The Outsider: The No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller

I've read a lot of King's stories and all of the Detective Hodges/Holly Gibney collection up to this point in the sequence and I think this one is probably my favourite thus far. I know it doesn't fall exactly into part of the sequence but I really enjoyed it. I did at one point wonder when exactly we would be reintroduced to Holly, as this isn't immediate. But I have to say I really enjoyed how this story incorporates a supernatural aspect into a crime novel.

As always with Stephen King, the plotting and characterisation are second-to-none. The way the premise is set up, and the main characters introduced is classic King and pretty much insures that you read the first third of the book at a gallop. I wouldn't place this among his best works as it suffers the same (in my opinion, relatively minor) problem as so many of his second-tier novels, in that by about halfway through, King already has so many narrative balls in the air that I personally was checking the page count as I read, thinking to myself "two hundred pages to wrap all this up, Steve, you sure you can do it?". This in no way makes the book a less engrossing or enjoyable read. It simply makes it a typical Stephen King novel and when you knock out the sheer volume of work this guy does, you can't come with a "Dark Half" or an "It" every time. Fans of this writer (I consider myself one) will know very well that a middling Stephen King is still better than the best a lot of very successful authors could every hope to write. Long may he continue

I enjoyed this book, but the story drops away in the middle. The beginning and the end give classic Stephen King themes a return visit. The opening section is probably the best King has produced in years. After that though, there is a whole lot of nothing goes on until the last section which once again is a tour de force. A solid 4 stars is what I have given, with a trim in the middle it could easily have been 5