{"id":3928,"date":"2015-01-26T06:00:49","date_gmt":"2015-01-26T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3928"},"modified":"2015-01-26T22:26:44","modified_gmt":"2015-01-27T03:26:44","slug":"mr-mercedes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3928","title":{"rendered":"****Mr. Mercedes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"car,

(photo: commons. wikimedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

By Stephen King.<\/a> I\u2019d resolved to read some Stephen King this year and picked this one up in the San Diego airport. I see that the Mystery Writers of America have nominated it for the Edgar Award\u2014\u201cBest Novel\u201d category\u2014for 2014. Five more nominees to go.<\/p>\n

King fulfills all the standard thriller conventions\u2014ticking clock, protagonist who must act outside the system with aid only from clever, but unofficial sources (in this case a black high school student and a woman with a serious mental disorder), a diabolical threat against a passel of innocents, and an opponent with sufficient intellectual- and fire-power to keep the stakes stoked. With characters from the crime novel version of Central Casting, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the plot–despite its interesting set-up–is more than a wee bit predictable.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an artful page-turner, if you don’t think too hard, and King fans may love it, but it breaks no new ground. (Read about the “King for a Year” project,<\/a> which so far revisits some of his more innovative works.) And perhaps it’s no surprise then, that Mr. Mercedes<\/em> will be turned into a television series, with the script to be written by David E. Kelley (Boston Legal<\/em> and Ally McBeal)<\/em>, and Jack Bender (Lost<\/em> and Under the Dome) <\/em>to direct.
\n