Holly by Stephen King

Holly by Stephen King was published in paperback in 2024. I picked it up for £5 in Sainsbury’s recently. I love Stephen King’s writing (11.22.63 is one of my favourite books ever), but I haven’t actually read many of his books because I don’t like horror. So I only read his books which aren’t horror!

Holly features a character I think I’ve come across before in The Outsider – private investigator Holly Gibney of Finders Keepers private investigation firm. Inside the book, Stephen King himself said: “I could never let Holly Gibney go. She was supposed to be a walk-on character in Mr Mercedes and she kind of stole the book and stole my heart. Holly is all her.”

Set in 2021, Holly starts with a Zoom funeral. Finders Keepers is taking a break. Holly’s mother has just died and her business partner is ill with Covid. Then Holly gets a call from a very worried mother. Penny’s daughter, Bonnie, has vanished without trace and the police don’t seem interested. Holly decides she can’t turn down her request and starts looking into Bonnie’s disappearance.

She is mystified as to why Bonnie would abandon her bike. And what happened to her bike helmet? When she finds Bonnie’s earring, she begins to suspect foul play…

As Holly investigates, with the help of her young friends Jerome and Barbara, it seems that Bonnie isn’t the only young person to have disappeared in the area.

Close to where Bonnie disappeared, a respectable couple – retired college professors – are hiding a secret in the basement of their home…

Holly is a real page turner, which is rather gruesome in parts. Covid plays a huge part in the story – there’s people ill in hospital, masks, hand sanitiser and elbow bumps rather than handshakes all the way through it. There’s talk of whether people have been vaccinated or not and Covid deniers. Although set in the USA rather than the UK, it is a reminder of just how much Covid ruled our lives in 2020 and 2021.

If you enjoy a detective story and don’t mind a bit of gore, I would definitely recommend Holly.

Holly Gibney will be back in May in Stephen King’s new novel, Never Flinch.