Book Review: "End of Watch" by Stephen King

While I read this book and finished it some time ago, I never did get around to publishing it. Apologies for the delay in actually writing, and especially in publishing, this particular blog entry, as this has been sitting in my unpublished posts for some time now. If memory serves correctly, this was due to the Nice attack, as I wrote this review around that time, and meant to publish it just after. But the Nice attack occupied my time and focus for a while there, and then there were other things that came up, and this fell down the list of unpublished works, until it was forgotten about.

Earlier today, however, I noticed it again, and realize now that it never actually did get published. And so, without further delay, here is the review.

Warning: Spoiler Alert for those who have not yet read this book but intend to do so!

This was the third, and presumably final, installment of Stephen King's Detective Hodges trilogy. In this particular installment, we see the return of Brady Hartsfield, the evil genius, if you will, from the first of these books, "Mr. Mercedes." In that one, he began his spree of murderous crime by stealing a Mercedes and running over a whole bunch of people waiting outside for a job fair to open up during particularly hard times in a Midwestern city.

He was not caught, which gave him only a boost in his confidence, and allowed him to work at leisure in what turned out to be his real hobby: pushing people to commit suicide. He tried to force already suicidal retired detective Bill Hodges into committing the act, but his urges actually have the opposite effect, and inspire Hodges to pursue Hartsfield. The rest of the book is about Hartsfield coming up with an even more destructive plan, and working to carry it out, while Hodges and his new team work to find out who this mysterious killer is and stop him before he can commit another atrocity.

Of course, Hartsfield is thwarted just at the end, as Holly, Hodges new friend and assistant, smashes Hartsfield's head in just before he is about to detonate the bomb at the community center, where thousands of kids are gathered to see the hottest boy band act.

Hartsfield is sent to the hospital and seems to have become a vegetable, although not everyone is sure that he is truly gone and neutralized as a threat. Before long, stories start emerging about weird things happening in his hospital room, such as the water turning on, or things falling, all on their own. Hodges begins to suspect that Brady is actually faking his condition, and he verbally tries to get Hartsfield to come out of his shell.

Still, there is no reaction, and the rest of the world believes that Hartsfield is in a concussion that looks hopeless. The medical community believes that his condition is hopeless, and that this will be his life sentence.

As it turns out, however, Hartsfield really is pretending, as he snaps awake from his coma state, and finds himself having strange new powers. It does not take him long before he begins to really explore them.

One of his main new powers is to inhabit into a new human body, so long as the host is not strong enough to force him out.It turns out that Hartsfield is quite skilled in this regard and, before too long, he has managed to inhabit two other individuals at will, and they allow him what his own body cannot give him any more: mobility.

Also, Hartsfield can enter the minds of others, and once again, he turns these powers of his towards trying to push people (particularly young people) to commit suicide.

Of course, it is up to retired detective Hodges and his team (Holly and ) to stop Hartsfield before he can actually create what he is desperately trying to create: an epidemic of suicides by young and desperate people in their city.

However, this time is different, because Hartsfield's new powers allow him to inhabit a new human host, and possibly several other human hosts simultaneously, as far as Hodge's gang is concerned. And that means that while the stakes have never been higher, neither has the capacity to make some crucial mistake or oversight.

Not surprisingly, however, Hodges and Holly do catch up with Brady, in the ultimate of what goes around, comes around. First, Holly gets clobbered in the head by Brady while crawling around in the snow outside of a hunting lodge that he has holed up in, and Hartsfield breaks Hodge's hand, rendering him defenseless.

In the end, however, Brady grows too cocky and sure of himself for his own good. He forgets about things, gets too lax, and this allows Hodges to surprise him while Brady is trying to hypnotize him. Brady gets shot in the process by Holly, and he has to run to the woods. But he has a monster gun on him, which he uses to shoot up the house (it's not his anyway), yet this trigger happiness on his part prevents him from hearing the sounds of the huge vehicle quickly descending on him, as Jeremy of course comes to the aid of Hodges and Holly. The vehicle plows over Hartsfield, who finally gets a real taste of the kind of pain that he himself caused in the first book in this trilogy (which each of the three books opens up with).

Finally, we find out that Hodges dies of pancreatic cancer in the end, but get the sense that Holly is not about to fall apart, as in the past, and that things are generally looking up for the group as a whole (although this is apt to be the last book in this series).