Stephen King’s latest novel, Mr Mercedes, is dedicated to James M. Cain and described as ‘a riveting suspense thriller’ — a phrase so closely approaching 100 per cent semantic redundancy (a non-riveting thriller? A thriller entirely free of suspense?) that it tells us precisely nothing. All it does is declare that the reader will keep turning the pages.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £16. Tel: 08430 600033. Michael Bywater is the author of Lost Worlds and Big Babies.
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