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Synopsis:

From master storyteller Stephen King comes an extraordinary new novel with intertwining storylines—one about a killer on a diabolical revenge mission, and another about a vigilante targeting a feminist celebrity speaker—featuring the beloved Holly Gibney and a dynamic new cast of characters.

When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to “kill thirteen innocents and one guilty” in “an act of atonement for the needless death of an innocent man,” Detective Izzy Jaynes has no idea what to think. Are fourteen citizens about to be slaughtered in an unhinged act of retribution? As the investigation unfolds, Izzy realizes that the letter writer is deadly serious, and she turns to her friend Holly Gibney for help.

Meanwhile, controversial and outspoken women’s rights activist Kate McKay is embarking on a multi-state lecture tour, drawing packed venues of both fans and detractors. Someone who vehemently opposes Kate’s message of female empowerment is targeting her and disrupting her events. At first, no one is hurt, but the stalker is growing bolder, and Holly is hired to be Kate’s bodyguard—a challenging task with a headstrong employer and a determined adversary driven by wrath and his belief in his own righteousness.

Featuring a riveting cast of characters both old and new, including world-famous gospel singer Sista Bessie and an unforgettable villain addicted to murder, these twinned narratives converge in a chilling and spectacular conclusion—a feat of storytelling only Stephen King could pull off.

Thrilling, wildly fun, and outrageously engrossing, Never Flinch is one of King’s richest and most propulsive novels.

Review:

The three things that 2025 Stephen King wants to write about are crime stories, politics, and Holly Gibney. Since 2014, the last twelve novels that he has written (not those cowritten with Richard Chizmar or Owen King), eight of them have been crime stories, and six of them have featured Holly Gibney. King has always had a fondness for crime novels, and he has leaned heavily on these thrillers and pulpy private investigator stories in the last decade simply because he loves them. He also loves Holly Gibney. This is the third stand-alone Holly novel since 2018, and including a novella in If It Bleeds, this is the fourth full story with her as the main investigator. She is a side character in the Bill Hodges trilogy and King loves her so much that he might never get tired of writing more stories with Holly (rumor has it that the fifth Holly novel is on the horizon). When King is not writing about Holly, he is thinking about politics. I have noticed through the decades that King loves crime novels, but I did not notice his deep interest and involvement in politics before the 2016 Trump administration. This does not mean that he was not previously involved, that he did not write about his feelings about other administrations or political topics, but I did not really notice his involvement until he and Trump started squaring off in cyberspace, King not being a fan of Trump at all. His writing has always had characters with political ideas and leaning, but it feels like these affiliations are so obvious now that when a person picks up a Stephen King novel, there is an expected amount of politics, good or bad. King’s focus in the last decade or so have been crime, politics, and Holly Gibney, and Never Flinch is the latest Stephen King book to really lean into these topics.

The story starts with a person who is killed in prison after being wrongfully convicted of owning child pornography. Someone decides that innocent people are going to pay for the actions of the jury, the judge, and the lawyers who convicted him. The plan is to kill thirteen innocent people and one guilty person. The killer starts this mission and once they get into the rhythm of killing, they actually feel like it is their calling, a quick addiction they do not know if they can stop. Another person who has a calling is the member of the small cultish Wisconsin church that is following a feminist speaker, Kate McKay, across the United States on her lecture and book tour in a plan to eventually kill her on stage. Holly Gibney is brought into the serial killer case by living in Buckeye City, where the serial killer is murdering at a rapid speed and being friends with the police who is working the case. In the middle of this, she is called by Kate McKay to be her bodyguard against the threats she is receiving. Not only is Holly in a position where she has to protect someone from a fanatic, she is also trying to figure out who the person is. Holly still does very Holly things, like saying “poopy”, wishing she can have a cigarette, hating carrying a gun, and talking about being fully vaccinated against Covid, but besides the irritating quirks, she does have a good sense of putting pieces together in a way that she figures out the puzzles before anyone else.

This is not the best Stephen King novel. He even admits in the afterward that it is not his best. He also admits that he worked hard on it, especially after his wife read the first draft and said, “You can do better.” I do not know how much better this final version is from the first, but there are things that are interesting in a novel that is pretty mediocre in the realm of King novels. One thing is that Never Flinch involves some very fanatical people and much of it is political. Kate McKay lectures about women power and how abortion bans are horrible for American women considering all of the bills are written by men, who have never had an abortion. The person that is stalking McKay plans to kill her because she is pro-choice. They are from an extreme fundamentalist church (a stand-in for churches like Westboro Baptist Church), who do not have anything better to do than to go around the country and protest abortion clinics. The serial killer of the innocent kills with a righteousness because the justice system failed, and people need to pay for the faults of the judicial system. And while all of this extremism is going on around her, Holly deflects conversations that ask her opinion on topics like religion and abortion, even though she is a vehicle for the idea that Covid vaccines and masks are safe and important as a way to protect yourself. The feeling in Never Flinch is that this is a reflection of an America where all of the people are wrong, that there is a middle ground nobody can see anymore because there are too many left or right, black or white feelings. This extreme polarization has gotten to the point where both sides are fighting, verbally and physically. Every one of the characters, regardless of what they are doing or thinking feeling like they are doing the “right thing”, and this how society completely breaks down.

This is not his best novel, but King also does something in this novel that most of his other novels do not do. He does not use any sort of supernatural or paranormal device to explain the action that is happening. He writes this as a straight crime novel, and this might be why the novel feels weaker than some of the others. The characters are limited to what they can actually do. Stephen King has been publishing books for fifty years, and he has earned the right to have his obsessions, write the stories that he likes more than the stories his fans clamor for. He can say and do whatever he wants within his novels. There will be people who will still read every single book he publishes, but some of his fanbase know that there are too many books to read and they are getting tired of the Holly stories. With Never Flinch, it makes sense that some of these fans are getting close to the point where they will just skip any new Holly novel.