Over the last five years I've really come to love Stephen King novels. Whether it's The Stand, 11-22-63 or Under the Dome, I've found him to be one of the better writers around today. However, the one exception of that for me has been this trilogy, the Bill Hodges trilogy.

The trilogy started out with Mr Mercedes, a book that now a couple of days after the horrific deaths of 70+ people in Nice, France makes the concept of that novel even more haunting. Needless to say I didn't like that book at it, it felt formulaic and lacked King's normal powerful punch. The second novel Finder's Keepers was a far better novel. The characters were more defined, the villain (although the same in all three books) was more well thought out, and quite frankly the entire novel was far more interesting.

That leaves us with End of Watch the third and final novel in the trilogy, and by far the worst of the bunch. End of Watch goes completely off the rails in every category. First and foremost there's a time constraint on how quickly the case needs to be solved because of a medical condition for our protagonist. If that wasn't bad enough Stephen King decides to throw in super natural powers into the third book that completely turned me off.

I remember after finishing Mr. Mercedes that I was shocked to find out that this was a trilogy, and now having finished it I can say that my shock has not subsided. There was no need for three books. These characters didn't warrant it. The plots didn't warrant it. Nothing about this trilogy was new or interesting or memorable.