Early one morning in a financially distressed Midwestern city where the unemployed of varied ages and desperation have lined up through the cold night outside a job fair, a lone killer plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes. Eight people are killed; 15 are wounded.In another part of town, months later, a retired cop named Bill Hodges, haunted by the unsolved killings, gets a crazed letter from someone who self-identifies as the "perk" and taunts Hodges with the notion that he or she will strike again. Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, hell-bent on preventing that from happening. Mr. Mercedes is a war between good and evil. Brady Hartfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that kind of rush again. Only Hodges, with a couple of highly unlikely allies, can apprehend the killer in this high-stakes race against time. Because Brady's next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim hundreds, even thousands. Stephen King has long been eerily prescient about the psycho-killers among us, and his depiction of Brady Hartfield is both uncanny and chilling. This is masterful suspense.
