I don't know how they do it—bestselling authors who deliver satisfying reads year after year. Among this season's surefire bestsellers are two terrific novels from masters of their genres.

Stephen King's The Outsider opens with every parent's worst nightmare: Eleven-year-old Frankie Peterson is found raped and mutilated in a Flint City park. Detective Ralph Anderson is sure he has a slam-dunk case—it's as airtight as he's ever seen. The crime scene is dripping with evidence pointing toward beloved youth baseball coach Terry Maitland. Eyewitnesses recall seeing Maitland around town before and after the crime. Yet an alibi soon emerges that mystifies local authorities: At the time of the abduction, Maitland was at a work event miles away from Flint City. He's even on video, and his fingerprints are found at his hotel.

King peppers The Outsider with the kind of eerie, nightmarish details that only he can conjure: a man with a melted face and straws for eyes who appears in a young girl's bedroom; a pile of clothes found in a barn, stained black; and an abandoned cave where twin boys once died.

Can a man be in two places at once? Of course not. King's creepy, exquisitely crafted, can't-put-it-down tale offers a shocking possibility, one that stuns hardened law enforcement officials and threatens to destroy an entire community.

MIDDLE-AGE MAZE
A totally different kind of terror envelops Kate Reddy, the Brit who won the hearts of millions of working mums in Allison Pearson's smash debut, I Don't Know How She Does It. In the wise and sparkling follow-up, How Hard Can It Be?, Kate faces the horrors of menopause and raising teenagers.

After years tending to kids and aging parents, Kate must now re-enter the working world to support her family. Her husband, Richard, is nursing a serious midlife crisis, having quit his job to spend most of his time cycling—or more precisely, buying expensive cycling equipment. Kate takes a midlevel position at the financial fund she set up a decade before, reporting to a man who was born the year she started college.

"I recognize his type immediately," Kate says. "Self-styled hipster, metrosexual, spends a fortune on scruffing products and Tom Ford Anti-Fatigue Eye Treatment."

Navigating the pitfalls of age discrimination, Kate soon demonstrates the kind of hustle that made her a financial star years before. Readers may wish she could show such moxie in her home life: Kate's daughter uses a social media mishap to manipulate Kate into doing her homework; Kate's son steals her credit card; and Richard, well, he makes a decision so horrible that one hopes he forgets to wear a helmet on his next bike ride.

How hard can it be? Pretty damn hard, Kate learns. But with great friends, a steely core and a clever mind, Kate shows that women can launch themselves off the mommy track and back into the world.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When the corpse of a sexually assaulted 11-year-old boy is found, fingerprint evidence and eyewitness accounts implicate upstanding citizen Terry Maitland, an English teacher, Little League coach, and father. He's got an alibi, but Det. Ralph Anderson soon has DNA evidence, and the investigation ratchets up to some scarily King-worthy puzzles.

When a young boy's mutilated corpse is found in a public park, the evidence points to Little League coach and high school English teacher Terry Maitland. Despite his vehement claims of innocence, witnesses put him at the scene of the crime, and his fingerprints and DNA are found all over the murder scene. The police have an airtight case, except that other witnesses and video also confirm Terry's alibi: that he was miles away at a teacher's convention on the night of the murder. For Det. Ralph Anderson, it is simultaneously the most straightforward and frustrating case of his career. How can a man be in two places at once? After the success of his "Bill Hodges" series and Sleeping Beauties, coauthored with his son Owen, King's latest feels somewhat flat and predictable. Followers of the horror master's career will likely guess the outcome early on. Usually a maestro of character development, King casts his novel with tired and one-dimensional figures, including Anderson, whose emotional development is disappointingly nonexistent. An extended cameo from a favorite past King character does little to increase the enjoyment. VERDICT King's fans may be dispirited by this latest disappointing thriller; however, his name alone will ensure it flies off the shelves. [See Prepub Alert, 12/1/17.]—Tyler Hixson, Brooklyn P.L.

MWA Grand Master King wraps a wild weird tale inside a police procedural in this nicely executed extension of his Bill Hodges detective trilogy (begun with 2014's Mr. Mercedes). Det. Ralph Anderson of the Flint City, Okla., police force appears to have beloved youth baseball league coach Terry Maitland dead to rights when he publicly arrests him for the grisly murder of an 11-year-old boy, since the crime scene is covered with Terry's fingerprints and DNA. Only one problem: at the time of the murder Terry was attending a teachers' conference in a distant city, where he was caught clearly on videotape. The case's contradictory evidence compels Anderson and officials associated with it to team up with Holly Gibney (the deceased Hodges's former assistant) to solve it. What begins as a manhunt for an unlikely doppelgänger takes an uncanny turn into the supernatural. King's skillful use of criminal forensics helps to ground his tale in a believable clinical reality where the horrors stand out in sharp relief. Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill. (May)