The Outsider

by Stephen King
561 pgs

In his latest book The Outsider, Stephen King creates a seemingly impossible murder mystery. A teenage boy is savagely killed and the police quickly have no question about who killed him. Multiple reliable witnesses saw Terry Maitland, a local English teacher an popular Little League coach, with the boy right before the time of death. They saw him get into a van with the boy, the same van that soon turns up filled with the boy's blood and covered with Terry's fingerprints. DNA evidence matching Terry is found at the crime scene as well. There's so much evidence against Terry, and so much outrage over the nature of the murder, that Detective Ralph Anderson makes a public spectacle out of arresting Terry during the middle of one of his Little League games, in front of the whole town.

But Terry is adamant in proclaiming his innocence. He's a well-loved family man and an admired member of the community, and he claims he wasn't even in town the day of the murder. he was at a teachers' convention hundreds of miles away with a group of his colleagues at the school. All of them can attest to him being with them the night of the murder. There's even video proof of him being at the convention. In fact, there's just as much evidence of him being at the convention as there is of him being at the crime scene.

Who else but Stephen King could begin a story with a premise like that and then ride it to such a satisfying conclusion? No one.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆