Constant Reader Guide

Bill Hodges Trilogy Reading Order (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch)

2026-09-03

Stephen King's Bill Hodges trilogy is the most straightforward reading order in his whole catalog: three books, written to be read in sequence, telling one continuous story about a retired cop, a serial killer he never caught, and the unlikely amateur detective agency that forms to finish the job. It's also the least "horror" thing King has written — closer to hard-boiled crime fiction with a late swerve into something stranger — and it introduced one of his most beloved recurring characters, Holly Gibney.

Here's the order, what happens in each book, and how the trilogy connects to the Holly novels and the TV adaptation.

The reading order

  1. Mr. Mercedes (2014)
  2. Finders Keepers (2015)
  3. End of Watch (2016)

Read them in publication order. Unlike a lot of King's loosely-connected Castle Rock books, this is a direct serialized story — each book picks up characters, relationships, and unresolved threads from the one before it. Skipping around will spoil major plot turns.

Mr. Mercedes (2014)

The trilogy opens with a mass killing: a stolen Mercedes plows into a crowd of job seekers waiting outside a City Center job fair on a grim, rainy morning in an unnamed Midwestern city, killing eight people, including a mother and her infant. A year later, retired detective Bill Hodges — divorced, overweight, and drifting toward a depressed early retirement — starts receiving taunting letters from the killer, who calls himself "the Mercedes Killer" and wants Hodges to kill himself over his failure to solve the case.

The killer is Brady Hartsfield, a loner working two dead-end jobs (electronics store tech, ice cream truck driver) who's already planning a second, far larger attack. What makes the book work is the structure: it's not a whodunit, since the reader knows who Brady is from early on, but a cat-and-mouse thriller about whether Hodges — pulled out of retirement's stupor and newly energized — can stop him in time. Along the way Hodges teams up with Jerome Robinson, a sharp teenager who does odd jobs for him, and Holly Gibney, an anxious, socially awkward woman related to one of the victims. The book ends with the three of them stopping Brady from detonating a bomb at a packed pop concert — Holly disables him with a sock full of ball bearings, in one of King's most quietly triumphant character moments — but Brady survives, brain-damaged and hospitalized, setting up the rest of the trilogy.

Finders Keepers (2015)

The middle book is structurally the odd one out: it's largely a separate story that only reconnects with the Hodges/Holly/Jerome plot near the end. It opens in 1978, when small-time criminal Morris Bellamy murders reclusive novelist John Rothstein — partly for money, partly out of pure fan rage that Rothstein ended his acclaimed Jimmy Gold trilogy on a note Morris hated — and steals a trove of notebooks containing unpublished Gold novels. Morris buries the cash and notebooks and is arrested on an unrelated charge before he can retrieve them, and spends decades in prison obsessing over them.

Decades later, a teenager named Pete Saubers — whose family was financially devastated in the City Center Massacre from the first book — finds the buried notebooks and cash, and starts anonymously selling the money to help his struggling family. When Morris is finally paroled and comes looking for what's his, Pete is in real danger, and it's Hodges' agency (Finders Keepers, the detective firm Bill and Holly formally establish in this book) that gets pulled in to help. It's a satisfying stand-alone crime story about obsession and ownership over art, and it plants Pete Saubers as a character who matters again later — but if you're here for Brady Hartsfield, know that he's mostly offscreen in this one, present only in unsettling hospital-room interludes that hint his mind isn't as blank as his doctors think.

End of Watch (2016)

The trilogy's finale brings both plotlines crashing together and pivots hard into King's more overtly supernatural territory. Brady Hartsfield, still institutionalized and seemingly catatonic, has secretly developed telekinetic and hypnotic abilities as a result of his brain injury and an experimental drug trial — and he's been using them to manipulate a corrupt doctor and, worse, to hypnotize suicidal hospital patients into killing themselves through a addictive handheld game device called a "Zappit." When a murder-suicide with ties to the original Mercedes Massacre draws Hodges and Holly's agency back in, they realize Brady is engineering a mass-suicide event and is far from finished with them personally.

It's the darkest book of the three, and the one where King leans fully into the idea that Brady's evil didn't end when his body was disabled — his consciousness, and his capacity to hurt people, become almost literally a virus. The book also deals directly with Hodges' declining health, giving the trilogy a genuinely emotional ending that's as much about mortality and legacy as it is about stopping a killer.

Where Holly Gibney goes next

Holly Gibney is the character King clearly wasn't done with, and after End of Watch she carries her own connected run of books, now with supernatural elements front and center rather than kept at arm's length:

You don't strictly need to read the Bill Hodges trilogy before starting the Holly books — The Outsider works fine as a standalone entry point — but several character details and Holly's whole emotional arc (from anxious sidekick to confident investigator) land with a lot more weight if you've read where she started. For the bigger picture of how these books tie into King's other Maine-set fiction, see our guide to how King's books connect.

The TV adaptation

Mr. Mercedes was also adapted into a TV series for the Audience Network, starring Brendan Gleeson as Bill Hodges and Holland Taylor as his neighbor Ida Silver, alongside Harry Treadaway as Brady Hartsfield. It ran for three seasons between 2017 and 2019 — but the show didn't adapt the books in publication order. Season 1 covers Mr. Mercedes, Season 2 jumps ahead to adapt End of Watch, and Season 3 circles back to tell the Finders Keepers storyline, reshuffling the trilogy's timeline for television. If you've read the books first, the TV order will feel backwards; that's intentional on the show's part, not a mistake, but it's worth knowing going in so you're not confused about which book maps to which season.

Should you read this trilogy?

Yes, especially if you think of yourself as someone who doesn't like Stephen King's horror. This is King writing tight, character-driven crime fiction, with the supernatural kept almost entirely off the page until the finale forces it in. It's also one of the more purely fun reads in his catalog — a genuine page-turner with three lead characters (Hodges, Holly, and Jerome) worth spending three books with. For where it fits against the rest of King's work, check our ranked list of King's best books, or start with our full reading order guide if you're planning out more than just this trilogy.