Solid four stars, no 3.5 rounded up fiddle-faddle on this one. 
 Excellent, Mr. King. Very well done. I think this is his best since Duma Key. It's certainly a page turner, hence my marathon reading day. It's filled with King's typical dark wit, and the villain: excellent. I was disappointed with Rose the Hat in Doctor Sleep, and Big Jim Rennie in Under the Dome wasn't entirely believable as he felt cobbled together from pieces that didn't quite fit snug (turns out he was), so I thought King might be losing his touch in giving us a truly loathsome main baddie, but he more than makes up with it in this one with Brady Hartsfield. (The "s" isn't a mistake. I know it says Hartfield in the description as well as in the summary on the inside flap of my copy, but it's Hartsfield throughout the text). He's one sick puppy, and his actions are entirely believable. 
 Bill Hodges, the main character, is also quite awesome, though Sheriff Alan Pangborn from Needful Things is still my favorite King cop character. (The bar is set pretty high after him). Still, I think Bill might come in second for that category, but I haven't read The Green Mile yet, and I think Paul Edgecomb is supposed to be pretty cool. He's really a guard, but I lump them in with cop characters. It's close enough for government work. 
 There's also a believable love interest and romance story. He just did a really great job with this one. 
 And for those who prefer normalcy in their books (which causes me to question why you're reading King in the first place), I'll point out that there isn't one shred of supernatural fun going on. Well, maybe just one very teensy, weensy, itty-bitty part towards the end, but that could be attributed to an overly stressed mental state for the character in question. There's a definite chance of a possible maybe that there might be a supernatural "phpt" in there, but it's no more than that. 
 And now for a couple of nit-picks, because I'm a bastard that way. He has a little bit of self-promotion going on in here. At one point Bill observes that the cop cars are blocking in the empty murder vehicle, "...as if the cops expected the big gray sedan to start up by itself, like that old Plymouth in the horror movie." Then right on the heels of that his partner asks him, in reference to a clown mask they found, "You ever see that TV movie about the clown in the sewer?" Bill watches it later and agrees the mask-face was very close to the face of Pennywise, the clown in the movie." King brings characters from other stories into his work all the time, and he gets all meta in The Dark Tower, where characters see themselves in their own books written by him, and even meet Stephen King, but this is the first time I've seen him refer to his own stories as well-known works in another fictitious world, and, well, I just thought that was a bit tacky. If he'd just turned that gear one more notch, he could've said "the Stephen King horror movie," and earned the adjective "shameless" to go with "self-promotion." Or is that an adverb? I need to ask an editor, and that brings me to... 
 ...something an editor really should've caught. It really isn't Stephen's fault, though he says it should be in the afterword, but he really deserves a pass on it. It was just one little word, but it was distracting enough that I felt compelled to send a text to a friend about it so we could have a brief chuckle. King once again shows us he's from the beforetimes, and writing in a modern setting can present challenges. The most glaring example of this was in Doctor Sleep where a 12 year old girl in 2012 spends a lot of time at her computer IMing her friends which would be quite believable in 2002, but not a decade later. This isn't on par with that, but it still got me. The setting is June 2010. Point of view is a 17 year old boy. He hears his little sister down the hall start playing her new teeny bopper boy band "record" for the thousandth time. "Record" technically works. The meaning has changed since the days of vinyl, and can be included to mean a CD, iTunes, audio files, whatever, but I'm quite certain no 17 year old in 2010 would use that word, unless that's part of the patois of this city, which I assume is somewhere in Ohio (I don't remember it being named, but the Cleveland Indians were the closest baseball team, so that makes north or central Ohio most likely since Pittsburgh has the Pirates and Cincinnati the Reds). "Album," or "playlist," or something along those lines would've worked better. You could even get away with "CD" in 2010, but barely. Also, I'm not sure about this, but I think most nine year olds would be listening to their music via head phones, but that doesn't mean all of them would. I guess some have their own iPod docking stations in their rooms. However, I'm adamant about the record thing. Sadly, the world has moved on since those days. In spite of that, though, I think he does an excellent job with his other tech references. Everything is relevant and believable, and it could easily have gone awry. Just thinking about it, I actually can't believe how much has changed between 2010 and 2014. Technology moves faster all the time. 
 Once again, well done Mr. King. A fantastic thriller, and a page turner. I thought this was advertised as a detective story, but it's different from other crime tales I've read. Granted, I haven't read but so many, but from the beginning we know who the bad guy is, what he's done, what he plans to do, etc., and the story is more about the good guys trying to find out the who, what, where, etc. There is plenty of thriller here, but no mystery (at least not for the reader), so I think this was mislabeled, unless I misread something (which isn't uncommon). So, consider all that when deciding on whether or not to read this. Also, stuff gets extremely dark and sick at times. It's top-tier SK in that department.