Finders Keepers, by Stephen King

I loved the first third of this book, and thought it would compete with Misery as my favorite Stephen King book. He introduced two interesting characters, one a thief with mother issues who is passionate about a particular writer, and the other a high school student from a troubled home who is passionate about the same writer. King goes into the magic that writers can have on people and the soul-filling nourishment that a good book can give people, especially ones who feel alone and alienated in the world. Finders Keepers was heading for great things with an important theme, something King hits upon once in a while.

And then Bill Hodges and his detective gang entered the book, and everything changed. Hodges was no longer the suicidal ex-cop looking for a reason to live (as he was in the first novel) and instead worries about his cholesterol. Gone were the important themes about literature to be replaced by an ex-con on the loose threatening people to get back what he stole thirty years earlier. The book became a standard detective thriller, which in itself wasn't bad, but it could have been so much more based on the first third of the book. I had gotten my hopes up for something along the lines of The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption, but instead got the more pedestrian Under the Dome.