An unusal crime story (?) from the King of horror. If you're a fan of Mr. King you'll most likely enjoy this one too. If you're not, beware! ( )

Pretty good. I love how the story was presented, and how it leaves one do decide what the final outcome is. ( )

Pulp Mystery With a Twist
Stephen King pulls a fast one with his Pulp-Mystery, The Colorado Kid, dragging the reader into the tale with an intriguing mystery that begs to be solved. A man that no one seems to know is found dead on an island off the coast of Maine, with no identification and sparse clues as to how he came to be there.

In typical King fashion, he grounds his story with interesting but believable, hometown characters that could easily be the people next door. However, I had a hard time believing that Stephanie McCann, a University of Ohio student, working as in intern at The Weekly Islander, the small newspaper for Moose-Lookit, the town where the tale takes place, would give up on the life she had known and her husband to be just so she could stay in Moose-Lookit and work for the newspaper. I was also disappointed in the way King ended the story. I know why he did it, especially after reading his notes on the subject, and I think he's probably right, but I was still disappointed.

The Colorado Kid is a good, fast read that I'm sure you will enjoy.

- Bob Avey, author of Beneath a Buried House ( )

I picked up this book, not because I'm a Stephen King fan (although I am), but because it was part of the new Hard Case Crime division of Dorchester Publishing. I'll admit, the variety of authors they've collected to write for them is extensive, and THE COLORADO KID just happened to be the first one in the Hard Case group to make it to the top of my to-be-read pile.

I understand, after reading THE COLORADO KID, why so many people on here posted negative reviews. I understand, because just like the main characters in the story told me, a mystery with no resolution plain and simply pisses people off. People want a happy conclustion to a problem--whether it be why 9/11 happened, why oil prices are so high, why a young woman in Wisconsin was murdered, or how a man from Colorado went to work one morning and ended up dead on a little island off the coast of Maine only hours later.

Not KNOWING, not having Mr. King spell it out for us, angered many a reader of this book. Should it have? Maybe. But I actually felt like there WAS a resolution to this story--that being that not everything in life has such a tidy ending as we want our stories to have. Of all the people who end up dead in the US every year, how many do you think go unsolved as to cause of death, or in the case of murder, capturing a perpetrator? Life--this roller-coaster ride that we get onto daily and hang on to since our very lives depend on it--is not black and white, and it sure as heck doesn't offer us up tidy conclusions at the end of every day.

THE COLORADO KID is, quite simply, a character study of not knowing. We can get the facts, we can extrapolate what we believe happened based on those facts, but in the end, it's all a mystery.

Kudos to Mr. King for taking an idea, running with it, and showing that he just doesn't give a flying fig if we get it or not. This book left me with questions, yes, and I actually thank him for that. A book that makes you think and question will always be worth more than a book that doesn't. ( )

200 or so pages should have been under 50. The idea, that life doesn't have the pat answers of a story, is OK. The 3 characters are OK, but he took way too many words to say it. Typical & why I quit reading him years ago.

His repetitive, bland descriptions do not dig me deeper into the world he is painting, they just bore me to tears. I was hoping for something different, more like his old style, out of a book by this publisher. Didn't get it.

If you haven't read it, don't bother. It's a waste of time & money. ( )