I like Stephen King’s “Mr. Mercedes”.

I just wanted to read a thriller about a killer whose weapon would be a car. Although the machine is only used at the beginning, I liked the book.

Let's start with the plot. Someone hit a crowd of people at a job fair with a Mercedes a year ago and managed to get away with it. Now the killer is pestering retired police officer Bill Hodges with letters to kill himself. As a result, this motivates Bill to search for the killer. That's how intellectual games begin.

The first half of the book is a game of "who is smarter", because what is Bill, what is Mr. Mercedes are trying to outwit each other in different ways.

The second half is "to make it to …", where the characters must manage to prevent a new crime of Mr. Mercedes.

Let's do without spoilers and briefly. The book turned out to be intense, especially towards the end. The author does not hide the identity of the maniac and at the beginning of the book shows who he is and how he thinks (and his name is Brady). In the first half, it was funny to read how Bill pranked the villain by saying that Brady is not the real Mr. Mercedes (and how it bombed him).

About the characters. Bill Hodges is not a very interesting character yet. I don't even have anything to say about him. His friend Jerome is a funny character. Such a cheerful, brave guy who likes to make the reader uncomfortable by jokingly speaking bad English (because he is black). Holly Gibney, a character who later acquires a own cycle, develops well in the second half from a sociophobic and insecure woman into a completely resolute and talkative (at least, talkative with Bill and Jerome).

Brady Hartsfield aka Mr. Mercedes turned out to be simultaneously cartoonishly angry, pathetic and menacing. Like, look, he's a racist, a sociopath, and he's only turned on by his mother. He gets angry when someone is happy. At the same time, he is quite smart, because he hides well under the guise of an ordinary guy, he gets along well with technology, and in the end he cunningly equipped his new weapon. And when something bad happened to him, I was happy with all my heart, because to hell with that asshole.

I like the author's writing style. This is a regular Stephen King text, that is, a lot of information, especially about the characters, which is easy to read. But the scenes where he describes sex are very uncomfortable.

All in all, a good thriller. He's intense, the villain is nasty, the writing style is good. Maybe not the best of this author, but definitely good.