Stephen King continues to be the master of macabre novels with his June 2 release of "Finders Keepers," a suspenseful page turner that is hard to put down once the reading has commenced.
If you don't have hopes and ambitions as a teenager, your life will fester into one as a wage-slave, caught up in a below livable wage, and true happiness will be nothing but a fantastic dream. I rephrased the words of 13-year-old Pete Saubers, the focal character in "Finders Keepers."
Saubers is a bright kid with lofty goals and a sweet soul. His life is introduced to black-mail and murder before he is old enough to legally drive a vehicle. "Finders Keepers" goes back and fourth from the years 1978 to 2014. In 1978, the highly disturbed Morris Bellamy kills writer John Rothstein in cold blood and steals Rothstein's cash and 18 years of his unpublished writings. It is on par with possessing the only copies of unpublished works by Anne Rice, John Grisham or King.
Bellamy buries the cash and notebooks in his back yard and in 1979 is put in jail for aggravated assault on a police officer, resisting arrest and the aggravated rape of Miss Cora Ann Hooper. He spends more than 30 years in prison for this crime, and no one knows he killed and robbed Rothstein.
While in prison he gets raped in the mouth and butt as King so eloquently states it, and Tom and Linda Saubers move into Bellamy's house with their two children Pete and Tina. Pete finds the large stash of cash and notebooks and like any 13-year-old boy, gives all the cash to his struggling parents in monthly payments because of his mom and dads finical woes.
Pete is a huge fan of literature, so he keeps the notes books a secret and reads them. He also knows they are a lot more valuable than all the cash he has found. By the time he is 15-years-old, Bellamy is out of prison and has already slain one of his quote unquote old pals with an ax.
Bellamy elusively gets Pete alone in the back room of a book store, where his once friend has an ax buried in his face. Pete looks upon the hacked up corpses in terror as Bellamy calmly says to him;
"He pissed me off, you don't want to piss me off, do you?"
Bellamy had an insane vendetta against the writer Rothstein, and now has one against Pete. The book gets intense when Bellamy is alone with Pete's mom and her 9-year-old daughter Tina. You want more details? Read the book.
Easily a four star rated book. "Finders Keepers" has all the elements for a great story, characters you love and loath, conflicts and at the end of the story there are no loose ends.
