Mr. Mercedes

Mr. Mercedes (2014) is King's first hard-boiled detective novel—no supernatural elements, no psychic powers, just two men in a cat-and-mouse game. Retired detective Bill Hodges receives a taunting letter from a killer who drove a stolen Mercedes into a crowd of job-seekers, killing eight. Hodges pursues the killer off-book while the killer plans another attack.

Brady is the antagonist—a young man working at a computer repair shop who committed the Mercedes massacre and now taunts Hodges through a dark-web platform. He is one of King's most contemporary villains: tech-savvy, socially invisible, and motivated by nihilism rather than any specific grievance. King has said he wanted to write a purely evil character with a recognizable modern profile.

Yes. It is the first of the Bill Hodges Trilogy, followed by Finders Keepers (2015) and End of Watch (2016). The trilogy is set in an unnamed midwestern city and follows Hodges's work as a private investigator after his retirement from the police. The third book introduces supernatural elements, crossing back toward King's usual territory.

Yes. A three-season television series aired on Audience Network (AT&T) from 2017 to 2019, starring Brendan Gleeson as Hodges and Harry Treadaway as Brady. The series adapted all three novels and received strong reviews, with Gleeson's performance particularly praised.

This novel functions as the first installment in the Bill Hodges trilogy and can be read independently, though it introduces the character Holly Gibney who later becomes the central figure in several subsequent books by the author.

A television series based on the Bill Hodges trilogy premiered in 2017 and spans three seasons, covering the events of the books through a narrative that occasionally deviates from the source material.

The author developed the story after hearing a news report about a woman who drove her car into a restaurant, which he combined with his observations regarding the high rates of depression and suicide among retired police officers.