The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

The Colorado Kid by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There’s no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues, and it’s more than a year before the man is identified. And that’s just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still...? No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett’s THE MALTESE FALCON and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world’s great storytellers presents a moving and surprising tale whose subject is nothing less than the nature of mystery itself...


This is not a new Stephen King book but re released illustrated edition part of the Hard Case Crime series.

As with most King books the reader should not be expecting the norm but have to inhabit the tale go get the most out of it.

Not a book with a conclusion or happy neat ending but one that makes the reader think and if a book can do that then, for me, it’s done a good job.

When two teenagers find the body of a man on the beach it begins a mystery that remains unsolved for many years. Over a cup of coffee two veterans of the local newspaper The Weekly Islander (Dave Bowie 65 managing editor and Vincent Teague the 92 year old founder of the paper) tell Stephanie McCann (22 who is on an internship at the paper) about the unsolved case.

Eventually the identity of the dead man is revealed but the reasons that lead him to the island of Moose-Lookit remain a mystery.

I enjoyed the engaging prose and characterisation of all the ‘players’ and felt it sat nicely in the era. Brave of any writer to leave a book the same way it started, as a mystery, yet for all that it was a clever and intriguing tale.

Life does not neatly package up answers for everything and I think that this is the message here. Some things we will never know for sure but it doesn’t prevent us from trying. This is not a book for anyone looking for a solution to the tale which might frustrate some readers but for me maybe that was its resolution in that not everything in life is so tidy and neat. Some things simply can’t be explained.

Thought provoking and a good 4 star read. I would like to thank the publisher for sending this in exchange for an honest review.