by Stephen King
First published 2019
A man is found dead on a small island off the coast of Maine. He has no identification. Nobody recognizes him. Two local newspaper reporters, veterans of the island beat, start pulling at the thread alongside a graduate student studying forensics. It takes more than a year just to put a name to the body. That should be the end of the hard part. It is not. The more the three of them learn about who the man was and how he ended up dead on that rocky shore, the further the answer seems to recede. The facts do not add up. The circumstances of his death should not be possible. Stephanie, the young forensics student, keeps pushing because she cannot accept that some things simply go unexplained. The two old reporters have been around long enough to know that sometimes the unknown stays unknown. This illustrated edition marks the return of King's unsolved mystery to bookstores after ten years, and it carries the same quiet, unsettling question at its center: what do we do when the truth refuses to arrive?
Genres: fiction, american-fiction, mystery, contemporary, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, contemplative, mysterious, slow-burn, thought-provoking, unsettling
Tropes: amateur-investigation, ensemble-cast, unreliable-truth
Setting: Maine, Island
Period: Contemporary
205 pages · Paperback · Hard Case Crime
Content warnings: death, murder