Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King

The Story: Like a lot of Stephen King books, this one takes place in Maine.  There are these two older guys who work for the local paper and they have a young female intern.  They are really kind of impressed with her, you can tell from the get go. She asks them if they have ever had a truly unsolved mystery on the island.  The story that they answer with is the story of The Colorado Kid.

Every town has these local legends, these stories that people tell each other with a little glimmer in their eye.  The men explain to the intern that this isn’t really one of those stories.  There are too many unknowns for it to be  ”glimmer in the eye” kind of story. It’s hard to even speculate as to what happened.

Here is the gist: A man is found dead on a beach.  He has no jacket and it is early April. He has steak stuck in his throat, and he has also suffered some kind of stroke.  His identity remains a mystery for over a year until a small clue leads them to Colorado.  From there, the list of unknowns more than doubles.

As they are telling this story, the two newspaper men are making the intern ask the hard questions and try to get to the bottom of this.  They are really feeling her out and seeing how well she would do working on the newspaper full-time.

And that’s as much as I’m telling you.  As with Into the Woods, I don’t want to give away too much. This is a mystery. It wouldn’t be fun if you knew all the twists and turns.

What I Thought: I found this on the dollar rack at Dollar General and remember having heard a great review of it from someone who is not a Stephen King fan.  She doesn’t like his scary stuff, but really liked this.  I hadn’t read it yet, so of course I picked it up.  And then, of course, I read it all in one sitting.

Good stuff.  I loved the old men who were kind of training this young girl.  They were good guys overall and just how they played off of each other and finished each others’ sentences was totally endearing to me. I wanted to meet them and have dinner with them.

The mystery itself was pretty basic.  For me, it felt like the mystery story took a backseat to the “present” story.  I’m not sure if he intended it that way but that is how I read it.

Did I mention that the intern was from Ohio? I love Ohio and I love when it is mentioned in books.

I guess that’s it.  This is a short little book. There’s really not much to say. This one wasn’t life changing but I do think it was worth the couple of hours that I put into reading it.  I loved the idea that it was this Hard Case Crime novel with the seductress on the front.  I also liked reading what seemed to be an experiment by Stephen King. Fun stuff.

Conclusion: If you like Stephen King or mystery novels, I’d say pick this one up.  It really won’t take too much time to read it and I think that you’ll be glad that you did.