Stephen King’s ‘Never Flinch’ Is a Gripping Must-Read Detective Tale

Stephen King, 77, has been so wildly successful for so long — more than 50 years — that it’s easy to take him for granted. Every year, like clockwork, Maine’s master of the macabre manages to deliver a harrowing new novel or a chilling collection of short stories, and we just expect it to be great. But his ease in dreaming up white-knuckle tales of terror tends to overshadow the fact that King is a singular prose stylist. His voice is all his, and his fans can recognize it blindfolded at 10 paces.

That’s certainly the case with King’s latest novel, Never Flinch, where he downshifts from the dark psychological horror of 2024’s short story collection You Like It Darker to spin a stunning detective mystery. (King modestly notes in an afterword that “this was a difficult book to write, partially because I had surgery to repair a damaged hip in September 2023,” but, he adds, he’s “happy enough” with it.)

Never Flinch unspools in and around Buckeye City, Ohio — a change in setting from King’s usual haunted Maine backwaters — where we meet Izzy Jaynes, the hardscrabble town’s relentless and relentlessly likable police detective. After the department receives an anonymous letter threatening the murder of “13 innocents and 1 guilty” as an act of “atonement for the needless death of an innocent,” Jaynes snaps into action. There's a serial killer on the loose. But what’s this righteous nut’s motive?

Simon & Schuster

The author's latest brings back a favorite King character, detective Holly Gibney.

It doesn’t take the hard-boiled and whip-smart Jaynes long to connect the letter to the prison death of a man wrongly accused of pedophilia. The 13 innocents and one guilty are the jury, judge and prosecutor who sent him upstate. Jaynes runs her latest theories on the case by her old friend, you guessed it, Holly Gibney of the Finders Keepers detective agency (you may remember her from King’s Bill Hodges Trilogy as well as The Outsider, If It Bleeds and the aptly named Holly).

Meanwhile, a second would-be murderer is stalking the best-selling feminist author Kate McKay (a “monster of ego” whose “tongue is a Ginsu knife,” King writes) as she crisscrosses the country on a book tour whose stops are more like whipped-up political rallies than staid literary events. The tale feels like an homage to the sort of pulp procedural you’d have found on a spinning pharmacy rack 50 years ago, when King first cut his teeth as a novelist. It’s lightning-paced, lurid and made for bingeing. 

But it’s also smart and ambitious , with a sprawling, multistrand narrative that King weaves together masterfully. I was already casting the Hollywood version in my head as I was turning the pages. (This fall, look for the film adaptations of two of his novels: The Long Walk, which he published in 1979 under the pen name Richard Bachman, and 1982’s The Running Man.)

Giving away too much of Never Flinch’s plot would be churlish, especially when it’s so gripping and vise-tight. But let’s just say you won’t predict the enthralling last act. Once again, the merry-prankster author is toying with us — and we love the game.