Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

When I saw social media buzzing last fall about the release of a new Stephen King book, I hopped on over to the Libby app to see, just for kicks, how long I’d need to wait to check out a copy of Holly. I put my name on the list for the audiobook version, then promptly forgot about it. Four months later when the notification popped up on my phone, I was juggling new-job stress with holiday plans and the three other books I was trying to read.

But since it was Stephen King, I made the time.

I came into this third book in King’s Holly Gibney trilogy not exactly cold, but definitely lukewarm. I read The Outsider (Holly Gibney #1) in 2020, but missed the second book, If It Bleeds. I also haven’t read the Bill Hodges trilogy, the one where Ms. Gibney makes her debut. So I was missing quite a bit of background info going into Holly. And while there were plenty of callbacks that I probably didn’t fully grasp, on the whole I think this book stands well on its own. The crime, the villains, and the protagonists all came together quite well to make this one of my more enjoyable reads of 2023.

It’s the summer of 2021, and Holly Gibney needs a vacation. But when a frantic woman calls, begging Holly to help find her missing daughter, Holly can’t refuse. Not only is her partner Pete out of commission thanks to Covid, but there’s also something about Bonnie Dahl’s disappearance that doesn’t add up. As she learns more about the case, Holly becomes certain that Bonnie Dahl didn’t just run away. Meanwhile, Rodney and Emily Harris, a married pair of retired college professors, conceal a sinister secret in their basement that could be linked to Bonnie’s disappearance. Despite their picture-perfect life, their research has taught them that appearances are superficial — it’s what’s inside a person that counts.

It was really lovely spending another book with Holly Gibney. I enjoyed her in The Outsider, and she didn’t disappoint here. She, a careful and germ-conscious neurodivergent woman, may have been the perfect main viewpoint character for a book set during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Before picking up Holly, I’d heard that a large portion of fans didn’t like the heavy presence of Covid and its surrounding politics in the book. Having now read it for myself, I feel the pandemic theme was handled well. Reading such a recent reality depicted in a book was somewhat jarring, to be honest, but King does an accurate job depicting the social uncertainty of those first few months after vaccinations began rolling out. I understand the King fans who would rather read something that’s not quite so close to home — I can’t deny that it feels a little soon to relive those times. As a setting, though, I found King’s 2021 America to be a faithful and empathetic snapshot of a place in time. There’s a good chance, in my opinion, that it’ll be regarded more fondly for that in the future.

The academic couple hiding a horrifying secret, the Harrises, were great villains in this. I loved the suspense and creeping horror as it becomes clear just how ruthless and sick they really are. Stephen King shines when it comes to writing antagonists. His ability to make them terrifyingly evil and very human at the same time is one of the things I’ve always admired most about his writing. Holly is just the latest great example.

This might be a five-star review, except that I did feel the action dragged a bit in the middle as the flashbacks slowly (sooooooo slowly) catch up to Holly’s investigation in the present. King is a master of suspense and tension, but his tendency to over-write can sometimes stall the narrative. But I also admire his dedication to giving his readers a true and intimate understanding of his characters—so I can’t grudge him for it much.

Now, I haven’t read a lot of recent Stephen King (Doctor Sleep and The Outsider were his only post-2001 books I’d consumed before this), but this is the first book that’s made me appreciate King’s age. His youthful characters have names like Edith and Margaret, they use such hip idioms as “gathering wool?” and they hang out in Dairy Queen parking lots. And sure, there can be kids in the current year who do those things or have those names, there’s no rule against it — but the young folks depicted in Holly don’t read like they organically sprang from their setting the way that, say, the cast of It or ‘Salem’s Lot did. Holly‘s characters still felt like living, breathing people, as Stephen King characters tend to — they just seemed a little lost in time.

For the most part, though, I thought Holly was a fun and suspenseful read. Honestly this is probably a three-star book by Stephen King standards, but to me that still makes it a four-star book when compared to most other horror out there. Reading Holly has even made me want to go back and start reading through the past books she’s appeared in, starting with Mr. Mercedes.