Mr Mercedes
by Stephen King
Genre: Crime fiction
Date Read: 13 June 2014
Reading with my ears
Narrator: Will Patton
Unabridged audio - Length: 14 hours 21 minutes
My thoughts:
Mr Mercedes is the journey of Bill Hodges, a police detective, with nothing to live for after his retirement from the force. He puts away his father’s gun (and thoughts of using it) as he begins to tract the one crazy killer he was never able to catch.
Brady Hartfield is very sick. It is scary to think that he lives in real life too. People blending nicely into society but with grandiose thoughts of being famous as the greatest killer.
I loved how King revealed only little bits of the support characters at a time. We never really got to know the the other characters in the book, just enough to give us glimpses into the reasons for Brady’s psychosis.
One of these characters is Freddy, Brady’s younger brother. He is only mentioned a few times in this book but I felt such empathy for him. A poor little lost soul, born into a family that ultimately killed him. Freddy was always slow and suffered brain damage during his short life which made caring for him a huge burden on the family. I understand the frustrations that the family must have felt but poor little Freddy did not deserve his life. Thankfully he would not have understood all that went on.
If you are looking for a scary horror by the great master, then you will be disappointed. Mr Mercedes is only scary in the way that an insane person can be scary. And Brady is scary . . .
This is instead a great detective story, defining the phrase “cat and mouse games”.
Will Patton once again showed why he is such a beloved narrator. He did an excellent job and the story flowed beautifully from scene to scene. He is a true professional. Love him!
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