In the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Holly Gibney is enlisted by the mother of Bonnie Rae Dahl, a college student who has recently gone missing. Over the course of her investigation, Holly comes across past victims who disappeared near where Bonnie vanished, and under eerily similar circumstances. What she is about to find out is that Rodney and Emily Harris, two local octogenarian professors, are hiding a dark secret in their basement...
Holly contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents:
- As bad as she was in life (as established by the previous Gibney books), Holly's mother Charlotte found a way to be one even from beyond the grave, by deliberately misleading her daughter into thinking the family's money had been stolen in an attempt to make her abandon Finders Keepers and withholding the money until after her death.
- Bonnie's mother Penny is quickly established to be very similar to Charlotte, to the point where it strained their relationship.
- Ellen Craslow was raped by members of her fundamentalist church for being vegan, and when she aborted her baby her father disowned her. Holly approaches one of Ellen's family members on Twitter, only to be told that Ellen will be "going to hell" for the abortion.
- Accidental Hero: Barbara nearly ends up with Emily as a mentor for her poetry, but ends up with Olivia after the latter agrees to teach Barbara. Olivia admits that she dislikes Emily and believes she's a hateful woman (as she remembers her dislike for Jorge Castro and believes that she's secretly racist). Olivia ends up saving Barbara's life, as before they decided on Bonnie as their next target, they considered targeting Barbara.
- The Alcoholic: Stinky Steinman's mother is a long-term binge drinker, and she overdoses on a combination of alcohol and pills when Jerome visits her to talk about Stinky's disappearance.
- All for Nothing: It is eventually confirmed (including by
the author himself) that Roddy's theories about deriving nutrition and brainpower from cannibalism were bullshit and that any health improvements he and his wife experienced were the result of a placebo effect. Meaning that five people died for nothing. - Amusingly Awful Aim: In the climax, despite the fact that Holly is in a cage and thus in no position to run or seek cover, Emily repeatedly fails to hit Holly when trying to shoot her, forcing her to get close enough to the cage that Holly can kill Emily. Justified, as not long before Emily fell down the basement stairs and broke her left arm, and since she's lefthanded she is thus forced to shoot with her non-dominant hand. Plus, she is in horrible pain due to a combination of the fall and her suffering from sciatica.
- Author Tract: A common criticism of the book, one which King himself addresses in the Author's Notes. Holly's attitudes toward people who refuse to vaccinate are more or less in line with King's own well-known opinions on the subject, although King does depict characters who disagree with varying degrees of vehemence.
- Beneath Suspicion: Downplayed; Holly is able to link several of the disappeared people to the Harrises so she does suspect them to be involved somehow. However, seeing that the Harrises are very old people, she assumes that they are accomplices to the person responsible for the disappearances rather than the perpetrators themselves. It takes her being captured and held in the basement cage before she realizes the truth.
- Berserk Button: Roddy really does not believe in the placebo effect, and mentioning it is a great way to spark an endless, borderline incoherent rant. This is a particular sore spot with Roddy because the placebo effect explains away the supposed benefits of his unique "diet," and he can't accept that.
- Beware the Nice Ones: This book continues the lesson of its predecessor: do not push Holly Gibney too far. The Harrises learn this one especially brutally, with Holly cutting Roddy's throat open with an earring and snapping Emily's neck the old-fashioned way.
- Brick Joke: After learning about her inheritance, Holly thinks about a joke where the setup is "A newfound millionaire walks into a bar and orders a mai-tai." She can't think of the punchline until after she is released from the Harrises' basement.
- Chekhov's Gun: The triangular earring Bonnie leaves in the cage.
- Commonality Connection: Holly can't help but notice throughout the novel how Bonnie's and Penny's relationship heavily reminds her of her relationship with her overly controlling, highly possessive mother, who passes away at the start of the book.
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Holly is to be the sole beneficiary of her uncle Henry's money despite the fact that he has children. King acknowledged that he simply forgot they existed.
- Comically Missing the Point: When the Harris' basement prison and slaughterhouse are discovered, the DA is mad at Holly for killing them in self-defense because it would have been the trial of the century, and now he has no one to prosecute. Of course, the reader knows that Rodney and Emily were perfectly willing to commit suicide with cyanide pills in case their crimes would ever be discovered, meaning there likely wouldn't have been a trial even if Holly didn't kill them herself.
- Cyanide Pill: Rodney and Emily Harris have two of these in case they are ever found out and the police will come for them.
- Dark and Troubled Past: As revealed via interviews Holly conducts, several of the victims had these:
- Peter, aka "Stinky" Steinman was the only child of an alcoholic mother. He was teased as a result, along with having the unfortunate nickname of Stinky.
- Bonnie, despite being a sweet and happy girl most of the time, had a troubled relationship with her mother (with her friend and co-worker saying they often fought), and a deadbeat boyfriend that she finally dumped a few months before her kidnapping.
- Ellen Craslow came from a VERY conservative family that reacted violently to anything that went against their beliefs. When she became a vegan and later came out as a lesbian, they were furious and tried to get her to change her ways (and did nothing when she was raped by boys from her church and impregnated as a result). When she chose to abort the baby, her family disowned her, causing her to leave Georgia.
- Deadlier Than The Male: While the Harrises' activities are mainly motivated by Rodney's "theories" about nutrition, Emily is the more crazy and cunning of the two, comes the closest to killing Holly when she is held captive in the basement and is eventually determined to have been the one who suggested the killing spree in the first place.
- Defiant Captive: Ellen Craslow refused to eat the liver, even after she started dying of thirst. She was the only one the couple didn't eat, as she'd refused to be "conditioned" by them. So instead Roddy shot her point blank after pretending to offer her a salad.
- Doom It Yourself: In a rare example of the D-I-Y project working exactly according to plan, Roddy consulted YouTube when welding together the cage in which he and Emily keep their captives. He takes a lot of pride in the quality of his workmanship. Justifiably so, apparently, as the police officer who is charged with dismantling the cage once Roddy and Emily are dead complains about how well put-together the thing is.
- Dramatic Ammo Depletion: After failing to shoot Holly from a distance, Emily eventually gets close enough to the cage Holly is in that she can stick the gun through the bars, making it impossible to miss anymore. And then the gun clicks empty since it was Holly's own gun and she, at the advise of Bill, intentionally left 1 chamber empty as a precaution since the gun has no safety on it.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: As depraved as they are, it is very clear that Roddy and Emily deeply love each other.
- Evil Old Folks: The antagonists are a pair of elderly serial killers.
- Failure-to-Save Murder: Penny, upon learning what happened to her daughter, starts screaming her head off and tries to attack the people who came to tell her (a cop and a psychiatrist). Upon calming down (sort of), she says she never wants to see Holly again, apparently blaming her for Bonnie's death (despite the fact that Bonnie was dead by the time Holly had been hired).
- Genre Shift: After a sharp turn into the paranormal starting with End of Watch, this book sees the Hodges/Gibney saga return to its detective novel roots, as the villains here, despite the implications of their utterly bizarre beliefs and outlandishly cruel lifestyle, are simply blabberingly insane elderly serial killers with nothing supernatural about them, and are killed with absurd ease once the much younger Holly gets within arm's reach of them.
- Heroic BSoD: Averted. The Harrises' crimes and Holly's experience as their captive makes her consider selling Finders Keepers, but she decides against it.
- I'm a Humanitarian: The Professors Harris captured their victims for the purpose of consuming their livers and brain tissue, in a bid to alleviate the effects of their old age.
- Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Both their academic backgrounds and the perceived effectiveness of their "diet" cause the Harrises to have a grotesquely inflated sense of their own intelligence. However, not only does their cannibal diet not work, but Izzy states that their criminal methods were so slipshod that they could have been caught way sooner had COVID not been straining the police force. What's more, despite believing that they were respected/loved by their associates and students, Holly's investigation reveals that many of the people who knew the Harrises found them either odd or disturbing (with many students dropping Rodney's classes because of his "screamy" lectures about the importance of meat).
- Most Writers Are Writers: Jerome and Barbara both embark on promising writing careers over the course of the story.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: The Harrises, Emily in particular, hold racist and homophobic attitudes about their victims. Emily's bigotry is mostly confined to the occasional passive-aggressive comment and some slightly more explicit internal narration. But following her death, Emily's diary is found to contain countless pages of psychotically written epithets directed at Jorge Castro (for being gay and Hispanic) and Ellen Craslow (for being black and lesbian). She also just wrote the N-word over and over again.
- Posthumous Character: Charlotte died of Covid before the start of the book, but her actions beforehand (especially with Holly's inheritance) impact Holly through the story.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: COVID-19 looms large over the story. Holly's mother has died of it, Pete Huntley is sidelined with a case of it and the police likely would have treated Bonnie Rae Dahl's disappearance as a kidnapping if they weren't understaffed due to the pandemic.
- Revisiting the Roots: The Bill Hodges/Holly Gibney series originally started with a grounded in reality hard-boiled detective novel featuring a human antagonist, but over time gradually shifted more and more towards the paranormal, with the third entry featuring a human with supernatural powers as the villain, and the fourth and fifth entries had supernatural creatures as the antagonists. This book returns the series to it's roots with a more grounded story and villains who, while certainly cruel, are ultimately normal humans with no supernatural abilities.
- Spotting the Thread:
- Several clues lead to Holly realizing that the disappearances are the work of a serial killer, and not simply people taking off for greener pastures:
- Bonnie's bike was found but her helmet and backpack weren't.
- Jorge Castro loved his job, yet still disappeared without a trace after a fight with his boyfriend.
- Ellen Craslow didn't have any family in Georgia yet apparently went back.
- Peter Steinman's mother was recovering from her alcohol addiction yet he still decided to run away.
- Cary was happy in his job at the bowling alley, was loved by his coworkers and patrons, and yet left no forewarning before disappearing.
- The trope also comes into play after Holly is taken captive by the Harrises:
- She thus misses an appointment with Penny Dahl, Bonny's mother, who then reaches out to Pete Huntley. Pete immediately knows something bad must have happened as Holly never misses an appointment.
- Emily drives Holly's car back to her apartment to make it look like Holly left it there herself, but when Barbara goes to the apartment to check on Holly, she notices the car is not parked in one of Holly's usual spots, and is partly outside the parking lines; again something Holly never does.
- And when Barbara goes to Holly's office next, she realizes someone (Emily again) has been trying to open the safe as the combination dial is not set back to 0; something Holly always does.
- Several clues lead to Holly realizing that the disappearances are the work of a serial killer, and not simply people taking off for greener pastures:
- Tastes Like Friendship: Several times, Holly and/or Jerome get their interviewees to open up to them by buying them drinks (i.e. Jerome got the middle school boys to tell them about Peter Steinman by buying them milkshakes, Holly got one of Bonnie's ex's friends to talk to her by buying him coffee, etc).
- Unfortunate Name: Due to an incident where he stepped in a rather large pile of dog doo, Peter Steinman was forever known by his classmates as Stinky Steinman, even after his disappearance.
- Unholy Matrimony: Even after decades, Roddy and Emily are clearly still in love. After all, they are both intelligent people with a love of study, teaching, kidnapping people, torturing them with starvation/thirst, and then harvesting their body parts for food.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
- If Penny hadn't blabbed about Holly on social media, the Harrises wouldn't have been able to get enough information to capture Holly.
- Barbara, too distracted by Olivia's passing, forgets to answer Holly's text about whether she saw a van in the Harrises' garage, which ultimately sets her up to be captured.
- Villainous Breakdown: Rodney has one when Holly spells out for him that his theories are bullshit, and Emily has one when she arrives home to find that Holly has killed Rodney.
- Villain with Good Publicity: Roddy Harris is considered an authority in the fields of nutrition and biology, Emily Harris is an accomplished English professor, and both have had long and storied academic careers. They are also both serial-killing cannibals.
- Would Hurt a Child: One of the victims of Roddy and Emily Harris was a twelve-year-old boy.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit:
- This is the Harrises' MO to kidnap their victims; one of them pretends to be crippled and in need of a wheelchair, and the other supposedly needs help to get this wheelchair up a ramp into their van. When the victim stops to help with this task, the Harrises sedate and abduct them.
- When Emily finds Holly snooping around their house, she lies down on the floor to pretend she fell and can't get up by herself in an attempt to get the drop on Holly, planning to use a taser on her when she gets close enough. Holly doesn't fall for it however and disarms Emily. She is only captured because Roddy attacked her with another taser from behind.
