage. Chris falls into the same boat, sadly. I don't think he's really portrayed as transgender; he dresses up as and portrays himself as his sister, not himself. That's not being transgender, more like extremely personal trauma-induced disassociation, I guess? He's exploited by his church, pretty willingly and unthinkingly, and groomed into being a disposable, deniable, disavowable 'lone wolf' and set on Kate McKay's trail. Similar to Buffalo Bill, he's not transgender — but it's not a helpful portrayal.
In interviews and in writing about this book, King's acknowledged that it underwent pretty heavy rewrites, and that he also used a lot more plotting ahead of actually writing than he usually does, and I think both show through. It feels more tangled and less lively than is usual for him. In On Writing, he talked about pre-plotting can kind of take that sense of urgency as you discover a story out of the writing for him, and that has happened here, I think. Not a bad book, but nowhere near his best.
Started: 2 June 2025
Finished: 6 June 2025
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